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NikolaiFyodorov  ·  3817 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Give me a great quote from something you're reading, have read recently.

Languages that have evolved in distant times or places may differ extensively in their resources for dealing with one or another range of phenomena. What comes easily in one language may come hard in another, and this difference may echo significant dissimilarities in style and value.

But examples like these, impressive as they occasionally are, are not so extreme but that the changes and the contrasts can be explained and described using the equipment of a single language. Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he puts it, "be calibrated," uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Kuhn is brilliant at saying what things were like before the revolution using -what else? -our post-revolutionary idiom.

Donald Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme