Corvus said:
The traditionally accepted translation tends to be something like "city-state", but in reality we have no word that can in fact summarise the concept of the polis.
Yes we do. Polis. Ancient Greek was long dead before we coined the term
Actually State and Polis are fundamentally the same concepts, the difference is that the English meaning has shifted (you'd get this problem comparing any dead language to a living one); it's rare these days for example to separate city and nation states, thus our concept of "state" is also interchangeable with "country".
The Conspirator said:
Yes, but the Eskimos have many various words describing (even if it's slightly) different kinds of snow, because they saw a lot of it, used the proper kind of it as igloo material and thus the nuances about it was important for them.
Yes, but we can adequately describe those nuances, we simply don't form a conglomerate of them. German language offers the same since you can continually bind nouns to get the much maligned ubernouns. It doesn't create something you couldn't directly translate into another language, it's just no other language offers that capability within it's syntax so in order to make sense you often have to break it down.
The Conspirator said:
In some African languages, if someone sees a mountain and knows that there is something 'behind' (with our conception) it, (s)he says "... is in front of the mountain" (I think it's because of their totemic beliefs preventing them from having a "perceptional egocentrism" about the mountain and the thing).
That's where you start getting into the weirdness. You can do the same with Japanese since their approach to subject is different. The phrase "Anata no pen desu ka" translated literally and preserving the Japanese syntactic structure would be "Owned by you Pen this is?", which once we reformat to English syntax reads "Is this pen owned by you?" or more simply "is this your pen?". The essential meaning and concepts haven't changed, but the order in which they are presented has.
As for menopause etc, Japanese don't have a word for computer either, that's because they're proper nouns rather than concepts. I mean technically English has no word for menopause either, since it's a conglomerate of Greek like most medical terms (using English syntactical rules, just to make it even more strange).
tommyboy said:
That, to me, is a weak position if you are asserting that the prevailing ideas of language as a universal genetic tendency are wrong. From his descriptions, their "culture" seems no more hermetically sealed and isolated than does their gene pool, if they have interacted as much as he says with the outside world.
Genes can determine whether you are capable of language, but not the form that language will take. A child born of European parents will learn Japanese just as readily as it's "native" tongue if exposed to it early enough. The only real difference genetics could make with regards to language is if they introduced some form of impediment or mutation of the vocal chords which made certain sounds impossible or difficult to produce; even if that were the case though you'd still be looking at something like the Japanese "L / R " difference rather than a complete lack of certain words.
Otherwise, we must think that our word "orange" is not a colour word, but a description of "like an orange". I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful distinction between a "colour word" and a "decription" anyway.
That depends. We're only familiar with colours as anything other than adjectives since we've been able to identify them as a specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. Prior to that, and in everyday use, they are indeed adjectives and we are saying "like an orange" when we use it as an adjective - we're referencing it's particular property of being orange which it shares with the namesake fruit. It is however an interesting distinction, since most languages do turn colours into labels in and of themselves. However, this is of course dependent on experience. I very much doubt a culture which had spent it's entire existence at the bottom of a coal mine for example would have any need or use for a word to describe white, since the odds on them ever encountering enough separate white items to make it worth having a unique word to describe their colour is somewhat remote.
Come to think of it, the same was probably true of orange for a long while. Hence why the wavelength 622 - 597 of the electromagnetic spectrum is now named after a fruit.