Saturday, February 12, 2011

Parsing problem

An interesting opening to the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity.

The principle of linguistic relativity is the idea that differences in the
way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people
think, so that speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave
differently depending on the language they use.

Any ideas on how to parse that sentence? Probably 'differences' is subject to 'affect', but difficult to tell. On the talk page someone notes that the introduction is messy, and is possibly the result "of different editors putting in different bits of information", but "there also errors in grammar and style". Perhaps that is it.

3 comments:

David Parker said...

Check out the Wiki on David Lewis if you want a good chuckle. The sentences look like they fell together by accident. For example:

"He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years."

Edward Ockham said...

Thank you David! As a reward, here is some Hippy philosophy. Perhaps we could make that into a Wikipedia article. Er ...

Edward Ockham said...

I personally prefer "It was his year at Oxford that played a seminal role in his decision to study philosophy, and which made him the quintessentially analytic philosopher that he would soon become."