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Re: [lojban] Re: Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives



From: "T. Peter Park" <tpeterpark@erols.com>
Reply-To: tpeterpark@erols.com
     li'o
--it's our brains that create the nouns, by perceiving certain
bundles of qualities as holistic unities. Our brains do it in the first
place--and then language reinforces this by "sanctifying" some of these
brain-created unities with words--

The mechanism is no more mysterious than a child "deputizing" a doll to stand for his/herself in a storylike game. Thus, a certain sound from thenceforward will be "as if"-horse. What's basic is neither linguistic nor epistemological categories, but the twin functions of "as-if" & "not-as-if" ("as-if: [not-as-if]", actually).
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