1In Germany somewhat more than a quarter of a century ago my wife once said to me at the traffic lights, “It has turned blue”, to indicate that we could drive on. My wife had translated her remark literally from Japanese, her native language, into German. The corresponding Japanese sentence reads: Ao ni narimashita. We were on a drive “into the blue” on a bright Sunday in May, and for a considerable time I had been concerned with the influence of language on perception and thought. With this in mind, the obvious thing for me to do was to ask her whether she does not perceive the difference between the colour of the sky above us and the colour of the meadow next to the road, and whether she does not see that the colour of the traffic light is closer to the green of the grass than to the blue of the sky. My wife was as amazed at the question as was a German colleague who offered “white wine”, then to be asked whether he does not see that the colour of the wine is closer to that of yellow roses than to that of the milk he drinks every morning. It is obvious that it cannot be claimed in a simple way that languages mirror the world as their speakers perceive it. This applies at least to current language usage. Speaking of “white wine” becomes understandable once the etymology of the word for white is known. In many languages, the word for white was originally not a colour word, but rather a designation for light.

2Something similar applies to the Japanese colour term ao(i).1 For a long period, Japanese was among the not inconsiderable number of languages that use the same word for blue and green. In Japanese, this is ao(i), and in older Chinese qing.2 Most of these languages nowadays have different colour words for blue and green.3 In modern Chinese, qing is primarily used only for a rather light green, for example that of vegetables and apples, but, in contrast to the Japanese ao(i), not for the colour of street lights.4 Having undergone the opposite meaning shift to qing, ao(i) is primarily used for the colour blue.5 But it is still also used for hues for which in West European languages the word for green is in general use.6 And yet there has been a special word for green in Japan for several centuries, midori, and today there is in addition gurin, a loan word from English.

3Perceptions are less easily influenced by how they are designated than are their conceptual processing in the head and their reproduction in images and language. No developmental psychologist would be surprised if a child who draws a glass of white wine and a glass of red wine next to each other were to paint the white wine white or at any rate lighter than what we see. For two reasons: A contrast is made clear by exaggerating it, in drawing as in speech. Furthermore, in pictures people tend to portray what they know or think they know, not what they see. In small children and members of archaic cultures, this tendency is especially conspicuous. They know that people have legs and draw them accordingly. Paul Feyerabend (1975, 249ff.), elated by the logical possibility of his motto “anything goes”, wrote that it can be assumed in some cases at least that children and archaic people “see the world in the way in which we now see their pictures” (238). An archaic artist would presumably have been just as astounded by the question whether he does not see that the charioteer’s legs, which he draws above the sidewalls of the chariot (Feyerabend’s illustration), are actually covered by these sidewalls as would the modern philosopher of science by the question whether he does not see the difference in colour between his “white wine” and the milk that he still drinks.

4Children know very well the difference between what they perceive and what they produce. Roman Jakobson reported about a German-speaking child who was not yet able to articulate the sounds k and r. Instead of “doctor” she said “dotta”. But when an adult adopted this childish language and also said “dotta”, the child protested. The adult should not say “dotta”, but “dotta” (meaning “doctor”). How could the child learn the right pronunciation if it could not hear, at least from a certain stage of development, how adults pronounce the word?

Logically possible, but not natural

5Cultural relativism was given an enormous impulse in the 20th century by an important insight in the philosophy of science: The same empirical givens are fundamentally compatible with an infinite number of different theoretical interpretations. A simple example: A line on a piece of paper can be interpreted just as well as one line or as five lines that imperceptibly run into each other. Any number of such lines is compatible with what we perceive. But not everything that is possible from a logical point of view is also natural. Our neural faculty of perception is constituted such that independently of the language and culture in which we are born we see one line, and not five little ones running into each other. Is this just chance?

6Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953, §143, 185ff.) illustrated the fundamentally unlimited manifold of interpretations of the world with a mathematical example: Somebody is assigned the task of continuing the number series 2, 4, 6, 8. He patiently adds 2 to each preceding number until he comes to 1000. Then, to our astonishment, he continues with 1004, 1008, 1012. Wittgen|stein comments that the person counting had “naturally” (von Natur aus) assumed that the rule behind the number series 2, 4, 6 and so on was: “Continuously add 2 until you get to 1000, and from there on 4.” This rule is just as compatible with the number series started by the person who assigns the task as is the rule that we apparently assume as a matter of course (that is: dogmatically) behind the series. The Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart, known as a “professed materialist”, then objected that it is technically more difficult to build an “intelligent machine” that continues the number series the way Wittgenstein imagined in his thought experiment than a machine that proceeds the way we naturally do. The plasticity of the human brain is proverbial, but in the field of neurology, too, not everything that is logically possible is natural. For Wittgenstein’s staggered formation rule to be followed “naturally”, it would have to involve a survival advantage that has not been noticed up to now.

7Information technology, which designs its products according to physical presuppositions and increasingly according to biological models, has become a thought-provoking “auxiliary” to philosophy. In a way that up to now has not been taken into consideration, it helps resolve problems of considerable significance for human self-understanding such as the question of a rampant relativism.

8Philosophy receives even greater services from intercultural research, which is today performed on an interdisciplinary basis, than it does from technology. It has become indispensable in the discussion of many fundamental philosophical assumptions. The great German philosophers of culture from Herder to Cassirer treated the question of relativism at their desks, reading an exemplary number of works on foreign cultures, but without presenting their research strategies and results to academically competent members of these cultures for assessment.

9In the human perception of the world, structural and functional constraints frequently become apparent. They are the reason why lan|guages are not haphazardly different from each other. A great proportion of these constraints can be explained by the fact that all human beings have the same neurobiological endowments. This is indicated by the intercultural and interdisciplinary studies that are being conducted primarily in the United States together with research colleagues from East Asia who have previously done training at American universities. Researchers with a good theoretical grounding are devoting their energies to classical philosophical questions and reaching remarkable results.

Perceptual determination of linguistic classifications

10The majority of philosophers do not deal with the classification of such concrete phenomena as colours or the kinds of snow for the Inuit (alias Eskimos) which Benjamin Whorf, the most prominent proponent of linguistic determinism and relativism, brought to dubious fame (Pullum 1991, 159ff.). Their terrain is more fundamental and abstract layers. They ask about the conceivable ways of being and kinds of reality.

11In the Indo-European languages, a grammatical distinction is made between discrete entities (tools, animals, people) that thanks to their form can be readily recognised as individual things, and mass substances (water, clay, flour, meat). Linguists call the nouns that we use for discrete units “count nouns”, and the nouns for mass substances “mass nouns”. We can count individual objects. To quantify mass substances, we need additional measure words.7 With the choice of the measure word, we also characterize and classify mass substances as liquid, finegrained or solid. Water is quantifiable when we pour it into jugs or measure the amount in litres, flour when we fill it into sacks or measure its weight in kilos, meat when we cut it into pieces or slices, gold when we melt it to bars, and so on. Thus, these measure words do not only serve quantification, but also act as classifiers. They provide information about the character of the materials (Holenstein 1982).

12The philosopher W. V. Quine has observed that the Japanese language (like many other languages) lacks the grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns that is so common in European languages (Quine 1969, 35 ff.). To make discrete objects countable, they must first be classified just like mass substances: as more or less long (one dimensional), flat (two dimensional) or round (three dimensional) things, as animals of a certain size or as human beings, and the like. When the Japanese speak of five oxen, they use an expression (go-to no ushi8) that in Quine’s view is ontologically ambivalent and which could be translated as “five bovines” or as “five head of cattle”. According to Quine it is not decidable which translation is right. He claims that it is indeterminate whether the Japanese refer to individuals (bovines) or to a mass substance (cattle) with their expression.9 To illustrate his claim, Quine here interprets “cattle” not as a collective noun (comparable to “herd”) but rather as a mass noun as if it were possible that the Japanese, faced with five oxen, perceive an “unindividuated totality of beef on the hoof.” In contemporary jargon, it could be said that it cannot be excluded that the Japanese perceive five items of living bovine biomass in a field much as we see five pieces of beef in a butcher’s shop.

13A Japanese student of Quine’s who could not reconcile this with his own understanding of the language as a native speaker, pointed out to him that Japanese learners of English at first misinterpret the phrase “five pieces of bread”. They thought that it meant not five slices, but five loaves of bread. The difference between individuated entities (oxen) and mass substances (beef) was completely evident to them. To such an extent, it could be added, that they do not deem it to be necessary to mark the distinction grammatically. For them it is also unnecessary to mark the gender grammatically with a special suffix to distinguish the male thespian, the actor, from the female, the actress.

14The Japanese logician who told me in the 1980s of his discussion with Quine gleefully added that afterwards Quine no longer used the Japanese expression for “five oxen” as an illustration from natural language for his theory of ontological relativity, whereas the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn still cites it.

15In the philosophy of science of the past century we can observe something like a “delayed relativism”. Just at the time when in the methodologically leading cultural science, linguistics, a countermovement was gaining ground against the sweeping cultural relativism of the first half of the 20th century, an insight burst into the departments of philosophy with the force of a revelation that the process of the history of science cannot be explained in exclusively rational terms, with reasons that can be derived from the nature of the matter itself. It often happens that psychological and sociological motives, striving for fame and for power, decide the course of research. It is known that the realization that one has too long adhered to a biased view can easily lead one to advocate the opposite view just as one-sidedly after having gone through the conversion. But as long as human beings do science, there will always be scientists who set aside their innate striving for power in favour of their equally innate cognitive Eros. For them, the nature of things and the continuous surprise from seeing new aspects of it are more attractive than the power games that science holds in store. There is very much that can be explained with sociological theories of relativity, but not everything.

16If a cultural relativity can be discerned, then it seems to be dependent less on the languages concerned than on the realm of phenomena in which it becomes apparent. On the one hand, as remarked at the beginning, it is a decisive point whether perception, conceptual processing of what is perceived, remembering or reproduction for the purposes of communication is at issue. On the other hand, the nature of the data plays a part. In many realms of perception, we are faced with a continuum of perceptual givens. At one end of the continuum, the independence of perception from language is obvious. At the other end, perception, due to the nature of the data, fluctuates, it is variable. Accordingly, it can be readily influenced by the language concerned and the individual command of language.

17A variability of perception and designation along a continuum both across languages and within languages is well known from colour tests (Holenstein, 1985, 17ff.). If speakers of different languages are asked which segment of the colour spectrum they regard as the optimal red and which as the optimal yellow, they will point to the same segments. For speakers of different languages, the difference between an optimal red and an optimal yellow is just as obvious as for speakers of one and the same language. But speakers of one language are no less uncertain and divided as to how far red extends on the colour spectrum and where yellow begins than are speakers of different languages. And if after a certain period the same person is again asked where the boundary is, the responses prove to fluctuate and waver. The certainty with which the prototypical segment of a colour is named and the variability with which a boundary is drawn in the area of the non-prototypical segments have more to do with the nature of the neural perceptual apparatus that we inherited from our parents than with the structure of the language that we learned from them. The influence of language makes itself most apparent when in addition to the primary colour terms red and yellow a language has an additional colour term for orange. The extension of red and yellow is then limited by the intervening colour. But then, in addition to the boundary between reddish and yellowish colours, the boundary between red and orange on the one hand and between orange and yellow on the other is variable.

18Intercultural perception and language tests now indicate that children are already just as familiar with the difference between individuated objects and mass substances independently of the their language as they are with the difference between the primary colours. Certain differences are quite simply conspicuous. Beef, cut up into smaller pieces, is still beef, whereas a part of the body of an ox, its neck or its stomach, is not an ox.

19In the perception of individuated entities and mass substances there is also a continuum. The probability of individuated perception is highest in the case of living beings, followed by concrete objects that are clearly divided from each other by definite shapes. The lowest probability is in the case of mass substances. In the case of flour and dust, we abstract from the fact that they consist of particles. We need a magnifying glass to grasp their individual components. By contrast, the individuality of “larger animals” is conspicuous. They are organisms that to a certain extent are obviously able to regulate their behaviour themselves, and can specifically react to changes in the environment. For all their knowledge that the individual can only be regarded as a relatively independent member of the group to which he belongs, “Western individualism” is not unintelligible to “the Japanese” by reason of language or culture. It is not something beyond their empathy or even imitation. It is all too familiar to them. In Japan, too, people have their individual character and idiosyncratic features. In Japan, too, there are egoistic and altruistic people. It is just as much a matter of course in Japan as it is in Europe or the Americas that an adult who does something on his own account and without considering the group to which he belongs can be held individually liable for his action. The Japanese use the expression for this, jiko sekinin, just as fluently as English speakers use the literal translation: self-responsibility. If Quine had not chosen the Japanese expression for “five oxen”, but, under the influence of Kurosawa’s film, the term for “seven Samurai” (shichi-nin no samurai10), he would probably himself have found a translation as “seven items of Samurai humanity, Samuraihood, Samurai mass” and the like, and the interpretation of “Samurai” as a mass noun implausible. The “groupism” attributed to the Japanese does not go this far.

20Behavioural scientists could have pointed out to Quine that Japanese primate researchers owed their pioneering successes among other things to the assumption that each animal has a separate identity and its own character. They did not classify all the observations that they made with an animal simply as typical of the species. For them the individual animal was not a random example of a population that can be exchanged for another without further ado. Accordingly, they gave each animal a name. For a long time, their American colleagues did not think it was possible for the researchers to recognise each individual animal in a horde of more than a hundred apes with the naked eye (de Waal, 2001, 116ff.).

Saying the same thing with other words

21Up to now, I have discussed constraints on the variability of natural languages founded in perception. These are constraints that guide our mutual understanding in communication within a language and across languages without coming to our awareness. In the next example, the point is our human ability to change perspectives. We are capable of seeing the same thing from different standpoints. Correspondingly, we can render it in language in different ways. Instead of the constraints on the variability of natural languages, the potential for variation in each person’s linguistic ability now comes into focus. This potential for variation makes it possible for us to understand the way speakers of other languages see and formulate reality.

22Some time ago, in 1981, the American cultural scholar Alfred H. Bloom thought he could prove that the Chinese are not as conversant with contrafactual thought as are Americans. There are no conditional verbs in Chinese comparable to the English verbs “would” and “could”. The contrafactual proposition, “If A were the case, then B would also be the case”, and the factual proposition, “If A is the case, then B is also the case”, can be rendered in Chinese with one and the same sentence, more or less: “If A is the case, then B is the case.” Bloom conjectured that this grammatical non-differentiation could provide one explanation for the fact that the development of science in China has remained behind that in Europe. Thought experiments, and thus contrafactual assumptions play a considerable part in scientific argumentation. We assume that the laws of nature are not only valid when a river in fact floods its banks, but also when flooding would have occurred if it had rained one day longer.

23Chinese and Japanese psychologists (Au 1983, Liu 1985, Takano 1989) then pointed out that the Chinese language, and similarly Japanese, which also lacks conditional verbs, do indeed have perfectly clear and unambiguous means to mark contrafactual statements adequately as such, translatable roughly as: “A is not the case, but if A is the case, then B is also the case”, or, “Assuming: if A is the case, then B is also the case.” Bloom had used stilted and sometimes ambiguous formulations of his contrafactual statements with his Chinese test participants. When phrases were used that were familiar to the Chinese and Japanese, the East Asian test participants understood the contrafactual statements just as well as the Americans did. The psychologists correctly pointed out that contrafactual statements do not by any means occur only in scientific language games, but rather reflect experiences that everybody can have. Every Chinese can imagine what would have happened after unusual rainfall if the banks of a river had not been reinforced.

24European philosophers sometimes conjecture that no philosophy was developed in China comparable to their own because the Chinese language of the Axial era had no word corresponding to the Hellenic word for “to be” (einai). They seem not to have noticed that such a word is not even needed to understand the question that Heidegger called “the fundamental question of metaphysics”.11 This question was first posed by Leibniz in French: “Pourquoi il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien?“ (Literally translated: “Why has it there something rather than nothing?”) In German, too, the most natural formulation of this question does without the word for “to be” (sein): “Warum gibt es überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts?” (Literally translated: “Why does it give something and not rather nothing?”) If a language has no word for “to be”, this does not mean that “to be or not to be” is not an existential question for its speakers. If the ancient Chinese did not develop a theory of being comparable with the Hellenic, the explanation is not the lack of a word for “to be”. After all, they did have a familiar word for “nothing” ( wu ). The more likely explanation is that different philosophical questions were in their focus. There is much justice to saying that rather than the question “to be or not to be”, the question “how to be and how not to be” was more important to them.

25In Leibniz’s formulation of the “fundamental question of metaphysics” there is something else to be noticed, too. In the French language in which Leibniz formulated it, it cannot be posed for being as such, but only for being with a spatial character: “Pourquoi il y a quelque chose plutôt que rien?” The same applies to the English rendering of the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” If not in all languages, it seems that in very many languages it is impossible to make pure existential statements without a spatial qualification. The word “existence”, a word of Latin origin (derived from the verb ex-sistere, “to put out”, “to stand out”), and its German equivalent, Dasein (literally “being there”) are palpable examples of this. Corresponding to the implicit ontology of natural human languages, linguists have coined the expression: “To be is to be somewhere.”12 It is also well known that in natural languages it is common to transfer qualifications of spatial relationships (“extension”, “long” and “short”, “before” and “after” and the like) metaphorically to temporal relationships, but not the other way round. In the ontogenetic development of language and apparently also in the phylogenetic development, the grasp for spatial categories comes before the grasp for temporal categories.

26Heidegger is famous for his attention to the etymological meaning of words, but neither such facts of development nor the spatial connotations of his central concepts Dasein and Existenz could entice him to focus on space rather than time as the primary dimension of being. His main work is entitled not Being and Space, but Being and Time. For Heidegger, too, non-linguistic experiences come before the linguistic.

27There are philosophers and linguists who call themselves “moderate relativists” because they think that language does not determine thought, but only suggests a certain kind of thought; they have to explain under what conditions this is the case. It is quite obvious that we normally do not notice certain ontological connotations of our language. Whether reading or writing, we simply pass over the spatial connotation of the question of being, or we abstract from it. Often enough there is cause to suspect that language is not so much a source of inspiration as a treasure trove for illustrations of insights that one came across elsewhere. Heidegger’s analyses of language are an example of this point.

28Two philosophers (Gyekye 1987, 179ff. and Wiredu 1996) from Ghana have remarked that in their language (Akan) as in other African languages the concept of existence is intrinsically spatial, and infer from this that the “spirits” in whose existence Africans believe “must be spatial”, but “cannot be spiritual in a neo-Cartesian [sic] sense”. However, according to them “spirits” are not fully material inasmuch as material beings are not merely extended, but also subject to the causal laws of everyday experience. The Akan assume that their spirits are exempt at least from some of these laws.

29Thus, what linguists deem to be a universal or near-universal feature of natural languages is regarded by Gyekye and Wiredu as a peculiarity of African languages: “to exist ([Akan:] wo ho) is to be be somewhere.” They fail to take account of the fact that even Oxford philosophers can only pose the question as to the existence of God in their native language with a spatial connotation of the mode of existence. An analytical philosopher, Richard Swinburne, who is convinced that the existence of God can be proved, wrote a book in 1996 with the title Is there a God? It was far from Swinburne’s intention to insinuate with his ordinary-language formulation that God, although a spiritual being, is also of a spatial nature.13 Linguistic relativists tend to overinterpret linguistic formulations.

30Many phrases have long lost their literal meaning. They are desematicized forms of expression. It is only people who enjoy playing with words (children, poets and satirists) who pay attention to their literal meaning and call our attention to it with various intentions in mind. From a philosophical point of view, it is not only true that the limits of our languages are not the limits of our world experience. By the same token, it is not so that the structure of language irresistibly determines the structure of our experience of the world. Our languages are not that powerful.

31Human linguistic competence includes, to put it in casual terms, the ability to speak about everything and secondly the ability to say everything differently. Human beings can speak about everything that they can imagine and conceive in some way, and certainly not only about what they perceive and what really is the case. They can explain the meaning of the expressions used to a child or a speaker of a foreign language who is not yet familiar with them. They do not only do this by giving examples for the use of these expressions. They can also explain them by circumscribing with other words what is meant by an unfamiliar word.14 Without the ability to say everything with other words, no human child would be able to learn its language. Not everything can be translated into every language in a simple manner, word for word. For every simple word in a language, there is not an equally simple word with exactly the same meaning, the same connotations and the same application in every other language. But in every language, in the one from which the translation is made just as well as in the one into which the translation in made, it is possible to paraphrase in a sufficiently intelligible manner what is said differently in the other language, with what means and with what consequences. Many excellent explanations of the manifold meanings and the wealth of nuances of dao and logos were written not by classical or modern native speakers of Chinese or Hellenic languages, but by Western European philologists.

32In principle, every language can act as a metalanguage for every other language. Of course, this presupposes that languages are understood as systems open to development. New developments require the creation of new words. There are several ways to do this. One intuitive example is the word for bicycle in various languages. The English word bicycle was adopted literally from French, in which the word is used today almost exclusively in the diminutive form (bicyclette). The German “Zweirad” (literally: “two wheel”) is a word-for-word translation. The term that today is more usual in German, “Fahrrad” (literally “driving wheel”), renders a different perspective on the same object. The Chinese words zixingche [self-moving vehicle] and jiaotache [self-going vehicle] and the Japanese jitensha [self-rolling vehicle]15 are other circumscriptions of the same vehicle. A word can be made intelligible by explaining its meaning or by identifying its object with a circumscription. We learn many words by paying attention to the linguistic or non-linguistic context in which they are used.

33Not all information that we need to understand a verbal utterance is contained in the language itself. We continuously speak ambiguously without bringing about misunderstandings. The knowledge we have from experience and the context at hand are sufficient to select the appropriate interpretation. In the sports pages we read, “Jones has already won the second tournament after a three-month break due to a knee injury.” Nobody gets stuck on the ambiguity of the sentence. At most, a translation machine will be uncertain as to what Jones’s “knee injury” brought about: the three-month break or the winning of the two tournaments. We do not need to verbalize everything to make ourselves understood. We can highly respect someone and make it clear to him without saying to him that we respect him. The limits of our languages are not the limits of our world. We have cognitive abilities that go far beyond our linguistic abilities. Without our non-linguistic cognitive abilities we would not at all be able to understand a multitude of the things that we tell each other in our own or a foreign language.

Prospect

34As an academic problem, linguistic relativism is just 250 years old in Europe. In South-West Asia, an Iranian scholar, Abu-Said al-Sirafi, who was born in Siraf16 in Persia about 890 and died in Baghdad in 979, already became aware of it over 1000 years ago. In Baghdad at the time, a Syrian interpreter of Hellenic philosophy, Abu Bishr Matta, who achieved fame in the history of philosophy as the teacher of al-Farabi, advocated the classical Aristotelian doctrine that languages are only different in the words used, but not in what is meant by the words (Holenstein 1985, 6ff., 1995). Aristotle (4th century bce) had introduced his view with a famous comparison: “Just as all men have not the same graphical signs, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.” Al-Sirafi objected that meanings are closely linked to the wording, and that they are therefore different from language to language (Humbert 1997). As an outsider, one can only conjecture that reading the Quran, a poetic work of eminent aesthetic quality, the wealth of meaning of which cannot be adequately translated into another language without commentary, made Muslim scholars sensitive to the peculiarities of the Arabic language, in particular when they came from another language area as did al-Sirafi.

35In contrast to linguistic relativism, moral relativism is not only 250 or 1000 years old, but — in Asia as in Europe — as old as philosophy is, more than 2500 years. Nonetheless, there are indications that if similar research strategies to those that have been developed in exemplary fashion in the intercultural psychology of language are used to study moral relativism, the resulting overturn of common prejudices will be of similar intellectual interest and political relevance.

Notes

• 1 ao is a noun, aoi an adjective.
• 2 The graphical sign for qing was adopted in Japan for ao.
• 3 In Chinese, these words are lan and lu.
• 4 In Chinese, lu is the normal term for this.
• 5 In those European languages with two different words for blue and green in common use, ao(i) is generally translated with the word for blue without further commentary.
• 6 For Europeans it is especially disconcerting that the Japanese also use ao(i), their word for blue, in a manner similar to the Chinese word qing for greenish vegetables and apples.
• 7 liangci in Chinese and josushi in Japanese.
• 8 Chinese: wu tou niu. Quine himself does not cite the Japanese version of “five oxen”: go is the numeral, to the numeral classifier for larger animals, no a postposition (a functional word not necessary in the Chinese version), and ushi the word for bovines, whether cow, bull, or ox.
• 9 “The one way treats the [...] Japanese word [ushi] as an individuative term true of each bovine, and the other way treats that word rather as an mass term covering the unindividuated totality of beef on the hoof. [...] — here is a question that remains undecided by the totality of human dispositions to verbal behavior. It is indeterminate in principle, there is no fact of the matter.” Cf. the expression for “masses” of people in which individuals are not distinguished and seem to lose their individual features.
• 10 nin (person, human being) is the numeral classifier for people.
• 11 Cf. on the following points Holenstein, 2006.
• 12 Personal communication by Hansjakob Seiler.
• 13 In the Internet, the statement “There is a God” can be found a million times over. In this sentence, there is “a meaningless dummy subject” similar to es in the German version “Es gibt einen Gott”. — Theologians are in general of the view that God is both a super-spatial and omnipresent being. Thus, the questions of a localizable existence of God in English or in French (“Est-ce qu’il y a un Dieu?”) could be regarded as justified.
• 14 Example: “A metalanguage is a language with which a language is spoken about and analysed.”
• 15 At the end of the 19th century, zizhuanche was adopted in China via the Chinese characters used in Japan for jitensha, and given the Chinese reading, but was soon abandoned, probably for political reasons.
• 16 The home town of the legendary figure Sindbad the Sailor.