Most people believe "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  Is there
one or more languages in which it is impossible to say "that mountain is
beautiful"?  Perhaps one would have to say "I attach a lot of beauty
to that mountain"...

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Clarification of Question by islanguagetheproblem-ga on 26 Mar 2005 09:51 PST

I'm new to Google Answers, so I missed the "provide clarification
button."  In the meantime, I entered a verbose comment you can see
below (March 24).  Here I'll try to do concise clarifications to your
very perceptive questions.

To Archae0pteryx:  I would be interested in ANY language that remotely
has characteristics like the beauty example.  If there is more than
one, then ideally, I would love to find one that forces subjectivity
to be a volitional act by the speaker.  So you could say "blood is
red"  but not "blood is scary"...  There would need to be some way of
expressing it personally.  For instance, we very easily say "I like
ice cream."  We can also say "Ice cream is likeable" but that is
somewhat stilted, and not usually used.  I'm looking for something
akin to "I scary blood."  "I important punctuality."  "We sublime Ode
to Joy."  "I vile bullies."  "We irrelevant those voters."  "I odd the
hermit."

To myoarin:  I think you hit the nail on the head.  Please let me know
if the above, and the March 24 comment, do not answer your questions.

To capitaineformidable:  I've wondered about Native American languages
- please see that part of my March 24 comment.  I know there are many
unusual languages from an old Cold War era science encouragement
classroom movie called "The Alphabet Conspiracy" by Bell Laboratories.
 There are not only sign languages, but whistling languages, and
others that I have forgotten in the 40 years since I saw it.

Does anyone know a linguist who might be curious about this?  Thanks
for your time and interest.

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Clarification of Question by islanguagetheproblem-ga on 31 Mar 2005 18:00 PST

I found something very similar to what I originally asked for.  A
tutorial about the language "E-Prime" (English Prime) is at: 
http://www.angelfire.com/nd/danscorpio/ep2.html
It is a derivative of English, with the sole purpose of eliminating
all forms of "to be" without inventing any new words.

It has the big disadvantage of not being the mainstream language of a
society.  If there is/was such a "real" language, there would be an
existence proof that a society could function with it.

But I'm thrilled to see the effort, and that the purposes of E-Prime
are much related to my own.

Perhaps there is an E-Prime expert that knows of a "real" language
that is similar to what I'm looking for?

How about a computer language?

Fascinating question!  I congratulate you for thinking it up.  I'd be
proud of it if it were mine.

I'm not a researcher, so I won't be taking a formal shot at studying
your question, but as a commenter I'm interested in a clarification
anyway.  It's easy to extract the wrong principle from a single
example.  (A second might help.)  Are you looking for a language that
has no way of asserting a general attribution of a trait
descriptively--no equivalent of "that <noun> is <adjective>"--so that
any such statement must be made in terms of an instance of an
abstraction?  Or are you looking for one that specifically lacks an
adjective for "beautiful," so that one can talk about beauty only by
naming that quality (in noun form) as a matter of subjective
experience?

Archae0pteryx

Yes, very interesting, not only grammatically but also on the
psychology of language or a language?s influence on the way we express
ourselves.
I interpret your question to be asking:  Is there a language in which
such descriptions have to be expressed as a personal impression?  Or
maybe in some other way, but not as a direct statement?
This is a very good habit, even in languages in which people mostly
use the blunt statement, as counselors advise.  It doesn?t matter when
almost everybody agrees that the sunset is grand, but it sure does in
many other instances:
It?s cold in here.  vs.  I think it?s cold in here, don?t you?
He?s a shifty-eyed you-know-what (about someone the speaker hardly knows).  Vs.
	I don?t like him / I think he?s ?  / So-and-so knows him and says ?

Get the idea?  Know anyone like that?  Get feedback for doing it yourself?

Are there languages like that? I don't know.

Somewhere, I seem to remember, there are languages that don?t have an
expression for the speaker  - first person singular.  If so, that
surely results in different ways of expressing things.
Interesting question?

I have no personal experience of this but like the previous
commentators I too find the question fascinating.

Maybe some of the Native American Indian languages have such
structures. I know that some of them use sign language to accompany
the words. During the last World War the ?Code Talkers? relayed
messages using Navajo Indian language. This was chosen mainly because
it was a language known in America but didn?t have a written form so
it couldn?t be learned by an enemy and also because the construction
didn?t correspond to any other known western language.
This was a code that was used over open air waves and was never broken.

Perhaps there is someone in the GA community that can add more to this.

Norman.

Hello-
I apologize for the delay in checking on my question, and I'm pretty
wowed by the thoughtful messages.  Way back on March 10, Archae0pteryx
asked:

"...as a commenter I'm interested in a clarification
anyway.  It's easy to extract the wrong principle from a single
example.  (A second might help.)  Are you looking for a language that
has no way of asserting a general attribution of a trait
descriptively--no equivalent of "that <noun> is <adjective>"--so that
any such statement must be made in terms of an instance of an
abstraction?  Or are you looking for one that specifically lacks an
adjective for "beautiful," so that one can talk about beauty only by
naming that quality (in noun form) as a matter of subjective
experience?"

I really like your question.  By the way, my tendency is to be
long-winded, so perhaps I shortened my question a bit too much.  I am
not looking only for the instance of "beautiful."  However, I am also
not looking for a language in which one cannot say "This book weighs
between one and three pounds."  The general distinction is (and I
realize this can get slippery) between a thing's intrinsic attributes,
and assigned (subjective, depending on the speaker) attributes.

Many jokes have been made about a parent and a teenager listening to
the teenager's favorite music, and verbally hitting each other with
"It's trash!!!" and "It rocks!!!"  At some level we know that it isn't
anything but waves moving through air.  But we suspend this regularly
- just read the music reviews in any publication.  I think it leads to
a dissonance in one's head, although in this case there may not be
much in the way of consequences.

I once heard something about the German language, of which I
personally know next to nothing:  In German, one can't say "Children
are playing in the street."  One must say  "Children are playing on
the street."  Since then, an acquaintance told me this is incorrect
(which would be nice to verify).  But it gave me the idea to ask the
question we are talking about.

I would also acknowledge Norman for his comments on the Navajo Indian
language.  If my memory is correct, one cannot say something like "The
stone fell down."  It would correctly be said (something like) "It
stoned down."  Perhaps somewhere there is a language for which one
must say "I beauty that mountain."

Here are some words to show my motivation for the question, and to
stress that it is not lightly asked.  I'm sure I don't need to
convince anybody about the widespread problem of depression, and all
its adjuncts.  Compare two scenarios:  In the first, a bullied child
has been told, in ever so many ways "You're worthless!"  The child
eventually, at some level, thinks "I'm worthless."  In the second
scenario, it is only possible for the bullies to say "I worthless
you!"  For the child to speak against himself, he would have to say "I
worthless myself!"  I would like to think that would sound kind of
stupid, and would have less of a corrosive impact.

My family is just at the tail end of several years of near-fatal
experience with this in a child.  Things are now going pretty well, by
the way.  But I quit my job just to work on it, and I would charitably
characterize our efforts and those of the dozens of well-meaning
professionals involved as A) very basic safety and B) groping in the
dark.

Conflict was near universal with all families of children in
treatment, and I was struck by the "I feel... statements" exercise. 
To defuse the almost automatic arguments (a much more serious form of
the music example above) we were instructed to only make statements
about how we felt when the other party did something.  This was done
to defuse things like "What you did was horrible!" to something
essentially unarguable, like "When you did that I felt horrible!"  It
was actually one of the contributions of the professionals that most
everyone thought was effective and at least attempted to carry forward
in their families.  So, if there is a language in which this is
automatic, do the people using that language get along better?

If I don't stop now, I will triple the length of this comment.  Thanks
for your engaging thoughts.

Hi, islang...,
You're worse than me about carrying on :), but it was interesting,
getting philosophical: Kantian, "intrinsic attributes" = Kant's "a
priori"  (I believe?).

The German:  Kinder spielen auf der Strasse,  children play on the
street, physically on the surface of the street.  But,  Das Haus ist
in der Hauptstrasse,  the house is in Main Street,  in that street,
not in another one, whereas English would say that it's on 57th St. In
German in this usage, the street is also including the buildings, it
seems. But, Das haus steht an der Strasse,  the house is on/next to
the street, when the street is not named, not inner-city, "Strasse" a
road with few houses.
That all really doesn't have anything to do with your question, just
the different usage of prepositions and linguistic feeling about the
meaning of the subject noun in the situation.
But now fp-ga, a native speaker, is probably going to come and correct
me ..., maybe on Kant too.  :-/

Sorry about your child-rearing problem.  Don't/Didn't we all have them?
In my comment above, I meant to say that counselors advise to avoid
the blunt statement that the situation is so-and-so, but rather to
says: I see it this way..., or: I think it is ..., or more obliquely:
Did you ever ("ever", bad, a generalization ...) Have you considered
that the bass of your loud music is just shaking the whole house?  I
should have avoided an uprearing example, not intending to be
personal, but it was the one that came to me from my own experience.
But it shows the virtue of the Socratic method, asking questions, only
stating personal impressions about non-intrinsic attributes.  The
other way, the blunt statement as a fact that is really only an
opinion can sometimes just cry for refutation, direct and personal: 
"You're wrong!  That ain't so!" and maybe proving it.  Ouch! Stress!
...  (just my experience ... well practiced :( )
The refuter may even accept the truth of the statement, but can still
argue on a rhetorical line:  "You just think that 'cause you don't
like my music."
(Which isn't a bad line, reintroducing the subjectivity of the
statement, but probably won't help the dispute.   Been there, done
that!)
Is there a language that insists on avoiding this?  One that requires
the opinion to be expressed as such?
Must be nice people, sharing impressions rather than confronting each
other with them.
Hope someone can bring some arcane linguistic knowledge to the discussion.
Myoarin

Well, thanks to myoarin-ga, I've just reread this question.

A rather detailed article on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis

Different ways of translating "pretty" into Japanese. But I'm not
quite sure if the examples given ("a pretty mountain") do refer to
your question:
http://www.mindspring.com/~kimall/Japanese/adjectives.html

Well, thank you, too, fp-ga.
The SWH article was very interesting, I really learned something, and
began wondering if the hypothesis could be understood to suggest that
the Greek language provided a way of thinking and expressing abstract
concepts - better than some other languages -  and thus philosophy and
math and the origins of modern science arose in the Greek culture? 
The Romans  - I believe -  never really incorporated this part of
Greek culture into their own ...(?)  Because Latin did not originally
provide the same basie for dealing with such?  Certainly their
numbering system wasn't handy for advancing math, despite their
obvious ability in architecture, but their sticking with their
numbering system suggests that they did not really care about the
subject.
OF course, there are other sophisticated oriental philosophies and we
are still trying to understand Chinese medicine.  My wondering
suggestion only concerns Greek and on to European philosophy, science,
etc.
And, interestingly, philosophers since then feel they have to
introduce new words or new meanings to words to express their ideas,
finding their own language inadequate.

Just a thought that I find interesting, and admittedly not one that
leads back to the original question, which I would also like to have
answered.
Myoarin