A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)
I&#x27;ve never understood the core question of S-W. Is it that you can&#x27;t have a word without having a concept for it? That seems like a no-brainer.<p>Neanderthals weren&#x27;t able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn&#x27;t have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn&#x27;t the cause of A.<p>The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes.<p>Most cultures that <i>can</i> build flying machines have one or more names for them.<p>I don&#x27;t know what it would mean to have the concept for something without having a word (or a sentence) to describe it.<p>If the S-W claim is that &#x27;it&#x27;s more common for a concept to underly a word than for a word to exist for a concept&#x27;, I don&#x27;t agree with that either -- kids who read a lot will often know the part of speech for a word and its context but not much else.