[pksebben]

"Sorry, but" is a poor substitute for "my bad". The error being pointed out to you is that your tone is dismissive, which this diatribe did nothing to correct. The culture people are trying to cultivate here is one that actively avoids suppressing ideas, and dismissiveness is antithetical to that end.

Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant.

... that's also not what "Turing complete" means.

[howlgarnish]

Correct, I'm dismissive because I don't think the article is saying anything particularly interesting or even correct. You're welcome to disagree, which is why we're arguing here in the comments section :)

As far as I tell (it's not my story after all), the author appears to be asserting that Inuktitut is somehow uniquely in tune with nature in general (dubious) and that we could change the way the Western world acts by absorbing some of those words (which sounds like linguistic determinism to me, not to mention even more dubious).

As for Turing completeness, my off the cuff analogy is that just like any Turing-complete programming language can implement any algorithm, any natural language can state any expressible human thought.

[pierreminik]

There's a joke in Greenlandic, closely related to Inuktitut, about polysemy. The joke stems from Greenlandic having very little polysemy when it comes to hunting, nature, practicalities and activities, while European languages is quite a bit more polysemic in nature.

I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes:

> A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure".

The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.