OrangePhilosophy

I have responded to this same thing in another blog.

There's some related material as well at:
" rel="nofollow">http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002377.html

In one blog, whose name or address I shall not mention, there is one man talking about the distinction between variation and error, claiming there is a thin line in between. This surprises me because I often assume that anyone, who has a basic knowledge in Linguistics, knows that modern Linguistics does not work with the normative concept of error.

Now, someone comes with another archaic idea that certain languages are primitive, i.e., that there are certain concepts x(1)...X(n) that cannot be expressed in a certain human language L. This is a return to geocentrism.

I do not like to have to say those things, because I try to be considerate of others' feelings. But others also have to be considerate of other cultures and of their image and respect different ethnic groups. Mind if anyone wrote something similar about us the Whites. What if someone wrote that, for instance, New Yorkers cannot make sex because English has not many words for certain sexual acts as another language? How would you react? Would you believe it?

What is this 'the sex' which you speak of? Maybe it's what we in New York call 'snoo-snoo.'
As far as sensitivity, I'm not so sure we don't want to consider that a tribe might not have enough number-concepts in order not to offend them. We also don't want to be motivated by a PC dogma that all languages or language users are equally capable of all cognitive or linguistic tasks if the data don't seem to fit this hypothesis. But, in the comments thread over at C. Timber there's some folk talking about evidence rendering the claims of linguistic paucity dubious in this case.
Tony, by 'geocentrism' you mean 'eurocentrism', right?

By geocentrism I mean the return of a science to ideas that are already too flawed and too archaic to be considered, except as historical curiosity. The idea of the existence of primitive human languages is an archaism in Linguistics inasmuch as geocentrism is an archaism in Astronomy.

But, yeah, if the whole idea was to sell some Indians short it is eurocentrism. The Japanese, which are, as we all know, a people from Asia, could, in another example, express a form of nippocentrism by claiming that we, the Whites, cannot count or enumerate either, given that the systems of numeral expressions in Indo-European languages differ from theirs.

These things said, I have to look into the original research. Perhaps the whole story has been misrepresented in the media. It happens most of the time.

I have started a series of entries on the subject in my blog.