andrew rambles

Has anyone else had enough of hearing about languages that have no word for "no"? 

You are usually told this little tidbit in some sort of pseudomotivational yes-you-can moment; but, are we really supposed to believe there is a culture out there that has developed beyond swinging from the trees, and has no way for one member to indicate to another that he is not interested in being the guinea pig for the new arrow-tips?

I also don't want to hear about how many words they have for "yes"! Anything more than a few is just unnecessary redundancy. Clearly these people are not sophisticated enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and are just incorporating everything into their lexicon. I am not impressed by this culture. 

Finally and in closing, while we're on the subject of cultures, have you ever noticed whenever someone on the Discovery Channel or TLC claims that a culture was "advanced" or "technological", they are always referring to a group of people that no longer exist? I'm not talking about Atlantis nonsense, I'm talking about real societies. I think its to counteract the superiority complex we have as being one of the cultures that "made it". The Mayan expert or whatever he is wants to bring us down a notch, knock us off our high horse. Just because the Mayans were wiped out by heavy rains or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or whatever it was, doesn't mean they weren't an exceedingly advanced culture. 

Also, we're supposed to believe they were capable of predicting the end of the world in 2012 but not capable of spotting their own demise and avoiding it? I call bullshit.