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Monday, October 03, 2005

No universals

Universals in language are very hard to come by. There are too many languages, so very rarely does anything fit all languages. For example, every good English speaker knows that adjectives come in front of their nouns. Unless you're speaking in a romance language like Spanish. Everyone knows that a pronoun like I is a separate word from the verb that shows what I is doing. Unless you're speaking in most other languages in the world besides English, in which case the pronoun is built into the verb as a suffix or an infix and occasionally a prefix.

So, it is highly likely that other behaviors besides language behavior also won't have universals. That's why the Creator looks on the heart, the intentions. Not only is behavior deceptive sometimes, but an action called good here may be called bad somewhere else in the world. But the Creator knows good intentions when he comes across them. So, tonight I repeat an age-old recitation. "May the words of my lips and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, the one who makes me acceptable."

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