ABSTRACT
There are no pre-existing ideas and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. Each language assigns to a particular lexical or grammatical category a range of phenomena that do not correspond to any lexical or grammatical category in another language. The close relationship between the people and their environment and the delicate adjustment of their lives to that environment has come to be encoded into the grammar of their language. An example of the relevance of an overt grammatical category for world-view comes from Robert Dixon's work on the Australian Aboriginal language Dyirbal. If language encoded every aspect of an objectively defined situation, then there would inevitably be total commensurability between encodings in different languages.
