endorsed later by Benjamin Lee Whorf, is related to the more recent view advanced by the Soviet semiotician; Jurí Lotman that language is a modeling system. Lotman describes literature and art in general as secondary modeling systems, as an indication of the fact that they are derived from the primary modeling system of language, and declares as firmly as Sapir or Whorf that ‘No language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its center, the structure of natural language. Language, then, is the heart within the body of culture, and it is the interaction between the two that results in the continuation of life-energy. In the same way that the surgeon, operating on the heart, cannot neglect the body that surrounds it, so the translator treats the text in isolation from the culture at his peril.