R
r
Intelligence does not depend on outside resources (languages),
intelligence begets new intelligent resources!
Intelligence does not depend on outside resources (languages),
intelligence begets new intelligent resources!
R
r
Yes Klingon's are a product of their moronic society, not their
moronic language. The brainwashing starts at home!
R
r
Yes you need the crutch of Unicode because no all-encompassing-
language exists today. Because of this we need interpretors at
accident scenes, and subtitles on movies. Public Warning Systems must
be delayed due to repeating the same information in different
languages. And the worst part of all of this is the human instinct to
fear that which is different. Yes, multi-languages contribute to
racism and classism although are not the only cause. What moronicity
is this when a self-aware species has evolved for as long as we and
yet, has not perfected universal communication, sad, very sad! What
would an advanced civilization think if they dropped in for a spot of
tea?
About the "western" technology made in China and Taiwan... do you
really think US are so modern? I can only recommend you to visit
Japan.
The US is nearing the end of it's global reign and superpower status.
Is that a good or bad thing? Only time shall tell! Doesn't matter
really because some other power will step in and be the hated one,
it's very lonely at the top -- i myself know this fact all to well ;-)
So how many letters do we need? 50, 100, 1000? Simplisticity is
elegance, that is why Python is so beautiful! Yes, English sucks eggs
and if we do adopt it as universal language, it should get an enema
for sure. But i am all for scraping the English language all together
and creating something completely new.
I guess you judge intelligence from memorization of redundant facts?
Some people believe this, however i don't. I have gb's and gb's on my
hard drive for storing redundant facts. I use my mind for dreaming,
reasoning, contemplating, exploring, etc, not as a refuse bin! As i
said before language is nothing more than a utility, a way to
communicate with others. You can romanticize it all you want but at
the end of the day it is nothing more than what it is. People who
romanticize language typically like Shakespeare and such. I have no
interest in flower sniffing pansies from days gone by. My interest are
science, technology, and the advancement of human intelligence. I
leave Saturday morning cartoons for children.
R
r
On Sep 14, 9:23 am, Christopher Culver
*I* am the OP! I never said language constrained thought or
intelligence, that's lunacy! That would be akin to saying class status
decides intelligence! You should reread this thread immediately! My
argument is multi-languages and the loss of communication, and
obviously we have before us an example of this miss-communication.
*I* am the OP! I never said language constrained thought or
intelligence, that's lunacy! That would be akin to saying class status
decides intelligence! You should reread this thread immediately! My
argument is multi-languages and the loss of communication, and
obviously we have before us an example of this miss-communication.
T
Terry Reedy
r said:
From Wikipedia IPA article:
Occasionally symbols are added, removed, or modified by the
International Phonetic Association. As of 2008, there are 107 distinct
letters, 52 diacritics, and four prosody marks in the IPA proper.
R
r
HaHa! and here is my favorite paragraph from that article..
The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that
are distinctive in spoken language: phonemes, intonation, and the
separation of words and syllables.[1] To represent additional
qualities of speech such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made
with a cleft palate, an extended set of symbols called the Extensions
to the IPA is used.[2]
LOL! (a smilie just would not have sufficed!)
R
Rhodri James
The biggest problem for the IPA is that vowels are a two-dimensional
continuum, which is hard to map with discrete symbols. Worse, differing
vowel sounds are the big variable in regional accents. There's basically
too much variation within the dialectal family of English to make an
attempt to render it phonetically much use.
H
Hendrik van Rooyen
1) Is an assumption, not a proven fact. "falling out of favour" is merely
fashion amongst people who are dabbling in fuzzy areas where the hard
discipline of the "scientific method" is inapplicable, because it is kind of
hard to "prove" or "disprove" that my thinking and yours differ "because" my
first language is different to yours. - we end up talking about our beliefs,
after telling war stories.
2) Is about as useful as stating that any Turing complete language and
processor pair is capable of solving any computable problem, given enough
time.
So why are we not all programming in brainfuck?
Or speaking the language of the people who wrote linear B?
When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
believe
), it kind of puts a crimp in the style of thinking that a person will do, growing up with only that language.
- Hendrik
C
Christopher Culver
Hendrik van Rooyen said:
Except the amount of circumlocution one language might happen to use
over another is quite limited.
You mean Mycenaean Greek? There's still a few million people in Europe
who speak a descendent of that very language.
When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
believe
person will do, growing up with only that language.
"Window" goes back to an Anglo-Saxon compound "windeye". Even if a
word does not already exist in a given language for whatever novel
item, the language is capable of creating from its own resources.
H
Hyuga
Oh, certainly! I thought I said as much in my original post, but maybe
I didn't stress that enough. I'm a lot stronger in Japanese than I am
in Chinese, but even Japanese uses various Chinese characters in ways
that have deep cultural ties that may not translate well (and in many
cases that are completely different from those characters'
implications in any Chinese language). I guess the reason I didn't
stress that enough is that I'm in no way implying that they be used as
is. I just think they could be taken as the basis for a standardized
universal written language. One might argue that it would make more
sense to come up with a new character set for that, but here we have
one that so many people are already familiar with in some form or
another. And the radical system makes them much easier to remember
than many people realize.
R
r
On Sep 15, 4:12 am, Hendrik van Rooyen <[email protected]>
wrote:
(snip)
Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word
for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad
man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text
attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is
__repr__
wrote:
(snip)
When a language lacks a word for a concept like "window", then (I
believe
person will do, growing up with only that language.
Are you telling us people using a language that does not have a word
for window somehow cannot comprehend what a window is, are you mad
man? Words are simply text attributes attached to objects. the text
attribute doesn't change the object in any way. just think of is
__repr__
T
Terry Reedy
Christopher said:
This is the old Lenneberg-Chomsky Universalist hypothesis, which has
fallen out of favor among cognitive scientists and others as various
researchers have done actual experiments to determine how and when
language does and does not influence perception and thought. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
L
Lie Ryan
r said:
Without an outsider (read: someone who used a different language) who
pointed out the idea of window; it is impossible for that person to
think about the concept of window except in the cases of independent
reinvention. This is because people are naturally lazy to think about
difficult concepts; "an opening on a plane" is much more difficult to
comprehend and express compared to "window". Thus people either have to
coin a new word for the complex concept or they won't be able to develop
the concept since they don't benefit from the abstraction that the new
word gives (think black-box thinking).
I would say "a word" is like a new class. A class encapsulates a
difficult concept into a much simpler wrapper so we don't have to think
about how it is implementated. New concepts and ideas will be developed
on top of these classes. Without the abstraction, we would have to use
much elaboration to express the more complex concept; and we will fail
to form conclusion earlier.
And this brings out the point: "though it is possible for any language
to illustrate any concept; the concept will require much less brain
cycle to comprehend in a fuller and richer language due to the wider
availability of abstractions".
"Yes it is possible" "But no, it is not feasible for any mere to think about
L
Lie Ryan
r said:
/LOL/, /GTFW/. After /googling/ on /the web/ for some time, /AFAICT/
English still accumulates words such as /"wtf"/, /"rofl"/, or /"pwned"/.
/FYI/, language doesn't rot, /OTOH/ our brains do. /
//CU/ /l8r/
Just my /$.02/
L
Lie Ryan
r said:
Ah.. Indian American is a good example. Since they had been so isolated
from the rest of the world, their language, culture, and technology did
not develop very well. An Orwellian nightmare of a single, unified
language will more or less have the same effect as what geographical
barrier did to the Indian American (and to other isolated cultures, e.g.
Indigenous Australian, Papuan, Japanese (during the period of
isolation), etc).
And contradictory to your belief, some Indian American DID adopt gun
powders when the white European come. And Europeans DID NOT develop gun
powders, the Chinese did. The Chinese invented early rockets and early
guns, and most importantly the gun powder itself.
Before you convinced everyone to use the same natural language, you must
convince everyone to use the same programming language. Nearly everyone
have their natural language as their first language (mindset language);
and nearly nobody have their favorite programming language as their
mother tongue. It will be much easier to convince people to switch to a
single, unified programming language since they don't have (or have much
less) cultural ties and personal affection to the language.
H
Hendrik van Rooyen
This is just an opinion, and it depends on the definition of "limited".
I have an example:
Translate into English (from Afrikaans):
"Die kat hardloop onder die tafel deur."
Literally, word for word, the sense of the words are:
"The cat runs under the table through."
The Afrikaans conveys the meaning precisely and succinctly.
I do not know of a simple way to convey the same meaning in English, to
describe the action that takes place when a cat starts running well before
one side of a table, dashes under it, and keeps running until it emerges at
the opposite side, still running, and keeps running some more, in one smooth
continuous burst of speed.
When you say "The cat runs under the table" the English kind of implies that
it goes there and tarries. Afrikaans would be "Die kat hardloop onder die
tafel in". ( "in" = "in"). "Die kat hardloop onder die tafel uit." ( "uit"
= "out" ).- Implies that the cat starts its run from under the table and
leaves the shelter. The bare: "Die kat hardloop onder die tafel." implies a
crazy cat that stays under the table while continuously running.
None of these concepts can, as far as I know, be succinctly stated in English,
because "English does not work like that" - there is no room in the syntax
for the addition of a spacial qualifier word that modifies the meaning of the
sentence. (not talking about words here that modify the verb - like fast or
slow - that is a different dimension)
So if you think the circumlocution is "quite limited", then your definition
of "limited" is somehow different to mine.
8<------------ archeology -----------------
I think what normally happens is that a foreign word is assimilated into the
language, at the time the concept is encountered by the culture, as a result
of contact with an outside influence - That, as far as I know, (from hearsay)
is what happened in the case of "window" and the N'guni languages.
It also happened in Afrikaans at the time of the invention of television. -
from its "own resources" (a bunch of God fearing, hypocritical, rabid English
haters) came the official word "beeldradio" - "image radio" (having
successfully assimilated "radio" shortly before.) You hardly ever hear the
erstwhile official word now. It has been almost totally displaced
by "televisie". No prizes for guessing where that came from.
My opinion is that it is very difficult to avoid this borrowing when suddenly
faced with a new thing. A language can only use its own resources to slowly
evolve at its own pace. But then - I am probably wrong because I am not a
linguist.
- Hendrik
H
Hendrik van Rooyen
No - All I am asserting, is the unfashionable view that your first language
forms the way you think. It goes deeper than the simple vocabulary problem
you are describing, even though that is serious enough. I still assert that
if your language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen
that object, then you "__cannot__" think about it, because you do not have
the tools in your kitbag that you need to do so. - no word, no concept, the
empty set.
And I would even assert that, when you meet the object, and acquire a word for
it, it is painful for you to think about it, because it is a new thing for
you. You then have to go through a painful process of integrating that new
thing into your world view, before you are able to use and reference it
easily. - did, for instance, the concept of "an abstract class" just jump
into your head, and stick there immediately, complete with all its
ramifications, in the minute immediately after hearing about it for the first
time? Or did you need a bit of time to understand it and get comfortable?
And were you able to, and did you, think about it "before" hearing of it?
If you answer those questions honestly, you will catch my drift.
The opposite thing is of course a continual source of trouble - we all have
words for stuff we have never seen,
like "dragon", "ghost", "goblin", "leprechaun", "the current King of
France", "God", "Allah", "The Holy Trinity", "Lucifer", "Satan", "Griffin" -
and because we have words for these things, we can, and unfortunately do,
think about them, in a fuzzy fashion, to our own detriment. People even go
around killing other people, based on such fuzzy thinking about stuff that
can not be shown to exist.
- Hendrik
M
MRAB
A window in a plane is an opening which isn't open as such!Lie said:
A
alex23
Hendrik van Rooyen said:
Okay class, this weekend's assignment is to read Wittgenstein's
"Philosophical Investigations" and then return here on Monday to
discuss
(For someone who is "not a linguist", Hendrik, you have a really solid
grasp on the fundamentals of the field...)
T
Tim Rowe
2009/9/15 Hendrik van Rooyen said:
There are good reasons for it falling out of favour, though. At the
time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, anthropologists were arguing that
members of a certain remote tribe did not experience grief on the
death of a child because their language did not have a word for grief.
They showed all the *signs* of grief -- weeping and wailing and so on
-- and sometimes used metaphors ("I feel as if my inside is being
crushed"). But because of the conviction at the time that "if your
language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen
that object, then you "__cannot__" think about it" the anthropologists
were convinced that this just looked and sounded like grief and wasn't
actually grief.
By the way, at the moment I am thinking of a sort of purple
blob-shaped monster with tentacles and fangs, that my language doesn't
have a word for and that I have never seen. On your theory, how come I
am thinking about it?