Posts by BenWilson
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If you'd understood what you'd read, you'd've realised that an appropriate reader is not justified in attributing Nazism to Nietzsche.
This it true. I did not really understand what I read. The separation of the work's meaning from the author's is I guess the point where I find the theory wanting. It's the author's intention I want to understand. If what they say strictly makes no sense, on a perfectly valid and justifiable parse of the text, but another less justifiable parse does make sense, and furthermore the author says that the less-justifiable one is the one they meant, they just didn't fully get how it could be misinterpreted until later, then I'm prepared to go with the author on that one.
I can fully see that other people might not care what the author's intent was at all. They may insist on the text, and how it would be interpreted by an appropriate reader. I don't really see why they would do this, though, unless they were trying to school the author, rather than understand them. Perhaps a lawyer might do this, to take advantage of poor wording in a contract or law. But I feel it likely that the judge or jury is going to look beyond the poor wording to the intentions of the author of the document, and the signatories.
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Linger, I just noticed your follow up comment to my earlier question. Sorry I missed it because I still wanted to get an answer to your 'referential multiplication' claim. It piqued my interest. I'm not sure if you were actually making a mathematical claim about social signals having a multiplying effect, or if that's more of a rhetorical device.
If you were actually quantifying, I'd like to hear what actual numbers correspond to what in your example on page 20 (I don't know how to do the linky thing). It's clear enough that more is conveyed in the examples than just the words. So saying "Thank you" after a compliment in Japanese carries some kind of negative connotation about oneself or one's opinion of the other people? What I don't get is how that 'multiplies' the meaning. It seems to simply have added a constant amount of data to the conversation. I can't say what constant, because it depends how you assign numbers to the content, but how it can be multiplicative is something I really can't grasp.
In fact, I can't grasp how any signal at all could do that, verbal or non-verbal. If you can store the meaning in x bits, and then add another signal, which takes y bits to store, how is the information contained anything more than bits(x)+bits(y)? It could certainly be less, if the concatenation of the bit patterns could be compressed, by some kind of algorithm, but it's not more.
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Anyhoo, it's been fun, folks. Over and out.
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of course it would! it would make everuthing so much easier ! all these people not understanding each other is just so silly and so unnecessary.
Hey, someone's finally catching on!
He might have a point though. In the future we mostly seem to be wearing one piece silver suits and speak English.
Even aliens! Except bad aliens.
It is curious how few visions of the future have humans unable to understand each other.
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The most ironic thing about this discussion for me is that whilst I'm having it, I'm simultaneously writing a conversion to my product that enables internationalization of the front end, to save our foreign customers from the annoyance of having to read English. In the next few weeks it's entirely likely to have 20 different front ends, and teams of people maintaining each one, peppered all around the world. I'm perfectly aware of how much effort goes into this now, and doing all I can to reduce the work they are required to do.
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are you are implying that everyone will be conversant in a single language in a few hundred years? can you offer any evidence to support that theory? i can't see any at all, but maybe i'm missing something
Evidence from the future? No, I don't have any, I'm sorry. Not until they get that bloody Hadron collider going anyway.
And no, I'm not saying anything about the chances. Just the possibility. It is supremely and totally possible, and it would also be a bloody good thing. It could happen entirely naturally, all by itself, or governments could band together and make it happen. I think the latter is less likely, but the former seems to be actually happening today. English has crept out to phenomenal numbers of people, and it's likely that even today, there are more people speaking it as an auxiliary second language than as a native tongue. Naturally the non-natives don't speak it just the way the natives do, but I, for one, am tolerant of that because I want to hear what these hundreds of millions of people have to say. I want to be able to communicate with them, easily and effectively, without needing a translator, or running around holding a piss in, looking for the second door on the left.
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Nothing to do with the armies and the economic might, then?
I reckon that actually has more to do with it, but the ability of the language to adapt for the massive empire it captured is surely a strength rather than a weakness. It's a way for the language to follow the advice of Machiavelli - when you capture a nation, you should allow them to follow their own customs, speak their own language, and be led by their own people. English allows a great deal of scope for that. It's a good language for conquerors who intend to hold on to their empire.
It's lovely of you to be so considerate about other people's money. But you know, we'll keep dubbing and subtitling films into our own languages, if it's all the same to you.
It's all the same to me, that's for sure. Whether it's still a common practice in a few hundred years remains to be seen.
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Mark,
I certainly do not believe in the equivalency of all languages. I am also bilingual, don't forget. But I do believe in the value of shared language. Then we don't need to rely on translation.
Gio
As I'm sure you appreciate, translation is often not an option. When you want to know where the toilet is, and someone can't understand you or be understood, it's really easy to see how useful it is that you share a language. If you want to read their literature or watch their films, then translations and subtitles work OK, although it is rather wasteful for them to have to do one for every language, for every work.
David
According to hypothetical intentionalism, this means that explicit statements by the author as to what their work means are ruled out.
That is one theory. It is not a fact. The existence of this theory does not make my reasoning specious.
To me it sounds like a bullshit theory, too. As I see it, the meaning of what an author writes is what they intended it to mean. They may have expressed it poorly for some particular audience, but that doesn't mean the audience get to claim the work and say it meant something other than what the author intended. That is like saying that Nietzsche was advocating Nazism, just because the Nazis willfully interpreted it that way. Or that it doesn't matter what I think I'm saying, only what you think I'm saying. That is a path to refusing to understand other people, rather than trying to. It seems especially likely to make it extremely difficult to express new ideas.
Islander
Do read a couple of histories of the English language, BenWilson, and then contemplate just how likely it is that this will *ever* happen.
I haven't quantified how likely I think it is. I've only said how desirable it is.
Does your fellow man actually want to communicate with you in a creolised bastard form of English though? I rather suspect that 99.9% of humanity want to keep their own linguistic riches, develope them, and continue happily using translators & translation devices if they want access to other languages.
I've said all along that the condition for success is the desire of people to communicate with others from around the world. Plenty of people have no such desire and will be happy to stick to the small subset of humanity with whom they can communicate. I like to think this attitude will fade away over time. Maybe I'm wrong. We shall see. I'm doing my bit, by accepting "non-standard" English any time I see it, so long as it's clear, and trying where I can to speak in simple ways. There may be a lot of people who appreciate me doing just that, but who don't have the courage to utter one word about it, out of fear of a misplaced comma inverting the meaning, or rendering it ridiculous. If you're out there, rest assured, I'm not that mean.
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David, I didn't say there was no threat of wipeout. It is just not the purpose.
As for how lamentable it is that languages die out....well yup. It is. But that's not enough reason to not try to communicate with your fellow man better.
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Colonial mindset? Not really. I just want a universal language. I'd hoped it would be Esperanto, and learned quite a lot of it, but the more I researched the less convinced I became that it will work.
Which takes me to the alternative - that a natural language becomes the universal language. I'd be just as happy if it was Chinese, but currently the most likely candidate seems to be English. That may be fortunate for me, but it will surely be fortunate anyway, for me, being a native speaker of the language of power. I'm thinking of the other people, those who find it hard to learn English, and who are frowned upon by pedants for speaking it poorly. They have far more than me to gain out of a universal language.
For it to work, it would actually have to be English speakers doing most of the work, since they would need to accept simplifications in their own native tongue. I don't actually think it would require any kind of large project, just a change in attitude towards tolerance in English of new, simpler, foreign influenced forms. And a willingness to use them.
Jeebus, could you be any more parochial?
I certainly could. And you could be a lot less, since your claims of being able to speak to everyone were limited to the English speaking world, Italy, Spain and France. Everywhere else, you can't make yourself understood worth a bar of shit and that doesn't seem to bother you in the slightest.
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