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transcending language?
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transcending language?

Cheng-Zhong Su

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Posted 10/03/08 - 01:31 PM:	#61
ragus wrote: Banno is being a bit of a bugger, Cheng-Zhong Su, because he's only telling you part of the truth. "English is a bugger" is also a colloquialism used (before the Australians) by the English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, etc. Using the word "bugger" opens the linguistic door to many imaginative phrases but needs to be used with care to avoid offence and care must be taken if offence is intended. In brief, it's use is very socially-sensitive, which is a "real bugger". If Banno claims I know "bugger all" about its use that won't offend me. I see, thank you for the explanation.

Cheng-Zhong Su

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Posted 10/03/08 - 01:33 PM:	#62
Banno wrote: Perhaps. It's use in Australia is certainly more common, and creates less offense, than elsewhere. For a while I referred to myself as a "old bugger" on this very forum, which I thought might provide a certain self-deprecating tone. Apparently, from comments received, it created quite the opposite impression. I'm buggered if I know why. Don’t worry about it, I don’t mind too.

Cheng-Zhong Su

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Posted 10/03/08 - 01:37 PM:	#63
Banno wrote: Perhaps. It's use in Australia is certainly more common, and creates less offense, than elsewhere. For a while I referred to myself as a "old bugger" on this very forum, which I thought might provide a certain self-deprecating tone. Apparently, from comments received, it created quite the opposite impression. I'm buggered if I know why. Don’t worry about it, I don’t mind too.

Cheng-Zhong Su

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Posted 10/03/08 - 02:00 PM:	#64
Banno wrote: But The subtlety of a simple word like "bugger" brings up my principle objection to formalized languages. How could something dreamed up by a bunch of folk at a committee meeting be more expressive and subtle than a language that has evolved over thousands of years of daily use by millions of individuals? You don’t expect it will happen overnight but in the long history it is the motivity of language development. What we can do is do it artificially and accelerate the changing speed. Every body know that with only two sounds (phonetic signal) one can express the universe very well. But the speed is slow. For instance we say ‘I’ correspondently the two sounds’ speaker may follow with ABBABABBA. Low expressing speed means low thinking speed, for each meaning is cohered with a sound. Thinking is a process of speaking in mind. We know Phoenician invented 22 consonant yet every body knows that with only consonant, no one can pronounce them properly? But when the Greek accepted these 22 consonants, they put some vowels in the alphabetic list. Then the number of different sounds increased several times. That is to say without vowel, Ma, Mi, Mu, Mai, Mo are but one sound as M while once you recognize the vowel is also information carrier, than Ma, Mi, Mu, Mai, Mo represent five different sounds. The result is the expressing speed and thinking speed of Greek should faster than Phoenician. I believe it also answer the question of why the Greek had such a great imagination.

Cheng-Zhong Su

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Posted 10/03/08 - 02:05 PM:	#65
ragus wrote: unenlightened wrote Completely? Maybe you've not been paying sufficient attention. Would you also assert this about the words that others say to you? Cheng-Zhong Su wrote Yesterday, he gave me a pen. The sentence expressed the past time twice. First ‘yesterday’ tell you it happened in the past, then the past tense ‘gave’ repeat it again. The double expression reflects the speaker suspecting his word. Suspecting his word? An alternative (and IMO more reasonable) understanding is that "gave" is a general indication of a past event and "yesterday" is more specific. Thus "gave" and "yesterday" are usefully informative. . But in the logic, they are not. They are but just double expression for the same meaning. My question is why there is some meanings you expressed twice while other meanings you only expressing one time? Is that a sort of prejudice?

unenlightened
ri t nd r tist

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Posted 10/03/08 - 08:36 PM:	#66
Cheng-Zhong Su wrote: Cheng-Zhong Su wrote: Yesterday, he gave me a pen. But in the logic, they are not[usefully informative]. They are but just double expression for the same meaning. My question is why there is some meanings you expressed twice while other meanings you only expressing one time? Is that a sort of prejudice? I might want to say "He gave me a pen." not remembering exactly when, or I might want to say it was yesterday. So to eliminate the redundancy would take a fairly radical reform. We could make all verbs present tense and add a word to indicate the past general or specific. "He give me a pen ago." or "he give me a pen yesterday." There are pidgin languages that use this kind of simplification I think. There is a certain value in redundancy though. ISBN numbers have a check digit at the end which is the last digit of the sum of the preceeding digits - this gives you a nine times out of ten chance of detecting a mistake in the number. So because accents vary and ears are falible (not to mention fingers), some redundancy in a language can be useful perhaps. But no one makes the rules for language, though many try, and if you want to eliminate redundancy from your language, no one can stop you, though they may stop listening.
The observer is the observed. J Krishnamurti "Philosophy, to the Philistine, is an evolutionary process, watched over by some sort of brisk dynamic Providence, and culminating in the supreme insight of modern thought." John Cowper Powys

Cheng-Zhong Su

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Posted 10/10/08 - 02:17 PM:	#67
Kelby wrote: Cheng-Zhong Su wrote: This example tells us that with more letters a language could transcend the barrier of a language with less, while a language with fewer letters hard to transcend the barrier of a language with more letters. If we use the life time as standard, then the speaker of language A need more than nine lives to understand the culture of language B. Cheng-Zhong Su This is assuming that the contents of language has a devastating effect on our capacity to reason and categorize. It assumes that "understanding" is dependent on words alone, and that the referential capacity of a single word is what defines our capacity to categorize in the world. Our brains help us categorize automatically without the use of words...and infants "understand" the world they come to live in regardless of the intrinsic referential capacity of a single word. Yes, 100 years ago, the Chinese people didn’t know any words of European, so they didn’t know how fast this civilization was going on even if they didn’t lack any intrinsic referential capacity.

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