JCL isn't a very good comparison; that would be like studying Sanskrit to make sense of English. For programming languages we use today, I would suggest something more along the lines of either Algol or IA-32 assembler. Incidentally, I was required to take a course on IA-32 and MIPS in second year.
Latin is extremely useful in understanding the origins of unfamiliar words. Over half of the English dictionary is derived from it; many of these are constructs that can be easily parsed with a small Latin dictionary and a comparatively compact set of Latin inflection rules. Of course, not all areas of expertise/interest involve a very large vocabulary, but it's still the case that a strong grasp of Latin and Greek is deeply beneficial to understanding English. This far outweighs the value of Pig Latin, which only has effectiveness as a method of encryption for about five minutes.
If you take the stance that learning things is an expensive, undesirable activity that can only be rationed for tasks directly relevant to... whatever it us you consider the goal of your life, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye, anyway. You probably won't get anything out of continuing this conversation.
"Agenda" in English comes from the feminine agenda and is already a correct singular term. If anything, the plural would be agendae. I'm not sure if that error means anything to either of our points, but I find it modestly ironic.
I never meant to pick on any one example in particular; the plurality of "data" is merely an instance of an instance of a set of reminders. Obviously, if "data" spends the rest of time used as a mass noun, it's not the end of the world. The example was simply relevant at the time and used to illustrate a point about the decay of such reminders. Latin plurals are not innately superior in any way; merely an additional token.
As for the relationship between the loss of reminders and the loss of civilization: it's symbolic. The reminders were added to English out of respect for the people who led the way to creating civilization; losing them indicates diminished respect/recognition/remembrance. One at a time, slowly, yes; but eventually.
The association is symbolic. For many hundreds of years, European scholars who were well-studied in matters of philosophy and literature originating in the Classical Mediterranean brought vocabulary from Latin and (usually Latinized) Greek for the purpose of enriching their own languages (especially Germanic languages where there was little influence.) Being experienced in dealing with Latin, as much academic exchange was previously conducted in it, they found that attempting to construct new inflexions for the other languages (such as, perhaps, "datums" or "spectrums") felt cumbersome and unnatural, so the original forms were preserved, which is not much of a challenge in Ecclesiastical Latin as most of the case endings had already vanished.
In essence, then, maintaining the usage and meaning of old language is a tradition, one that pays respect to the people who used the language in that fashion previously, and in particular the originators of the usage. When such stylings are no longer maintained and fall into disuse naturally, that is the inevitable, natural death of the tradition, and hence the custom falls out of cultural memory; conversely, when they are actively rejected in full knowledge of their origin and purpose, that is a statement that the reasons for preserving them are not worth remembering.
Recent years have seen a substantial increase in discarded traditions. Many of these were harmful and stupid (such as traditional gender roles) and many of them have been replaced with things that are harmful and stupid (such as current gender politics.) However, there are many others that have been victims of other changes: the average educated person's understanding of ancient history and culture (for one particularly relevant example) has decreased sharply, in part because of the perception that ancient historians are boring people who live in an unwieldy world of complicated languages and painful, inefficient memorization techniques. This cultural barrier has given Classical studies the highest attrition rate of all majors at most English-speaking universities.
As a result of the lack of understanding of the past, it has become increasingly common for students to believe that it has little or no relevance without having given it proper due. With the vast reach afforded to us by technology, and the superficially different challenges we face, we now carry a generally elitist attitude toward the past. We forget that they, too, were human, and had brilliant engineers who invented clockwork-driven orreries, basic steam engines, and questioned how their minds worked (with some fairly poignant questions that we still don't have good answers for.) By all means, they deserve respect for their achievements and for what they gave us. What we've achieved technologically and socially is arguably much more impressive, but that doesn't diminish the magnitude of those older accomplishments.
When tiny little bits of their impact on our culture vanish out of apathy or negligence, it's frustrating, because it means that we're one tiny little step closer to completely forgetting where we came from. A few decades ago this was no big deal, but with the explosion of change, we're looking at total cultural amnesia. That's eventually going to mean re-learning a lot of lessons, though it's hard to say when. In some regards, we're already sliding back into the decay of the Roman Empire: we mask the trite empire-building tendencies of our politicians under the guise of radical political motivations, but they are still just as self-serving and disinterested in protecting the integrity of their electorates as the last Byzantine kings. And just like the Library of Alexandria, our universities look like they will limp along for a few extra generations until (comparatively) nouveau riche Christian mobs burn them down for heresy and witchcraft.
And so, as flimsy as a premise as that may seem, it's hard for me not to see resistance to using "data" as a plural word as symbolic of a greater process toward decay.
Let me know if you still need any more connexions filled in.
Those sorts of culture wars are pretty much endless. Also of note is the eternal war on how to pronounce the humble char. (charcoal? character? charity? saccharine?) I think Bjarne Stroustrup encourages people to just enjoy the regional variations, as one does with accents.
I'm pretty sure if it's the contents of the articles that use blog templates with which you're pleased, then you can call it a blog.:) I have no idea what's wrong with that copy of Bodoni; you'd think a font would be more carefully ironed out than that. Fortunately, there are at least a dozen digital renditions to choose from, so it's not even really that big a deal. (And 'node' is the typical term.)
I think you'll have to elaborate more on your point of contention before I can provide you with a meaningful response. The second paragraph is bemoaning the situation described in the first, and selectively quoting those two sentences doesn't make that less true.
This is entirely true; I think I was just a little bit bitter yesterday; I may've muddled up your comment with someone else's and spilled a bit of vitriol in the process. One of the most beautiful things about language is that it keeps evolving, whether we like it or not. A language that truly stops evolving is one that is no longer the carrier of new ideas. (Although we seem to be reinventing the wheel an awful lot these days.)
Observe the typo-infused signature. Observe the ridiculous profile. Observe that the user hasn't posted since 2008. Observe that you have been trolled furiously.
I'm sorry, someone else already claimed the correct answer to the first part of the question, which was "reduction." We remind you that quiz show hosts rarely have worthwhile senses of humour, and encourage you to try your best at the second part.
My point was that the passive voice is much more awkward to form in English than Latin, yet we do it anyway, and exhaustively in scientific work. While it's true the subject is unimportant, the habit is at least partially influenced by the convenience of doing so in Latin.
English has always been extremely irregular. Pronunciation is scarcely uniform, and attempts at spelling reform almost always ruin the regularity of the language rather than restore it. And the parts of it that are regular are really ugly: "-ing" for the progressive aspect; possessives and plurals are too similar.
There's a certain point, I think, when there's no point in trying to save a burning ship.
Bingo. The terms come from smelting, where most ores came in oxides, and had to be reduced to their oxygenless forms. Most people start glazing over when you explain what they actually mean.
The French made a big deal of trying to be the linguistic and cultural basis for everything in the eighteen hundreds, it's true, but to be honest the English and Germans, who made rather substantial contributions to Chemistry and Physics during that period, simply wouldn't've stood for it.
During the 19th century, most scientific discourse in the Western world was conducted in Latin. It's less like we've imported Latin loanwords and more like we've stapled large amounts of English into Latin text. Many other characteristics of scientific writing are also borrowed (or meant to accommodate) quirks of Latin; we almost exhaustively use the passive voice, for example, because there's no way to avoid giving a direct subject in English. (This may be bogus.)
The reason English borrows and preserves so many Latin plurals (and it's just the plurals! You don't have to worry about genitives or datives or anything!) is out of reverence to the original source language. Latin's contribution as a carrier of communications in the arts and sciences is incalculably vast, and by choosing to preserve parts of its traditions in their language, English scholars during the Renaissance were deliberately helping to preserve its memory. At the time, of course, it was in part just a case of everyone's favourite mega-creole being a linguistic pickpocket to fill in its own deficiencies, but the respect that Latin has commended since its official death some time in the fifth century is still awe-inspiring.
By the way, plurals in English have never been all that consistent. Originally formations like "man" to "men" were much more common. In fact, viewed in the long history of things, the -(e)s formation only gained predominance more recently. Most European languages have two or more ways to form plurals based on the noun's case, just like (and often derived from) Latin, and English is peculiar in how regularised it is. You can choose to think of this as "it could've been worse" if you wish, but on the flip side it makes poetry much more difficult than in any other language.
If you're still really so upset about irregularities in language, though, you can always try Lojban or Esperanto.
Latin literacy was widespread in most English-speaking universities until the early 1980s, both in the sciences and the arts. As I showed in another response to my post, both Science and Nature magazines have about three times as much usage of data in the plural than in the singular. "Over time" in this case is basically the last ten years. In the mid-nineties, no one with a university background would have challenged the use of "data" as a plural term and not expect to get corrected. Much further back, and you would probably be ostracized.
Honestly, I'm not surprised, just disappointed at how completely people have stopped caring. The unbridled presentism that pervades in technology communities these days is desiccating culture at a furious pace. Just because we think about the world around us more logically than our ancestors did doesn't mean all of their accomplishments and creations should be thrown away.
Okay. The oil companies made it all up to protect their profit margins, and Due Process is too slow to catch the conspiracy before they do major social and political damage. The world is going to hell, and the Neoconservative movement is mostly responsible. Indirectly responsible parties include the New Left, for being reactionary and obfuscating the issue, the Old Left, for prompting the creation of the the Neoconservatives, and the Old Right, for prompting the creation of the New Left. Humans will never learn the lesson that radicalism is the enemy of progress and civilization as long as there are short-term benefits to being a radical, and consequentially, we will never have flying cars, lunar colonies, interstellar travel, wealthy African nations, or a widely-distributed cure for AIDS or cancer. And we'll all be cooked and flooded to death just after we stop playing Chicken Little every time there's a warm winter or cold summer.
Well, statistically, we may be. English was a very poor language with very weak descriptive power until the Renaissance imported huge amounts of Latin and Greek vocabulary. More still comes from French loanwords.
I should stress that only in the past forty or fifty years have reasonably intelligent people been so uneducated in the Classics that they bitch about this kind of thing on a regular basis. As a speaker of English, you'll just have to learn to put up with it.
Predominant is undeniable, though. Try running 'site:nature.com "data was"' vs. 'site:nature.com "data were"' through Google Fight. 38000 for "were", 6060 for "was". Sciencemag.org is about the same, giving 1700 for "was" and 9630 for "were". Typically, the stodgier the institution, the more rigourous they are about preserving the older convention.
I'm not bucking a trend here—hundreds of thousands of scientists use it this way every day and are convinced the rest of the world is wrong. Both are trends. Both must be lived with.
Slashdot Mirror
JCL isn't a very good comparison; that would be like studying Sanskrit to make sense of English. For programming languages we use today, I would suggest something more along the lines of either Algol or IA-32 assembler. Incidentally, I was required to take a course on IA-32 and MIPS in second year.
Latin is extremely useful in understanding the origins of unfamiliar words. Over half of the English dictionary is derived from it; many of these are constructs that can be easily parsed with a small Latin dictionary and a comparatively compact set of Latin inflection rules. Of course, not all areas of expertise/interest involve a very large vocabulary, but it's still the case that a strong grasp of Latin and Greek is deeply beneficial to understanding English. This far outweighs the value of Pig Latin, which only has effectiveness as a method of encryption for about five minutes.
If you take the stance that learning things is an expensive, undesirable activity that can only be rationed for tasks directly relevant to... whatever it us you consider the goal of your life, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye, anyway. You probably won't get anything out of continuing this conversation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)
I recommend reading my exchange with Kavafy (starting in this comment.)
I think we'll leave things at that.
"Agenda" in English comes from the feminine agenda and is already a correct singular term. If anything, the plural would be agendae. I'm not sure if that error means anything to either of our points, but I find it modestly ironic.
I never meant to pick on any one example in particular; the plurality of "data" is merely an instance of an instance of a set of reminders. Obviously, if "data" spends the rest of time used as a mass noun, it's not the end of the world. The example was simply relevant at the time and used to illustrate a point about the decay of such reminders. Latin plurals are not innately superior in any way; merely an additional token.
As for the relationship between the loss of reminders and the loss of civilization: it's symbolic. The reminders were added to English out of respect for the people who led the way to creating civilization; losing them indicates diminished respect/recognition/remembrance. One at a time, slowly, yes; but eventually.
The association is symbolic. For many hundreds of years, European scholars who were well-studied in matters of philosophy and literature originating in the Classical Mediterranean brought vocabulary from Latin and (usually Latinized) Greek for the purpose of enriching their own languages (especially Germanic languages where there was little influence.) Being experienced in dealing with Latin, as much academic exchange was previously conducted in it, they found that attempting to construct new inflexions for the other languages (such as, perhaps, "datums" or "spectrums") felt cumbersome and unnatural, so the original forms were preserved, which is not much of a challenge in Ecclesiastical Latin as most of the case endings had already vanished.
In essence, then, maintaining the usage and meaning of old language is a tradition, one that pays respect to the people who used the language in that fashion previously, and in particular the originators of the usage. When such stylings are no longer maintained and fall into disuse naturally, that is the inevitable, natural death of the tradition, and hence the custom falls out of cultural memory; conversely, when they are actively rejected in full knowledge of their origin and purpose, that is a statement that the reasons for preserving them are not worth remembering.
Recent years have seen a substantial increase in discarded traditions. Many of these were harmful and stupid (such as traditional gender roles) and many of them have been replaced with things that are harmful and stupid (such as current gender politics.) However, there are many others that have been victims of other changes: the average educated person's understanding of ancient history and culture (for one particularly relevant example) has decreased sharply, in part because of the perception that ancient historians are boring people who live in an unwieldy world of complicated languages and painful, inefficient memorization techniques. This cultural barrier has given Classical studies the highest attrition rate of all majors at most English-speaking universities.
As a result of the lack of understanding of the past, it has become increasingly common for students to believe that it has little or no relevance without having given it proper due. With the vast reach afforded to us by technology, and the superficially different challenges we face, we now carry a generally elitist attitude toward the past. We forget that they, too, were human, and had brilliant engineers who invented clockwork-driven orreries, basic steam engines, and questioned how their minds worked (with some fairly poignant questions that we still don't have good answers for.) By all means, they deserve respect for their achievements and for what they gave us. What we've achieved technologically and socially is arguably much more impressive, but that doesn't diminish the magnitude of those older accomplishments.
When tiny little bits of their impact on our culture vanish out of apathy or negligence, it's frustrating, because it means that we're one tiny little step closer to completely forgetting where we came from. A few decades ago this was no big deal, but with the explosion of change, we're looking at total cultural amnesia. That's eventually going to mean re-learning a lot of lessons, though it's hard to say when. In some regards, we're already sliding back into the decay of the Roman Empire: we mask the trite empire-building tendencies of our politicians under the guise of radical political motivations, but they are still just as self-serving and disinterested in protecting the integrity of their electorates as the last Byzantine kings. And just like the Library of Alexandria, our universities look like they will limp along for a few extra generations until (comparatively) nouveau riche Christian mobs burn them down for heresy and witchcraft.
And so, as flimsy as a premise as that may seem, it's hard for me not to see resistance to using "data" as a plural word as symbolic of a greater process toward decay.
Let me know if you still need any more connexions filled in.
Those sorts of culture wars are pretty much endless. Also of note is the eternal war on how to pronounce the humble char. (charcoal? character? charity? saccharine?) I think Bjarne Stroustrup encourages people to just enjoy the regional variations, as one does with accents.
I'm pretty sure if it's the contents of the articles that use blog templates with which you're pleased, then you can call it a blog. :) I have no idea what's wrong with that copy of Bodoni; you'd think a font would be more carefully ironed out than that. Fortunately, there are at least a dozen digital renditions to choose from, so it's not even really that big a deal. (And 'node' is the typical term.)
I think you'll have to elaborate more on your point of contention before I can provide you with a meaningful response. The second paragraph is bemoaning the situation described in the first, and selectively quoting those two sentences doesn't make that less true.
This is entirely true; I think I was just a little bit bitter yesterday; I may've muddled up your comment with someone else's and spilled a bit of vitriol in the process. One of the most beautiful things about language is that it keeps evolving, whether we like it or not. A language that truly stops evolving is one that is no longer the carrier of new ideas. (Although we seem to be reinventing the wheel an awful lot these days.)
Observe the typo-infused signature. Observe the ridiculous profile. Observe that the user hasn't posted since 2008. Observe that you have been trolled furiously.
Only on Slashdot.
...seriously, I've tried it on 4chan and they totally miss it.
I'm sorry, someone else already claimed the correct answer to the first part of the question, which was "reduction." We remind you that quiz show hosts rarely have worthwhile senses of humour, and encourage you to try your best at the second part.
My point was that the passive voice is much more awkward to form in English than Latin, yet we do it anyway, and exhaustively in scientific work. While it's true the subject is unimportant, the habit is at least partially influenced by the convenience of doing so in Latin.
English has always been extremely irregular. Pronunciation is scarcely uniform, and attempts at spelling reform almost always ruin the regularity of the language rather than restore it. And the parts of it that are regular are really ugly: "-ing" for the progressive aspect; possessives and plurals are too similar.
There's a certain point, I think, when there's no point in trying to save a burning ship.
Bingo. The terms come from smelting, where most ores came in oxides, and had to be reduced to their oxygenless forms. Most people start glazing over when you explain what they actually mean.
Keep trying! You're only one answer away from an experience your nostrils will never forget!
I'm sorry, that's incorrect! You'll have to try harder if you want a whiff of Slashdot history!
Trivia time for anyone who's never taken organic chemistry: What's the opposite of oxidation and why do they have such obscure names?
First correct answer wins a free olfactory impression of CmdrTaco's old foof chair.
Yeah; who ever benefited from understanding the reason for anything?
The French made a big deal of trying to be the linguistic and cultural basis for everything in the eighteen hundreds, it's true, but to be honest the English and Germans, who made rather substantial contributions to Chemistry and Physics during that period, simply wouldn't've stood for it.
During the 19th century, most scientific discourse in the Western world was conducted in Latin. It's less like we've imported Latin loanwords and more like we've stapled large amounts of English into Latin text. Many other characteristics of scientific writing are also borrowed (or meant to accommodate) quirks of Latin; we almost exhaustively use the passive voice, for example, because there's no way to avoid giving a direct subject in English. (This may be bogus.)
The reason English borrows and preserves so many Latin plurals (and it's just the plurals! You don't have to worry about genitives or datives or anything!) is out of reverence to the original source language. Latin's contribution as a carrier of communications in the arts and sciences is incalculably vast, and by choosing to preserve parts of its traditions in their language, English scholars during the Renaissance were deliberately helping to preserve its memory. At the time, of course, it was in part just a case of everyone's favourite mega-creole being a linguistic pickpocket to fill in its own deficiencies, but the respect that Latin has commended since its official death some time in the fifth century is still awe-inspiring.
By the way, plurals in English have never been all that consistent. Originally formations like "man" to "men" were much more common. In fact, viewed in the long history of things, the -(e)s formation only gained predominance more recently. Most European languages have two or more ways to form plurals based on the noun's case, just like (and often derived from) Latin, and English is peculiar in how regularised it is. You can choose to think of this as "it could've been worse" if you wish, but on the flip side it makes poetry much more difficult than in any other language.
If you're still really so upset about irregularities in language, though, you can always try Lojban or Esperanto.
Latin literacy was widespread in most English-speaking universities until the early 1980s, both in the sciences and the arts. As I showed in another response to my post, both Science and Nature magazines have about three times as much usage of data in the plural than in the singular. "Over time" in this case is basically the last ten years. In the mid-nineties, no one with a university background would have challenged the use of "data" as a plural term and not expect to get corrected. Much further back, and you would probably be ostracized.
Honestly, I'm not surprised, just disappointed at how completely people have stopped caring. The unbridled presentism that pervades in technology communities these days is desiccating culture at a furious pace. Just because we think about the world around us more logically than our ancestors did doesn't mean all of their accomplishments and creations should be thrown away.
Okay. The oil companies made it all up to protect their profit margins, and Due Process is too slow to catch the conspiracy before they do major social and political damage. The world is going to hell, and the Neoconservative movement is mostly responsible. Indirectly responsible parties include the New Left, for being reactionary and obfuscating the issue, the Old Left, for prompting the creation of the the Neoconservatives, and the Old Right, for prompting the creation of the New Left. Humans will never learn the lesson that radicalism is the enemy of progress and civilization as long as there are short-term benefits to being a radical, and consequentially, we will never have flying cars, lunar colonies, interstellar travel, wealthy African nations, or a widely-distributed cure for AIDS or cancer. And we'll all be cooked and flooded to death just after we stop playing Chicken Little every time there's a warm winter or cold summer.
Is that sufficiently straight?
Well, statistically, we may be. English was a very poor language with very weak descriptive power until the Renaissance imported huge amounts of Latin and Greek vocabulary. More still comes from French loanwords.
I should stress that only in the past forty or fifty years have reasonably intelligent people been so uneducated in the Classics that they bitch about this kind of thing on a regular basis. As a speaker of English, you'll just have to learn to put up with it.
Predominant is undeniable, though. Try running 'site:nature.com "data was"' vs. 'site:nature.com "data were"' through Google Fight. 38000 for "were", 6060 for "was". Sciencemag.org is about the same, giving 1700 for "was" and 9630 for "were". Typically, the stodgier the institution, the more rigourous they are about preserving the older convention.
I'm not bucking a trend here—hundreds of thousands of scientists use it this way every day and are convinced the rest of the world is wrong. Both are trends. Both must be lived with.