grammar and punctuation are, IMO, artifacts of education and written language; spoken language has *no* punctuation and (I believe) no grammar.
You need to discern between two different ideas of "grammar":
(A) grammar as an artificial system for the description of language
(B) grammar as an intralinguistic ruleset that governs the well-formedness of statements.
Native speakers may not be aware of the grammar (A) of their language, but every native speaker is intuitively aware of grammar (B). It's internalized during early childhood in the speech acquisition phase. Even before Chomsky (at least since Ferdinand de Saussure), linguists were well aware that there is a complex system to how native speakers form their utterances.
Every linguistic utterance is structured according to some grammatical rules, be it from a native speaker or not. Try it: you can't, for example, shift words around arbitrarily in an English sentence without possibly losing or changing its meaning.
As far as the punctuation is concerned, you're right, but spoken language has intonation and stress instead. Usually you know when a spoken sentence is over.
Sure, they can identify when it sounds wrong. [...] But I believe that speech is independent of grammar and that grammar is a relatively modern invention.
Grammar doesn't only govern when an utterance sounds wrong, it also serves to build sentences that convey the intended meaning in interpersonal communication. Take word order in English sentences, for example. From a sentence such as
Joe kicks Bob
every English native speaker will know who's doing the kicking. This word order is quite strict, in a sentence such as
Bob kicks Joe
the meaning is entirely different. A feature such as the subject-verb-object (SVO) rule of word order is already a feature of grammar, specific to some languages. At least in English, this rule should be observed, and you can't randomly shift words around to, say, OVS without risking to give an entirely different meaning to the whole sentence. Every English speaker is intuitively aware of this. When word order isn't observed, the result will sometimes just sounds awkward, and sometimes the meaning will be entirely misunderstood.
Linguistics has no way to cope with things like tone, intensity, amplitude and so forth (except when they are phonemic as in tonal languages).
Of course it has! They're called prosodic features, such as stress and intonation. They are extremely important in linguistics, especially when it comes to more complex fields such as discourse analysis. But even at the most basic level, these have to be considered. In Russian, for example, these prosodic features are often the only way do discern whether an utterance is actually a question or a statement.
No, it wasn't indoor, it was an outhouse sauna in Russia. For the pedantic: not a sauna but a banya, but they're really the same.
I didn't jump in the lake, but I ran around in the snow instead, cold enough for me, the lake would probably have been warmer anyway. (I'm talking Centigrade, otherwise a 100 degree sauna would be pretty boring)
I don't think so. Worst I've ever done was going from a 100 degree (Centigrade) sauna to -40 degrees. It was tough, but doable. I don't think the extra twenty degrees or so will make that much of a difference.
Actually, I was quite astonished to see this on Slashdot, as I had lunch with the guy last Thursday where I work. He's nice in persion, but one of the secretaries at work said he stinks and should wash more often. I'm afraid I didn't notice it quite as badly...
He has an interesting way of getting along financially. Basically, he's living off an exclusive contract with the German TV station RTL where he's featured every now and then in shows. He also gives lectures on mathematical topics; RTL makes him charge a very steep EUR 2500 per lecture (about $3000). I think originally he studied psychology; he's still running the psychiatrist's practice in Cologne that he startet off with.
We were joking about him tackling the Millenium Problems now; I wonder if he's serious about that... but then, there's more to it than calculating in your head really fast.
I study computer science at the university level, by the by.
I guess it's easier in computer science because there's a lot of geeks contributing and possibly less dispute on the subject. The probability of someone with an agenda murking up an article on the halting problem is significantly lower than with an article on Islam. In history or the social sciences I wouldn't recommend citing it in a research paper, even with timestamps.
Linux has editors (Linus) and sub-editors (component maintainers) to regulate what actually gets in and make sure it's good.
Linux also has a very obvious way of finding out if it's good. If it runs, it's good. You don't have that with an encyclopaedia, all you can do is trust it.
I don't think you can make a general statement about this. It all depends on where you live and what your occupation is. In West Ukraine, the general status of Russian is rather low. In the East, there's less status distinction on the basis of language. If you come to Ukraine as a foreigner, nobody really expects you to know Ukrainian, and in general Ukrainian native speakers will be extremely pleased and friendly if you can speak a couple of sentences in Ukrainian as well.
In administrative or technical professions, I guess there's little distinction either, partly because everybody there is perfectly bilingual anyway; due to the Soviet past, Russian is still the language of science.
The general official line is to replace Russian with English in the long run as the first foreign language and strengthen the position of Ukrainian, against Russian. In most schools, the amount of Russian has dropped significantly, and Ukrainian and English are compulsory now. For Russian native speakers, this is bad, of course, as their children have to learn two languages in school (Ukrainian and English) and so on. Similar processes are going on in most other former Soviet republics. The effects will only be felt in ten or twenty years, however.
But then, most Slavonic languages are mutually intelligible to this extent... I mean, Russian is the only one I've learned, and I do understand Ukrainian, when people speak clearly and slowly, at least with speakers from the East (and it's a beautiful language, by the way). But when I was in Poland and Slovakia, I've managed to understand people, too, as long as they took the time and I took a little bother.
I guess it's cool to have languages grouped so closely together, you can get yourself understood in a much wider area of countries... But they're still separate languages.
Can't really confirm that. I guess if you want to travel Eastern Europe, it's a good idea to know both of them, maybe a little Russian, too, even if that's even less liked.
It depends on how old people are, I guess, the younger population speaks English better than German, while older people are better in German.
Learn Russian. People who live on Ukraine typically speak Russian or Polish better than Ukrainian.
This is not quite right. It depends on where you are and whom you hang around with, and there is a large Russian-language minority, but still Ukrainian is the majority language in Ukraine. And you're completely wrong about the Polish; even in the West Ukraine, the dialects of Ukrainian are not mutually intelligible with Polish at all, even though they share some features.
And most of Ukrainian programmers know Russian. Because there are a lot more technical literature published in Russian than in the Ukrainian.
That's true. Which is why I'd agree with you and recommend learning Russian; most Ukrainians tend to speak it, even if many of them don't particularly love it, and generally Russian is a much more useful language in the world than Ukrainian, because you can use it in Russia, too.
Ukrainian language is more or less invention of nationalists politics from West Ukraine.
This, again, is completely wrong. In debunking Ukrainian nationalism as a whole, you're spreading another nationalist myth, from Russia this time. (Since I'm neither Ukrainian nor Russian, I think I can say this.)
Ukrainian is an East Slavic language of its own. Dialects from East Ukraine are mutually intelligible with Russian to some extent. I've learned Russian as a foreign language (I'm German), and when I listen to Ukrainian speakers from East Ukraine, I understand about a third.
However, literary Ukrainian is far less close to Russian, and I don't understand it as easily. The literary language is also quite old; the first grammar of Ukrainian was published well in the 1830s (about twenty years after the first modern grammar of Russian), and the center of Ukrainian nationalism in the early 19th century was Kharkiv (or Kharkov in Russian), not the Polish-influenced West.
And most educated people are located in the East part (Kharkov region) where Russian was always native language.
Wrong again; the center of education is probably the capital, Kyiv (Kiev in Russian), which is in an Ukrainian-speaking region, and Lviv in the far west has an extremely good university. Even in the East, Russian isn't and wasn't "always" native language everywhere; my girlfriend is from Dnepopetrovsk, which is about as far east as it gets, and she's a native speaker of Ukrainian.
One thing that completly eludes me however is where he got the Poles from?
Large parts of what is Western Ukraine today used to belong to Poland before WWII. Ukrainian as a language is also somewhat between Russian and Polish. The dialects are closer to Polish in Western Ukraine. My girlfriend comes from Eastern Ukraine near Dnepopetrovsk, and when she speaks Ukrainian, I understand her pretty well (I know some Russian). People from the western regions such as Lviv I usually don't understand at all.
Nach jeder Auslenkung ziehen die Federn den Spiegel so schnell in seine Ausgangslage zurück, dass er sich mehrere tausend Mal pro Sekunde verkippen lässt.
It's been many years since I studied German, but that reads to me: the mirror moves "more than a thousand times per second".
It means "several thousand times per second" (I'm German). This is necessary if you want decent refresh rates. The mirror has to be tilted once for every scanline; if you want 70 fps at 240 lines of vertical resolution, that means it will have to be tilted about 16,800 times per second. In theory, this would lead to an buzz at the upper end of the audible spectrum. TV sets usually emit noise at about 15 kHz, which is terribly annoying.
Given how small the amplitude actually is (and it has to be for this kind of motion!), however, I doubt you would hear a lot as long as the mechanical parts are properly designed and it's in any kind of casing.
That still leaves the fascists and the socialists and the international corps to work to screw it up, unfortunately.
That's an amazing group of people you're lumping together. Next to the only thing missing is intelligent psychic snails from the star system of Epsilon Eridani.
Well, their president is a socialist, but he was elected democratically, so whatever they get, they get what they chose, and it's not up to you to complain about it.
Slashdot Mirror
- (A) grammar as an artificial system for the description of language
- (B) grammar as an intralinguistic ruleset that governs the well-formedness of statements.
Native speakers may not be aware of the grammar (A) of their language, but every native speaker is intuitively aware of grammar (B). It's internalized during early childhood in the speech acquisition phase. Even before Chomsky (at least since Ferdinand de Saussure), linguists were well aware that there is a complex system to how native speakers form their utterances.Every linguistic utterance is structured according to some grammatical rules, be it from a native speaker or not. Try it: you can't, for example, shift words around arbitrarily in an English sentence without possibly losing or changing its meaning.
As far as the punctuation is concerned, you're right, but spoken language has intonation and stress instead. Usually you know when a spoken sentence is over.
CIA employees are federal employees, too.
Talk about recursion! Nice way to get everybody on Earth a secure job, though ;)
No, it wasn't indoor, it was an outhouse sauna in Russia. For the pedantic: not a sauna but a banya, but they're really the same.
I didn't jump in the lake, but I ran around in the snow instead, cold enough for me, the lake would probably have been warmer anyway. (I'm talking Centigrade, otherwise a 100 degree sauna would be pretty boring)
Why not use Qt/Aqua on MacOS X instead of the incredibly clumsy X11 interface, then?
Smart, hot, sane. Pick any two ;)
He has an interesting way of getting along financially. Basically, he's living off an exclusive contract with the German TV station RTL where he's featured every now and then in shows. He also gives lectures on mathematical topics; RTL makes him charge a very steep EUR 2500 per lecture (about $3000). I think originally he studied psychology; he's still running the psychiatrist's practice in Cologne that he startet off with.
We were joking about him tackling the Millenium Problems now; I wonder if he's serious about that... but then, there's more to it than calculating in your head really fast.
Brought to you in plain text for any spambot to pick up. ;)
With code, you have one ("does it work? does it crash?"), which is why Open Source works.
With encyclopaedias, you don't, so the trend is not necessarily towards improvement.
I don't think you can make a general statement about this. It all depends on where you live and what your occupation is. In West Ukraine, the general status of Russian is rather low. In the East, there's less status distinction on the basis of language. If you come to Ukraine as a foreigner, nobody really expects you to know Ukrainian, and in general Ukrainian native speakers will be extremely pleased and friendly if you can speak a couple of sentences in Ukrainian as well.
In administrative or technical professions, I guess there's little distinction either, partly because everybody there is perfectly bilingual anyway; due to the Soviet past, Russian is still the language of science.
The general official line is to replace Russian with English in the long run as the first foreign language and strengthen the position of Ukrainian, against Russian. In most schools, the amount of Russian has dropped significantly, and Ukrainian and English are compulsory now. For Russian native speakers, this is bad, of course, as their children have to learn two languages in school (Ukrainian and English) and so on. Similar processes are going on in most other former Soviet republics. The effects will only be felt in ten or twenty years, however.
But then, most Slavonic languages are mutually intelligible to this extent... I mean, Russian is the only one I've learned, and I do understand Ukrainian, when people speak clearly and slowly, at least with speakers from the East (and it's a beautiful language, by the way). But when I was in Poland and Slovakia, I've managed to understand people, too, as long as they took the time and I took a little bother.
I guess it's cool to have languages grouped so closely together, you can get yourself understood in a much wider area of countries... But they're still separate languages.
Can't really confirm that. I guess if you want to travel Eastern Europe, it's a good idea to know both of them, maybe a little Russian, too, even if that's even less liked.
It depends on how old people are, I guess, the younger population speaks English better than German, while older people are better in German.
Ukrainian is an East Slavic language of its own. Dialects from East Ukraine are mutually intelligible with Russian to some extent. I've learned Russian as a foreign language (I'm German), and when I listen to Ukrainian speakers from East Ukraine, I understand about a third.
However, literary Ukrainian is far less close to Russian, and I don't understand it as easily. The literary language is also quite old; the first grammar of Ukrainian was published well in the 1830s (about twenty years after the first modern grammar of Russian), and the center of Ukrainian nationalism in the early 19th century was Kharkiv (or Kharkov in Russian), not the Polish-influenced West.Wrong again; the center of education is probably the capital, Kyiv (Kiev in Russian), which is in an Ukrainian-speaking region, and Lviv in the far west has an extremely good university. Even in the East, Russian isn't and wasn't "always" native language everywhere; my girlfriend is from Dnepopetrovsk, which is about as far east as it gets, and she's a native speaker of Ukrainian.
Given how small the amplitude actually is (and it has to be for this kind of motion!), however, I doubt you would hear a lot as long as the mechanical parts are properly designed and it's in any kind of casing.
It's the first FPS I've ever played, and the download is a whopping 19 kilobytes
Well, their president is a socialist, but he was elected democratically, so whatever they get, they get what they chose, and it's not up to you to complain about it.