There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible,
Those are modern languages, which are a whole different kettle of fish. I can't speak to those particular ones (I haven't looked into them much). However, many countries (or even country-aspirant areas) have elevated their local dialects to "languages" for reasons of self-identity rather than logic. The linguistic definition of a separate languages is that they are mutually-unintelligible, and if linguistics is unimpeded by nationalism, (as it mostly is with ancient reconstructed languages like "Old English"), then that's the way it works. Reconstructed languages are by definition not mutually-intelligible with other languages.
"Old English" and "Old Norse" are reconstructed language names. So by definition, if they exist, they are mutually unintelligible. If two people are speaking the precursors to those two languages, but can understand each other, then they are both, by definition, speaking different dialects of Proto-Germanic. This is what the words "dialect" and "language" mean in linguistics.
So to say that English and Danes living in 10th century English had mutually-intelligible speech is equivalent to saying that "Old English" and "Old Norse" were not separate languages yet by the 10th Century (and probably *all* West and North Germanic speakers could understand each other still). I cannot find any reference online that makes that claim. It is simply not mainstream.
Let's take this further. "Old High German" is said to have been an extant language from 700 to 1050 AD. But Old German and Old English are closer related (they are both West Germanic), so if West Germanics could still understand North Germanics, then they could certainly still understand each other. So Old German couldn't have existed yet either.
There is significant evidence [h-net.org] that Old English and Old Norse were to a certain extent mutually intelligible.
The link is interesting, but that's not the mainstream linguistic opinion. If the two were mutually-intelligible, then they shouldn't exist yet at all. They are made up terms defining supposedly mutually-unintelligible languages. IOW: this was an argument that those two languages didn't exist yet, and they were speaking different dialects of "Proto-Germanic". It is arguing that the language families of West Germanic and North Germanic had not yet split into separate languages.
In fact, the positions of most mainline churches is precisely this position you insist is an insignificant minority. And even if this is a "minority", so what? Truth isn't something that is up for a vote, and any Atheist will tell you the same. You don't get to define away the religious beliefs of 21 million Americans because that isn't a majority.
Evangelicals and Atheists are in some kind of joint conspiracy to define "the one True Christianity" in a way that is at odds with science (aka: logic). It perhaps helps both their purposes, but its a lie.
An easier way to use the moon is by measuring it's position relative to the stars. Then you don't have to wait for a particular phase. In fact, that's the method that was in competition with Harrison
Not just competition. The people in charge of the prize always intended to give it out to someone using some variation of this method. That's why they had so much trouble wrapping their minds around the concept that the problem had been "solved" with clocks. To them, that was at best cheating, and more accurately not solving the exact problem they were thinking of.
Their version of it is. Considering The Bible is actually self-contradictory in places if you take it literally, you don't need to wait for science to do that though.
My whole point is that you *can't* minimize it. Its there in full force, no matter what you do. So if you don't think about it and work with it, you are just asking for trouble. Like Lucas making a buffoonish character with a made up language that sounded to a lot of ears Afro-Caribbean. He likely got into trouble here precisely because he thought making up a language somehow completely immunized him against people seeing cultural context (or it creeping into his fake language). It doesn't.
...oh. But reading through that thread, there were some English in the show speaking Old English.
I'm with you on your main point too. There's just no comparison between some made up noise and a real organic human language.
It kind of reminds me of the movie Congo. I remember seeing breathless articles interviewing a guy about how he created the way guys in gorilla suits pretended to get angry and attack people. It looked nothing like actual angry gorillas, which we aren't exactly bereft of data on. Once the movie actually came out, movie-goers and reviewers were far less impressed with it than the journalists were. It got 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the fake gorillas feature prominently in most negative reviews.
don't know enough about Scandinavian languages to know if they're speaking an old Scandinavian dialectic.
I haven't seen the show, but the most historically sensible thing for Vikings to be speaking would be Old Norse. According to some folks on Reddit, that is in fact what they are speaking.
Its not very closely related to English, outside of the fact that they are both Germanic, and their common ancestor language was only 700 years or so in the past at that point.
Chosing a language always sets a context, and if you want to control the context, you can't chose languages at will.
But this already happens anyway. Ever notice how the imperials in Star Wars tend to speak British English? Dialects are used to indicate social differences in English Language SF/Fantasy movies and shows all the time. Its done with the apparent race of actors as well. Even if all your actors for all the races in your shows are the same (usually white), that's a statement with some implied context. If the races of the actors are mixed seemingly randomly with the "races" in the source work, that's a statement with some implied context too. You simply cannot get away from it.
I see no problem with extending this to entire human languages, as long as the languages are properly used (the words actually say what they purport to say, or something sensible for the context if subtitles aren't used).
Not a single reublican voted for it. It was passed by a legislative trick called reconsiliation that can't be filibustered
I love how this ignores that those same Republicans, who were in the minority, shamelessly used every senate "trick" in the book to stop passage. They fail due to another trick, and suddenly they're the aggrieved party? Somebody needs to grow up.
The image I will always remember is Senator Byrd, being wheeled in from his deathbed to break yet another filibuster vote that the Republicans knew they didn't have the votes to sustain. He was saying "Shame! Shame!" as the Republicans in the Senate were cynically clapping for him like they cared about his health, when they were the ones endangering it.
If Republicans didn't like that "tricks" were used in the process to pass Obamacare, then they shouldn't have used them.
You must have missed Obama going out of his way to refuse to negotiate with the Republicans over the last government shutdown.
And why should he? The "government shutdown" is Congress refusing to pay for bills Congress ran up. What possible benefit to the POTUS is there in playing with them on this? If they were offering something the Democrats might like in exchange it might be different. But sticking a gun to your own head and demanding my car keys isn't going to get you a "negotiation".
His replacement might be worse and the House of Representatives may get even less done.
The flip side is that far-right Republican in that job might actually feel secure enough to make deals and actually get laws passed. Plus, they are getting so little done now that there honestly isn't that much worse to get. The nice thing about being in the gutter is that there's nowhere to go but up.
I was going to disagree with you here. However, I just heard Boehner's statement. He said he made the decision last night, and he specifically mentioned the Pope's exhortation to compromise and work together (which to my mind was the most damning thing the Pope said to Congress yesterday).
Also, there's this report from when he announced it privately to his conference:
Boehner also told the lawmakers that Pope Francis' visit to Congress the day before was a crystallizing moment, according to the lawmaker. Boehner then read the prayer of St. Francis to the conference after announcing his decision.
So yes, it looks like you were actually right on the money. It was going to happen eventually, but as to why today? The Pope did this.
Why is it that lawmakers have to get stuff done. It seems to me that a more prudent course of action would be to pass as few new laws as possible.
This has to be your favorite Congress ever then.
For me though, that's like complaining that the captain keeps steering the ship badly, so I'm happier when he's just drunk in his cabin and nobody is at the wheel. That might work OK for a while when the ship's mostly headed in the right direction already and there are no hazards nearby, but eventually there's going to be an obstacle that needs steering around, and when that happens you're screwed.
Yup. This is why you shouldn't be afraid to be a bastard with your supervisors over matters of ethics (eg: time reporting, license compliance, government regs, etc.). It's most likely your neck on the line, not theirs.
Not being sarcastic in the slightest. When I go home from a day/week of work, the last thing I want is to do more IT work for free. I couldn't be happier that my parents (and my non-techie sister's family) are using machines I cannot help them with.
I wouldn't want it for myself, because I game. Also, I don't have oodles of money to spare, whereas I *do* have the ability to build my own PC's, so my computing world is far more functional, fun, and cheap, than it would be in the Mac world. For about $200-$400 a year, I always have a nearly state-of-the-art rig, plus 2 lesser ones (made from cast-off parts).
But for people who aren't in my situation, and who can afford the extra money and can stand dealing with Mac "Genius" shops, I'm not gonna yuck their yum. Happily, if you're wifi is borked, nothin' I can do for ya.:-)
AFAIK, none. Unless you count that brief stint where get got himself a PC laptop. By the time he handed it to me it had Gator and all the rest of the crap installed on it. If it were my box, I would have reinstalled Windows, but of course he had got a deal on a return, and thus had no install media and no copy of his license key. Ugh.
I can't even begin to count the blessing it has been to my life that he's a Mac person. Absolute top of the list is that if something goes wrong, I can honestly say I have no idea how to fix it.
Apple knows how to make computers. An iPhone is just a small computer that happens to be able to make phone calls. A car is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Not so much anymore. Particularly with EV's, where the engine and drivetrain are actually quite simple, aside from the computerized bits. What you have with those may very well just be "a large computer that knows how to move a big box."
Do you really think Apple became the richest company on the globe selling their products exclusively to hipster millennials?
Of course not. They also sell lots to hipster Gen-X ers and hipster Boomers. My Dad has used almost exclusively Macs at his law office (and home) since the 1980's.
The idea that learning C first has any advantage is completely bollocks, a/. myth.
Its even crappy for "knowing why your code is slow". One important thing for optimizers is knowing the scope of the data the program is working with. Pointers destroy scoping, and it is next to impossible to do anything in C without using pointers. You can't even pass data out of routine's parameter without them.
It also encourages microoptimizations that vary between superfluous and actively harmful. My personal favorite is the "register" keyword, which is merrily ignored by every compiler I know of. It's not a human's job to know where variables go, and at the language source level you have no way of knowing the best way to allocate registers. Then there's the "for" loop, which is basically a "while" loop with extra syntactic sugar, and can't be optimized nearly as well as just about any other language's "for" construct because the loop control variable is actually mutable from within the loop (which could be dang near any line of code in the program, thanks to the magic of C pointers).
Even worse, people who learn this language first have a nasty tendency to overuse pointers and do pointless microoptimizations in other languages once they move on.
Still, there's no good reason for it to be that much faster, unless the Java was also incredibly crappily written (which is quite likely). They are both compiled languages, written at about the same level. Something seriously wrong must have been going on in that code.
Note: This is from a professional C++ developer, who also happens to have done his Master's thesis on Compiler Construction. Admittedly, I don't care that much about Java, except in theory. Have only used it a few times. But either there was something going on with that Java program I'm seriously missing, or the rewrite speedup wasn't primarily about language.
Re:Yes, we should give up because it is hard..
on
Let's Not Go To Mars
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· Score: 1
There are other hard things we could consider doing, such as eliminating carbon emissions are establishing peace in the Middle East.
Damn shame that 7 billion people isn't enough to work on multiple things at once.
it would be accurate to call Mars a veritable hell for living things, were it not for the fact that the planet's average surface temperature is minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit
The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of at least 735 K (462 C).
Slashdot Mirror
There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible,
Those are modern languages, which are a whole different kettle of fish. I can't speak to those particular ones (I haven't looked into them much). However, many countries (or even country-aspirant areas) have elevated their local dialects to "languages" for reasons of self-identity rather than logic. The linguistic definition of a separate languages is that they are mutually-unintelligible, and if linguistics is unimpeded by nationalism, (as it mostly is with ancient reconstructed languages like "Old English"), then that's the way it works. Reconstructed languages are by definition not mutually-intelligible with other languages.
"Old English" and "Old Norse" are reconstructed language names. So by definition, if they exist, they are mutually unintelligible. If two people are speaking the precursors to those two languages, but can understand each other, then they are both, by definition, speaking different dialects of Proto-Germanic. This is what the words "dialect" and "language" mean in linguistics.
So to say that English and Danes living in 10th century English had mutually-intelligible speech is equivalent to saying that "Old English" and "Old Norse" were not separate languages yet by the 10th Century (and probably *all* West and North Germanic speakers could understand each other still). I cannot find any reference online that makes that claim. It is simply not mainstream.
Let's take this further. "Old High German" is said to have been an extant language from 700 to 1050 AD. But Old German and Old English are closer related (they are both West Germanic), so if West Germanics could still understand North Germanics, then they could certainly still understand each other. So Old German couldn't have existed yet either.
There is significant evidence [h-net.org] that Old English and Old Norse were to a certain extent mutually intelligible.
The link is interesting, but that's not the mainstream linguistic opinion. If the two were mutually-intelligible, then they shouldn't exist yet at all. They are made up terms defining supposedly mutually-unintelligible languages. IOW: this was an argument that those two languages didn't exist yet, and they were speaking different dialects of "Proto-Germanic". It is arguing that the language families of West Germanic and North Germanic had not yet split into separate languages.
Funny to see the response this got.
In fact, the positions of most mainline churches is precisely this position you insist is an insignificant minority. And even if this is a "minority", so what? Truth isn't something that is up for a vote, and any Atheist will tell you the same. You don't get to define away the religious beliefs of 21 million Americans because that isn't a majority.
Evangelicals and Atheists are in some kind of joint conspiracy to define "the one True Christianity" in a way that is at odds with science (aka: logic). It perhaps helps both their purposes, but its a lie.
An easier way to use the moon is by measuring it's position relative to the stars. Then you don't have to wait for a particular phase. In fact, that's the method that was in competition with Harrison
Not just competition. The people in charge of the prize always intended to give it out to someone using some variation of this method. That's why they had so much trouble wrapping their minds around the concept that the problem had been "solved" with clocks. To them, that was at best cheating, and more accurately not solving the exact problem they were thinking of.
Yeah, and I'm sure the real gorillas weren't too happy with the movie either.
Well, since the "simulated primate choreographer" apparently had no clue what an angry gorilla looks like, he won't ever know the difference.
Does this mean Christianity is now falsifiable?
Their version of it is. Considering The Bible is actually self-contradictory in places if you take it literally, you don't need to wait for science to do that though.
My whole point is that you *can't* minimize it. Its there in full force, no matter what you do. So if you don't think about it and work with it, you are just asking for trouble. Like Lucas making a buffoonish character with a made up language that sounded to a lot of ears Afro-Caribbean. He likely got into trouble here precisely because he thought making up a language somehow completely immunized him against people seeing cultural context (or it creeping into his fake language). It doesn't.
...oh. But reading through that thread, there were some English in the show speaking Old English.
I'm with you on your main point too. There's just no comparison between some made up noise and a real organic human language.
It kind of reminds me of the movie Congo. I remember seeing breathless articles interviewing a guy about how he created the way guys in gorilla suits pretended to get angry and attack people. It looked nothing like actual angry gorillas, which we aren't exactly bereft of data on. Once the movie actually came out, movie-goers and reviewers were far less impressed with it than the journalists were. It got 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the fake gorillas feature prominently in most negative reviews.
don't know enough about Scandinavian languages to know if they're speaking an old Scandinavian dialectic.
I haven't seen the show, but the most historically sensible thing for Vikings to be speaking would be Old Norse. According to some folks on Reddit, that is in fact what they are speaking.
Its not very closely related to English, outside of the fact that they are both Germanic, and their common ancestor language was only 700 years or so in the past at that point.
Chosing a language always sets a context, and if you want to control the context, you can't chose languages at will.
But this already happens anyway. Ever notice how the imperials in Star Wars tend to speak British English? Dialects are used to indicate social differences in English Language SF/Fantasy movies and shows all the time. Its done with the apparent race of actors as well. Even if all your actors for all the races in your shows are the same (usually white), that's a statement with some implied context. If the races of the actors are mixed seemingly randomly with the "races" in the source work, that's a statement with some implied context too. You simply cannot get away from it.
I see no problem with extending this to entire human languages, as long as the languages are properly used (the words actually say what they purport to say, or something sensible for the context if subtitles aren't used).
Not a single reublican voted for it. It was passed by a legislative trick called reconsiliation that can't be filibustered
I love how this ignores that those same Republicans, who were in the minority, shamelessly used every senate "trick" in the book to stop passage. They fail due to another trick, and suddenly they're the aggrieved party? Somebody needs to grow up.
The image I will always remember is Senator Byrd, being wheeled in from his deathbed to break yet another filibuster vote that the Republicans knew they didn't have the votes to sustain. He was saying "Shame! Shame!" as the Republicans in the Senate were cynically clapping for him like they cared about his health, when they were the ones endangering it.
If Republicans didn't like that "tricks" were used in the process to pass Obamacare, then they shouldn't have used them.
You must have missed Obama going out of his way to refuse to negotiate with the Republicans over the last government shutdown.
And why should he? The "government shutdown" is Congress refusing to pay for bills Congress ran up. What possible benefit to the POTUS is there in playing with them on this? If they were offering something the Democrats might like in exchange it might be different. But sticking a gun to your own head and demanding my car keys isn't going to get you a "negotiation".
His replacement might be worse and the House of Representatives may get even less done.
The flip side is that far-right Republican in that job might actually feel secure enough to make deals and actually get laws passed. Plus, they are getting so little done now that there honestly isn't that much worse to get. The nice thing about being in the gutter is that there's nowhere to go but up.
Boehner also told the lawmakers that Pope Francis' visit to Congress the day before was a crystallizing moment, according to the lawmaker. Boehner then read the prayer of St. Francis to the conference after announcing his decision.
So yes, it looks like you were actually right on the money. It was going to happen eventually, but as to why today? The Pope did this.
Why is it that lawmakers have to get stuff done. It seems to me that a more prudent course of action would be to pass as few new laws as possible.
This has to be your favorite Congress ever then.
For me though, that's like complaining that the captain keeps steering the ship badly, so I'm happier when he's just drunk in his cabin and nobody is at the wheel. That might work OK for a while when the ship's mostly headed in the right direction already and there are no hazards nearby, but eventually there's going to be an obstacle that needs steering around, and when that happens you're screwed.
Yup. This is why you shouldn't be afraid to be a bastard with your supervisors over matters of ethics (eg: time reporting, license compliance, government regs, etc.). It's most likely your neck on the line, not theirs.
Not being sarcastic in the slightest. When I go home from a day/week of work, the last thing I want is to do more IT work for free. I couldn't be happier that my parents (and my non-techie sister's family) are using machines I cannot help them with.
I wouldn't want it for myself, because I game. Also, I don't have oodles of money to spare, whereas I *do* have the ability to build my own PC's, so my computing world is far more functional, fun, and cheap, than it would be in the Mac world. For about $200-$400 a year, I always have a nearly state-of-the-art rig, plus 2 lesser ones (made from cast-off parts).
But for people who aren't in my situation, and who can afford the extra money and can stand dealing with Mac "Genius" shops, I'm not gonna yuck their yum. Happily, if you're wifi is borked, nothin' I can do for ya. :-)
AFAIK, none. Unless you count that brief stint where get got himself a PC laptop. By the time he handed it to me it had Gator and all the rest of the crap installed on it. If it were my box, I would have reinstalled Windows, but of course he had got a deal on a return, and thus had no install media and no copy of his license key. Ugh.
I can't even begin to count the blessing it has been to my life that he's a Mac person. Absolute top of the list is that if something goes wrong, I can honestly say I have no idea how to fix it.
Apple knows how to make computers. An iPhone is just a small computer that happens to be able to make phone calls. A car is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Not so much anymore. Particularly with EV's, where the engine and drivetrain are actually quite simple, aside from the computerized bits. What you have with those may very well just be "a large computer that knows how to move a big box."
Do you really think Apple became the richest company on the globe selling their products exclusively to hipster millennials?
Of course not. They also sell lots to hipster Gen-X ers and hipster Boomers. My Dad has used almost exclusively Macs at his law office (and home) since the 1980's.
It's just a language that requires you to be competent, or better, and to address it through ...
I have some Assembler programmers from 1975 on the phone here who'd like to speak to you. They say they want their language superiority argument back.
The idea that learning C first has any advantage is completely bollocks, a /. myth.
Its even crappy for "knowing why your code is slow". One important thing for optimizers is knowing the scope of the data the program is working with. Pointers destroy scoping, and it is next to impossible to do anything in C without using pointers. You can't even pass data out of routine's parameter without them.
It also encourages microoptimizations that vary between superfluous and actively harmful. My personal favorite is the "register" keyword, which is merrily ignored by every compiler I know of. It's not a human's job to know where variables go, and at the language source level you have no way of knowing the best way to allocate registers. Then there's the "for" loop, which is basically a "while" loop with extra syntactic sugar, and can't be optimized nearly as well as just about any other language's "for" construct because the loop control variable is actually mutable from within the loop (which could be dang near any line of code in the program, thanks to the magic of C pointers).
Even worse, people who learn this language first have a nasty tendency to overuse pointers and do pointless microoptimizations in other languages once they move on.
Still, there's no good reason for it to be that much faster, unless the Java was also incredibly crappily written (which is quite likely). They are both compiled languages, written at about the same level. Something seriously wrong must have been going on in that code.
Note: This is from a professional C++ developer, who also happens to have done his Master's thesis on Compiler Construction. Admittedly, I don't care that much about Java, except in theory. Have only used it a few times. But either there was something going on with that Java program I'm seriously missing, or the rewrite speedup wasn't primarily about language.
There are other hard things we could consider doing, such as eliminating carbon emissions are establishing peace in the Middle East.
Damn shame that 7 billion people isn't enough to work on multiple things at once.
it would be accurate to call Mars a veritable hell for living things, were it not for the fact that the planet's average surface temperature is minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit
Hell, that would be Venus:
The CO2-rich atmosphere, along with thick clouds of sulfur dioxide, generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar System, creating surface temperatures of at least 735 K (462 C).