I could write about chiasmus, colophones, word prints, methods of war, olive tree cultivation, proper names, place names, organized crime, Semitic grammar, Uto-Aztecan and Hebrew, festivals, journeys through the Arabian peninsula, and witnesses.
In my other message to you, I kept things simple and on the spiritual side. I briefly mentioned intellectual grounds as well, but didn't elaborate. Let me do so here. Some background first: I was born into the church and participated fully (meetings, baptisms for the dead, two week missions, taught Primary classes, etc.) until my third year of college.
My PhD dissertation is on a Uto-Aztecan language. I currently make my living writing educational materials for a Uto-Aztecan language (different from my dissertation). The proposed connections between Uto-Aztecan and Hebrew are incorrect. There is absolutely no reason to connect Uto-Aztecan and Semitic grammar or vocabulary. They aren't very similar at all--there are major, fundamental differences in their cores.
The place and personal names are unconvincing at best. Tip of the iceberg: there is no possible way that the pronunciation guide at the back of the Book of Mormon is an accurate representation of any language descended from Hebrew. The stress pattern alone is straight out of Latin.
I reject the papers out of FARMS for the following reason: I understand linguistics and grammar. I've read their papers on language. They are unconvincing at best. If the accuracy of the papers I cannot professionally evaluate is similar to what is in those that I can evaluate, then I cannot trust any of their conclusions.
The response I got from my payers about the Book of Mormon started my doubts. Brigham Young said something to the effect of "A true religion and a true science cannot disagree." I took that as true; and since the faith approach wasn't helping me, I took the science approach. A couple years later, I left the church. Everything I have learned and seen since then has reinforced my belief that I made the right decision.
I know I'm not the one you asked this of, but my answer is "Yes." Not only have I read it cover to cover, I knealt down in a quiet room and prayed about it, earnestly wanting to know. At this point in my life, I am absolutely convinced (on spiritual and intellectual grounds), that the Book of Mormon is not true.
There is wisdom in there, and it is worth reading. Just like the Diamond Sutra and Koran and the Tao Te Ching. But it is not an accurate record of anything.
Personally, I find this to be a prefectly appropriate trade-off. My DVDs are slowed-down only slightly, so somebody that is helping subsidize Netflix is slightly happier. I'll admit I think it's very unfortunate they don't mention this fact anywhere on their site, but it is widely available info.
I tend to agree. That's why I was vaguely happy when I saw the class action suit. I just hope it leads to them giving a more honest description of their service.
Seriously though. Look at the cat scratch, it's not a clean cut, it's similar to if you got scratched by a pointy stick, not a razor. If the claw went deeper it wouldn't move because only the point is sharp, not the edge.
Apparently you've never had to clean rat guts off your living room wall. Believe me, cats can disembowel quite well.
ven advanced grammar checkers still work very poorly compaired to sitting down, reading it yourself, and then having an english inclined friend do the same.
What I find even better is to run my document through a text-to-speech program and listen to the grammar. Grammatical errors are much easier to catch by ear than by reading. It's too easy to skip plurals and verb inflection when you know what you should have written. But hearing it spoken makes that stuff obvious. Sometimes it helps catch long, awkward phrasings too.
Me too. I was 21 the first time someone told me the definitions I'd been given were wrong, or at least incomplete.
I sincerely wish they'd focussed on grammar a bit more than they had.
That also describes me.:)
Anyways, let me reiterate my request for some good links on the subject.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any good links for these kinds of questions. I'd have to google for them. If you want books, try some introductory linguistics books like Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, Fromkin and Rodman's Introduction to Linguistics, or Andrew Radford's Syntacic theory and the structure of English. (Off the top of my head, the last is probably the best for explaining how to figure out what part of speech a word is without resorting to bad definitions.) If you are really brave, the first chapter of Mark Baker's Lexical Categories has some excellent discussion of the issues, though the book is very technical and definitely not for beginners.
By "significant" I mean noun vs verb significant, not type 1 ajective vs type 2 adjective.
Japanese is not type 1 versus type 2 adjective in any way other than an attempt for an English speaker to understand their system. An i-adjective is more like a verb than anything else; a na-adjective is more like a noun than anything else. The categorization of words/concepts into syntactic classes ("parts of speech") is influenced by semantic properties, but not determined by it.
Like a Chocktaw would find an adjective significant. (although I am having great difficulty grasping this "no adjectives, no quantifiers" concept. Surely they have ways of expressing that something is hotter or colder, more or less, faster or slower)
Of course they have words for those concepts. They are verbs. Pure and simple. Instead of "There were three of us" you say "we three-ed"; instead of "The tall man walked away" you say "The man who talled walked away."
There is a universal conception of individuals having properties that can be described, but that does not translate into the universal existence of adjectives.
The definitions of the parts of speech we are taught in school are wrong. They are simplifications made to help young children; but we never get around to teaching the full story in later years. As a consequence, we've had a few generations of people who were never given anything beyond an elementary/junior high level understanding of what a part of speech is, and the people who should be teaching this are resistant to it for no good reason. (Most English-teachers-in-training who take my linguistics classes never want to accept what I just said in this paragraph, but I've never had a single one who was able to give a good reason for their refusal.)
Do other languages have parts of speech that do not have English equivalents?
Yes
(I'm guessing yes, but not significant ones).
That depends on what you mean by "significant". Japanese has two different parts of speech that correspond to English "adjectives". Some languages fail to make distinctions found in English; Choctaw has nouns, verbs, and adverbs -- an nothing else--to prepositions, no adjectives, no quantifiers (ie. numerals or logical quantifiers.) All those three English categories are verbs in Choctaw. Some people have argued that the Salishan languages and some varieties of Indonesian have only a single part of speech: nouns are verbs are adjectives etc. That's a very controversial position. Most linguists believe there is at least a universal distinction between nouns and verbs.
When you are modelling language, you are modelling the mind.
Sure -- perhaps most linguists alive today believe that, and have for a long time. The question is: when languages differ, does that reflect a difference in the minds of the people, or does it just show how incomplete our understanding of language and mind is? Some languages do not have different words for "blue" and "green" but careful tests show that they do in fact distinguish the colors. On the other hand, some languages do not distinguish "left" from "right", and careful tests show that they do not distinguish them (except perhaps in reference to oppossing body parts). The connection between language and mind is there, but not very straightforward (in this humble linguists opinion). I know you were talking about parts of speech, not individual lexical items, but you can apply the same issues to the differences pointed out above.
However, this is in fact desirable in a text comprehension system. Why? Because you want to be able to extract meaning from text even if it's ungrammatical.
Agreed, but that is not really relevant for the issue at hand. They make a point of stating that they can avoid certain kinds of overgeneration that a text comprehension system would not want to avoid: long distance gender agreement in pronouns. So clearly they are trying to avoid the kind of overgeneration you have in mind.
They claim the grammar learned can be used for recognition or production of novel sentences. Overgeneration is bad for the latter use (as you noted).
the sort of grammatical theory that you have in mind (the kind that posits a clear distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences) offers little aid (if any) in explaining how people can actually manage to extract meaning from, or even completely understand, expressions that the theory classifies as "ungrammatical."
Wow. You read far more in my comments than I intended to put in them. They set the criterion for success as the ability to match a string to a path through the machine, and they don't want to overgenerate. That suggests a binary distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical to me. Perhaps I read too much into them.
Incidentally, I agree with you that maintaining a clear grammatical/ungrammatical distinction is undesirable in a good theory of comprehension (and production). I don't know any serious, modern syntacticians who think there is such a distinction in the real world. It is a useful idealization for many questions, however, such as formal learning theory.
I read the paper quickly, and skipped some of the more technical details, but nothing in there blew my mind.
Some things I was not impressed by: They gauge the accuracy of the learning process by dividing the text in half, learn off the first half, then test against the second. Success for a particular sentence is measured by whether or not there is a perfect match between the sentence and a path through the machine. If the grammar their algorithm generates is a superset of the grammar of the language, they can still pass, despite the fact that they did not learn the language correctly. There is also no way to be sure that the paths found are what a human parser would agree to. I realize finding reliable metrics for these things is a genuinely hard problem, but this was not the more impressive attempts I have seen.
Another thing, more of a pet peeve than anything else. They claim wonderful success in learning a variety of languages, but they chose five closely related languages (English, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, and Italian), and one that is not related, but still not too dissimilar in the big scheme of things (Chinese). (And to anyone who thinks Chinese is really different from English, spend a week with a Chinese grammar, and then another one with a grammar from an Amazonian language. That'll change your mind.)
Re:Sometimes, we're just worried about students
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Textbooks With EULAs
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How clearly was it marked that you wanted the non-current edition? I ask this not to criticize or blame you, but to point out that if I was an overworked book buyer, I might start to forget to match the requested edition with the edition being sold by the publisher.
True enough. But the title of the book encoded the version number explicitly, and I also gave the ISBN, which they asked for and which clearly differentiates the versions. I could not have been more explicit given the (web based) form I needed to use.
You are right though, that the new edition was brand new (1 1/2 months old), so they might have second guessed me.
That's not really the point though. The point was just because it looks like the professor is requiring the students to buy the new, expensive version when there is no real improvement over the old, that does not mean the professor actually made that decision. They have to deal with bookstores that can mess things up, and publishers that might send the newest version despite the order. The person I responded to was too quick to declare professors evil.
Re:Sometimes, we're just worried about students
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I think this is an issue with professors as much as publishers. If the only difference between the new and old book is the questions are rearanged, then the professor is an asshole if he makes you buy the new version.
A couple years ago I taught a summer course and asked for a particular edition of the textbook. I put that version on my online syllabus, so my students could get the book wherever they wanted before class started. (The Borders down the street sold it cheaper than the textbook store did, and there were plenty of used books around.) The book store simply ordered the most recent version instead. (I checked my paperwork--they screwed up, not me.) I didn't find out until students walked in the first day of class with the wrong edition, and by then it was too late--by the time the proper books would have arrived, the course would have been half-over. I ended up having to prepare homeworks and lectures that were compatible with two slightly different books.
Don't be so quick to blame professors. There are other factors involved.
I wasn't looking to disbelieve you, but when I saw a gap in the list, then a reference to what was contained in the gab, it looked like a classical way to avoid mentioning something without being obvious about it. The academic in me instantly got suspicious.
The word "effeminate" shows up in the ASV and KJV, and it was there in the Latin, so I didn't even check other translations. It's not there in the German Catholic Bible either, though it does reference "sex boys" and "boy violators", which is close enough to the NIV phrasing.
Anyways, it's not entirely clear that general homosexuality is being condemned, because the terms being used in the (German and Latin at least), also refer to other acts that should be deemed immoral (e.g., prostitution).
As you suggested, only going to the Greek can resolve the question. (But which version of the Greek?)
(I could go forever on this topic -- I'm a linguist specializing in the lexicon with a focus on "exotic" languages. I use translations of the Bible as a standard source for comparison.)
Do not be deceived:Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers......thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God....
It also says (between the ellipses) "nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor "
The way you left out part, but then quoted part of what was in there made me very suspicious, so I looked at what you were hiding. Just the word "effeminate", though I'm not sure why you skipped that one word.
And then because it is my way, I checked out the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, to see what it said. Here's the Latin, with the sinners in bold:
6:9 an nescitis quia iniqui regnum Dei non possidebunt nolite errare neque
fornicarii neque idolis servientes neque adulteri
6:10 neque molles neque masculorum concubitores neque fures neque avari neque ebriosi neque maledici neque rapaces regnum Dei possidebunt
10 types of sinners in Latin, 11 in English. What was added? Well, the Latin masculorum concubitores was expanded to "male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders". The Latin is close enough to English on this point to make the meaning of the phrase reasonablly clear: it is refering to "male concubines". Concubines, of course, are people in a legally recognized relationship with another, but inferior to that of the spouse. Traditionally this was used of women, but there are references to women having male concubines. This makes it look less like a prohibition against homosexuality, and more like a prohibition against deviating from the standard family/marriage model (which is not like our current one, BTW). Latin had plenty of words to talk about homosexual prostitutes and lovers that could have been used if that is how they understood that passage at the time.
I wish I knew enough about Greek to read that version. Maybe someday I'll get around to it.
Note, BTW, that I am not disagreeing with your main point. I think you made that point very well, and are right about it.
I pulled the definitions from the online version of the OED (3rd edition). (Possibly it requires a subscription -- I access it through a University system, so I'm not sure.)
It has 94 main entries for take, and most those main entries have two or three subentries.
And I bet you have heard take used in this manner before. It is exactly the same sense as when someone says "I took the idea and ran with it" or "The opening scene of that movie was taken from a book by Asimov". If I had "taken" it dishonestly, someone could say "You stole that idea!" This is all perfectly reasonable English.
But you want another source, so check out the myriad of meanings listed at m-w.com. Definitions 6 and 11 lend themselves to this kind of discussion, the latter probably more relevant.
Whether something is material or immaterial is not relevant to my argument, by the way.
I think it is. The basis of your argument is that theft deprives someone of something by taking it. If it is immaterial (like ideas or digital patterns), then you do not necessarily deprive someone of it when you take it. The definitions show that steal and take does not require deprivation.
Or try looking in a dictionary, they generally say something along the lines of "the object must be moved, however slightly, from it's original position", or a definition involving taking something, which does not occur in copyright infringement.
Let's check the Oxford English dictionary.
First off, definitions for theft and thief ultimately lead to deciding what steal and take mean, so I'll skip those steps.
steal
1a. To take away dishonestly (portable property, cattle, etc., belonging to another); esp. to do this secretly or unobserved by the owner or the person in charge. ...
d. In wider sense: To take or appropriate dishonestly (anything belonging to another, whether material or immaterial [emphasis added]).
And since you both you and the OED rely on take: take
V. 30 To get, obtain, or derive by one's own act from some source (something material or non-material); to adopt, copy, 'borrow' [emphasis added]
Sounds to me like copying songs does qualify as stealing and therefore theft according to the most authoritative dictionary of the English language.
Of course, the OED is not a dictionary of legal terminology. Lawyers might very well have their own definitions that go the way you want them to. But according to standard English, theft is a perfectly appropriate word to use in these contexts.
As a linguist, I feel I have to publicly disagree.
The problem with changing spellings is that the more we do it, the less the current generation can comprehend writings from the past.
This is a valid concern, but not an insurmountable one. We already change the spelling of things written just a couple hundred years ago. Take a look at a reproduction of the US Constitution or the letters of the founding fathers. Furthermore, English is the only major language of Europe that has not had a significant spelling reform in the past few centuries, but Germans still read Goethe and Spaniards still read Cervantes.
Isn't it nice that we can still read Shakespeare's works 400 years after they were published?
Another poster already pointed out that we do change the spelling of Shakespeare's work. Go to your local library and find a copy of a quarto or folio -- they can be very hard to read without practice. Heck, Shakespeare spelled is own name in a half dozen different ways, to say nothing of variations on long o (oo, oa, o-e) for the same word.
But writings just 200 years before that, such as Chaucer's, are very difficult to read because there wasn't a yet standardized language.
The problem in reading Chaucer is not just one of spelling. The phonology (sound system) of English during Chaucer's time was very different from that of Modern English. English underwent what is called the Great Vowel Shift, along with other changes. Shakespeare was in the middle of this major restructuring of English pronunciation. It wasn't just pronunciation, the entire grammar was restructured in many ways: the pronouns (eg, replacing 'thou-thee-thy' with 'you-your'), verb marking (eg, eliminating a y- prefix on past tense verbs), etc.
The reason there was no standardization during Chaucer's time, though, was because it was difficult for language to travel long distances.
The reason there was no standardization was that it was a completely foreign idea. The concept of having a standard language is a relatively recent one, and one that is not even universally accepted around the world. I work with a tribe that has the same word spelled two different ways on the walls of their church--they know they are different, but in their culture this doesn't matter.
Putting that aside, Great Britain was not too large for language standardization (of the sort you seem to be thinking of) at that time. Monarchs made all kinds of proclamations that were carried out across the island. If one had decided that there would be a single consistent spelling system to be used by all scribes and teachers, it would have happened.
But now that we have television, and the Internet, it would be a shame if we changed our language.
I don't really understand your point here. English was never consistent across its many regions before the invention of TV and the internet. Achieving the kind of consistency you seem to want would require massive changes to the way the language has been for all of recorded history. There has never, ever been a "Standard English" that everyone spoke or learned--there have always been regional differences, even standardized ones. To make a single Standard English for everyone might now be possible with our new forms of communication (actually, I doubt it), but to do this would require massive changes.
e. It would move us away from our cultural heritage linguistically.
Impossible to avoid due to the fundamental natures of language and culture.
and how do you know what the average joe in iran wants?
My roommate was born and raised in Tehran, and he confirms this. The average joe in Iran wants the current mullahs gone, though only a little bit more than the average slashdotter wants the Republicans gone.
In other words, things are bad, but not violent-revolution bad.
And certainly not please-liberate-us-President-Bush bad.
There is no need for this to be an issue of opinion. Words have definitions.
Good point. Let's check the Oxford English Dictionary.
Christian, a. and n.
B. n.
1. a. One who believes or professes the religion of Christ; an adherent of Christianity.
2. One who exhibits the spirit, and follows the precepts and example, of Christ; a believer in Christ who is characterized by genuine piety.
As you said "There is no need for this to be an issue of opinion. Words have definitions."
(For the record. I'm an ex-Mormon. I was raised one, but left once I actually started thinking about what I was told rather than just accepting things.)
Good point. If we assume that the designer is not a God, how do we explain the evolution of the designers?
I don't disagree with you about the validity of ID, but I do like SciFi and valid reasoning, so...
Intelligent design and spontaneous order from first principles are not logically exclusive.
Say, for the sake of argument, that our universe emerged from basic principles of physics -- no designer. Now, Earth, AD 3,000; we can manipulate the most fundamental particles of existance, particles of such small size that quarks look like galaxy clusters. Based on this knowledge, we design miniature universes, put these fundamental particles together in a way to create life, ecosystems, etc, all in an effort to try to model the complexities of our universe in a good scientific manner.
The people in these little universes are the result of intelligent design. The designers did not have designers, because they were the result of spontaneous order (by stipulation).
It seems, then, that ID could be a valid scientific theory iff they start coming up with ways to test for the existence of design versus spontaneous order and define what it means to be intelligent. Neither of these are being done, AFAIK, and that is the real problem.
Heh. I buried something like that in an essay I wrote in English Class. I had a teacher that just piled and piled and piled work on us. I was CERTAIN she didn't read through everything. "If you read this far, I owe ya a soda."
I did that in an English class once. The teacher seemed to accept just about anything as an answer, so I figured she was just checking to see if every question was answered. One day I answered the question with "I bet you don't even read these." When I got the assignment back, she had written "Yes, I do." in the margin. At the end of the quarter she admitted that she usually didn't, but her eyes just happened to fall on that sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
That didn't take long at all.
Now listen to the sound of one hand clapping.
I could write about chiasmus, colophones, word prints, methods of war, olive tree cultivation, proper names, place names, organized crime, Semitic grammar, Uto-Aztecan and Hebrew, festivals, journeys through the Arabian peninsula, and witnesses.
In my other message to you, I kept things simple and on the spiritual side. I briefly mentioned intellectual grounds as well, but didn't elaborate. Let me do so here. Some background first: I was born into the church and participated fully (meetings, baptisms for the dead, two week missions, taught Primary classes, etc.) until my third year of college.
My PhD dissertation is on a Uto-Aztecan language. I currently make my living writing educational materials for a Uto-Aztecan language (different from my dissertation). The proposed connections between Uto-Aztecan and Hebrew are incorrect. There is absolutely no reason to connect Uto-Aztecan and Semitic grammar or vocabulary. They aren't very similar at all--there are major, fundamental differences in their cores.
The place and personal names are unconvincing at best. Tip of the iceberg: there is no possible way that the pronunciation guide at the back of the Book of Mormon is an accurate representation of any language descended from Hebrew. The stress pattern alone is straight out of Latin.
I reject the papers out of FARMS for the following reason: I understand linguistics and grammar. I've read their papers on language. They are unconvincing at best. If the accuracy of the papers I cannot professionally evaluate is similar to what is in those that I can evaluate, then I cannot trust any of their conclusions.
The response I got from my payers about the Book of Mormon started my doubts. Brigham Young said something to the effect of "A true religion and a true science cannot disagree." I took that as true; and since the faith approach wasn't helping me, I took the science approach. A couple years later, I left the church. Everything I have learned and seen since then has reinforced my belief that I made the right decision.
I know I'm not the one you asked this of, but my answer is "Yes." Not only have I read it cover to cover, I knealt down in a quiet room and prayed about it, earnestly wanting to know. At this point in my life, I am absolutely convinced (on spiritual and intellectual grounds), that the Book of Mormon is not true.
There is wisdom in there, and it is worth reading. Just like the Diamond Sutra and Koran and the Tao Te Ching. But it is not an accurate record of anything.
I tend to agree. That's why I was vaguely happy when I saw the class action suit. I just hope it leads to them giving a more honest description of their service.
Apparently you've never had to clean rat guts off your living room wall. Believe me, cats can disembowel quite well.
What I find even better is to run my document through a text-to-speech program and listen to the grammar. Grammatical errors are much easier to catch by ear than by reading. It's too easy to skip plurals and verb inflection when you know what you should have written. But hearing it spoken makes that stuff obvious. Sometimes it helps catch long, awkward phrasings too.
Me too. I was 21 the first time someone told me the definitions I'd been given were wrong, or at least incomplete.
I sincerely wish they'd focussed on grammar a bit more than they had.That also describes me. :)
Anyways, let me reiterate my request for some good links on the subject.Unfortunately, I don't know of any good links for these kinds of questions. I'd have to google for them. If you want books, try some introductory linguistics books like Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, Fromkin and Rodman's Introduction to Linguistics, or Andrew Radford's Syntacic theory and the structure of English. (Off the top of my head, the last is probably the best for explaining how to figure out what part of speech a word is without resorting to bad definitions.) If you are really brave, the first chapter of Mark Baker's Lexical Categories has some excellent discussion of the issues, though the book is very technical and definitely not for beginners.
Japanese is not type 1 versus type 2 adjective in any way other than an attempt for an English speaker to understand their system. An i-adjective is more like a verb than anything else; a na-adjective is more like a noun than anything else. The categorization of words/concepts into syntactic classes ("parts of speech") is influenced by semantic properties, but not determined by it.
Like a Chocktaw would find an adjective significant. (although I am having great difficulty grasping this "no adjectives, no quantifiers" concept. Surely they have ways of expressing that something is hotter or colder, more or less, faster or slower)Of course they have words for those concepts. They are verbs. Pure and simple. Instead of "There were three of us" you say "we three-ed"; instead of "The tall man walked away" you say "The man who talled walked away."
There is a universal conception of individuals having properties that can be described, but that does not translate into the universal existence of adjectives.
The definitions of the parts of speech we are taught in school are wrong. They are simplifications made to help young children; but we never get around to teaching the full story in later years. As a consequence, we've had a few generations of people who were never given anything beyond an elementary/junior high level understanding of what a part of speech is, and the people who should be teaching this are resistant to it for no good reason. (Most English-teachers-in-training who take my linguistics classes never want to accept what I just said in this paragraph, but I've never had a single one who was able to give a good reason for their refusal.)
Yes
(I'm guessing yes, but not significant ones).That depends on what you mean by "significant". Japanese has two different parts of speech that correspond to English "adjectives". Some languages fail to make distinctions found in English; Choctaw has nouns, verbs, and adverbs -- an nothing else--to prepositions, no adjectives, no quantifiers (ie. numerals or logical quantifiers.) All those three English categories are verbs in Choctaw. Some people have argued that the Salishan languages and some varieties of Indonesian have only a single part of speech: nouns are verbs are adjectives etc. That's a very controversial position. Most linguists believe there is at least a universal distinction between nouns and verbs.
When you are modelling language, you are modelling the mind.Sure -- perhaps most linguists alive today believe that, and have for a long time. The question is: when languages differ, does that reflect a difference in the minds of the people, or does it just show how incomplete our understanding of language and mind is? Some languages do not have different words for "blue" and "green" but careful tests show that they do in fact distinguish the colors. On the other hand, some languages do not distinguish "left" from "right", and careful tests show that they do not distinguish them (except perhaps in reference to oppossing body parts). The connection between language and mind is there, but not very straightforward (in this humble linguists opinion). I know you were talking about parts of speech, not individual lexical items, but you can apply the same issues to the differences pointed out above.
Agreed, but that is not really relevant for the issue at hand. They make a point of stating that they can avoid certain kinds of overgeneration that a text comprehension system would not want to avoid: long distance gender agreement in pronouns. So clearly they are trying to avoid the kind of overgeneration you have in mind.
They claim the grammar learned can be used for recognition or production of novel sentences. Overgeneration is bad for the latter use (as you noted).
the sort of grammatical theory that you have in mind (the kind that posits a clear distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences) offers little aid (if any) in explaining how people can actually manage to extract meaning from, or even completely understand, expressions that the theory classifies as "ungrammatical."
Wow. You read far more in my comments than I intended to put in them. They set the criterion for success as the ability to match a string to a path through the machine, and they don't want to overgenerate. That suggests a binary distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical to me. Perhaps I read too much into them.
Incidentally, I agree with you that maintaining a clear grammatical/ungrammatical distinction is undesirable in a good theory of comprehension (and production). I don't know any serious, modern syntacticians who think there is such a distinction in the real world. It is a useful idealization for many questions, however, such as formal learning theory.
I read the paper quickly, and skipped some of the more technical details, but nothing in there blew my mind.
Some things I was not impressed by: They gauge the accuracy of the learning process by dividing the text in half, learn off the first half, then test against the second. Success for a particular sentence is measured by whether or not there is a perfect match between the sentence and a path through the machine. If the grammar their algorithm generates is a superset of the grammar of the language, they can still pass, despite the fact that they did not learn the language correctly. There is also no way to be sure that the paths found are what a human parser would agree to. I realize finding reliable metrics for these things is a genuinely hard problem, but this was not the more impressive attempts I have seen.
Another thing, more of a pet peeve than anything else. They claim wonderful success in learning a variety of languages, but they chose five closely related languages (English, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, and Italian), and one that is not related, but still not too dissimilar in the big scheme of things (Chinese). (And to anyone who thinks Chinese is really different from English, spend a week with a Chinese grammar, and then another one with a grammar from an Amazonian language. That'll change your mind.)
True enough. But the title of the book encoded the version number explicitly, and I also gave the ISBN, which they asked for and which clearly differentiates the versions. I could not have been more explicit given the (web based) form I needed to use.
You are right though, that the new edition was brand new (1 1/2 months old), so they might have second guessed me.
That's not really the point though. The point was just because it looks like the professor is requiring the students to buy the new, expensive version when there is no real improvement over the old, that does not mean the professor actually made that decision. They have to deal with bookstores that can mess things up, and publishers that might send the newest version despite the order. The person I responded to was too quick to declare professors evil.
A couple years ago I taught a summer course and asked for a particular edition of the textbook. I put that version on my online syllabus, so my students could get the book wherever they wanted before class started. (The Borders down the street sold it cheaper than the textbook store did, and there were plenty of used books around.) The book store simply ordered the most recent version instead. (I checked my paperwork--they screwed up, not me.) I didn't find out until students walked in the first day of class with the wrong edition, and by then it was too late--by the time the proper books would have arrived, the course would have been half-over. I ended up having to prepare homeworks and lectures that were compatible with two slightly different books.
Don't be so quick to blame professors. There are other factors involved.
The word "effeminate" shows up in the ASV and KJV, and it was there in the Latin, so I didn't even check other translations. It's not there in the German Catholic Bible either, though it does reference "sex boys" and "boy violators", which is close enough to the NIV phrasing.
Anyways, it's not entirely clear that general homosexuality is being condemned, because the terms being used in the (German and Latin at least), also refer to other acts that should be deemed immoral (e.g., prostitution).
As you suggested, only going to the Greek can resolve the question. (But which version of the Greek?)
(I could go forever on this topic -- I'm a linguist specializing in the lexicon with a focus on "exotic" languages. I use translations of the Bible as a standard source for comparison.)
It also says (between the ellipses) "nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor "
The way you left out part, but then quoted part of what was in there made me very suspicious, so I looked at what you were hiding. Just the word "effeminate", though I'm not sure why you skipped that one word.
And then because it is my way, I checked out the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, to see what it said. Here's the Latin, with the sinners in bold:
10 types of sinners in Latin, 11 in English. What was added? Well, the Latin masculorum concubitores was expanded to "male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders". The Latin is close enough to English on this point to make the meaning of the phrase reasonablly clear: it is refering to "male concubines". Concubines, of course, are people in a legally recognized relationship with another, but inferior to that of the spouse. Traditionally this was used of women, but there are references to women having male concubines. This makes it look less like a prohibition against homosexuality, and more like a prohibition against deviating from the standard family/marriage model (which is not like our current one, BTW). Latin had plenty of words to talk about homosexual prostitutes and lovers that could have been used if that is how they understood that passage at the time.I wish I knew enough about Greek to read that version. Maybe someday I'll get around to it.
Note, BTW, that I am not disagreeing with your main point. I think you made that point very well, and are right about it.
And I bet you have heard take used in this manner before. It is exactly the same sense as when someone says "I took the idea and ran with it" or "The opening scene of that movie was taken from a book by Asimov". If I had "taken" it dishonestly, someone could say "You stole that idea!" This is all perfectly reasonable English.
But you want another source, so check out the myriad of meanings listed at m-w.com. Definitions 6 and 11 lend themselves to this kind of discussion, the latter probably more relevant.
Whether something is material or immaterial is not relevant to my argument, by the way.
I think it is. The basis of your argument is that theft deprives someone of something by taking it. If it is immaterial (like ideas or digital patterns), then you do not necessarily deprive someone of it when you take it. The definitions show that steal and take does not require deprivation.
Let's check the Oxford English dictionary.
First off, definitions for theft and thief ultimately lead to deciding what steal and take mean, so I'll skip those steps.
steal
...
1a. To take away dishonestly (portable property, cattle, etc., belonging to another); esp. to do this secretly or unobserved by the owner or the person in charge.
d. In wider sense: To take or appropriate dishonestly (anything belonging to another, whether material or immaterial [emphasis added]).
And since you both you and the OED rely on take:
take
V. 30 To get, obtain, or derive by one's own act from some source (something material or non-material); to adopt, copy, 'borrow' [emphasis added]
Sounds to me like copying songs does qualify as stealing and therefore theft according to the most authoritative dictionary of the English language.
Of course, the OED is not a dictionary of legal terminology. Lawyers might very well have their own definitions that go the way you want them to. But according to standard English, theft is a perfectly appropriate word to use in these contexts.
The pictures are obviously faked--you can't see any whalers anywhere.
Bullshit. I can intentionally crash my Redhat 9.0 system in under 30 seconds. And I learned how to do it the hard way.
- Insert flash drive.
- Immediately mount the drive from the command line, while all the lights are still going flashy-flashy.
- Pray everything is saved, cause you won't get a chance.
- Brush the dust off the reset button and push it.
Yeah, it's a stupid thing to do, but I learned it when I was late for a presentation, still hadn't printed the file, and had really fast fingers.The problem with changing spellings is that the more we do it, the less the current generation can comprehend writings from the past.
This is a valid concern, but not an insurmountable one. We already change the spelling of things written just a couple hundred years ago. Take a look at a reproduction of the US Constitution or the letters of the founding fathers. Furthermore, English is the only major language of Europe that has not had a significant spelling reform in the past few centuries, but Germans still read Goethe and Spaniards still read Cervantes.
Isn't it nice that we can still read Shakespeare's works 400 years after they were published?
Another poster already pointed out that we do change the spelling of Shakespeare's work. Go to your local library and find a copy of a quarto or folio -- they can be very hard to read without practice. Heck, Shakespeare spelled is own name in a half dozen different ways, to say nothing of variations on long o (oo, oa, o-e) for the same word.
But writings just 200 years before that, such as Chaucer's, are very difficult to read because there wasn't a yet standardized language.
The problem in reading Chaucer is not just one of spelling. The phonology (sound system) of English during Chaucer's time was very different from that of Modern English. English underwent what is called the Great Vowel Shift, along with other changes. Shakespeare was in the middle of this major restructuring of English pronunciation. It wasn't just pronunciation, the entire grammar was restructured in many ways: the pronouns (eg, replacing 'thou-thee-thy' with 'you-your'), verb marking (eg, eliminating a y- prefix on past tense verbs), etc.
The reason there was no standardization during Chaucer's time, though, was because it was difficult for language to travel long distances.
The reason there was no standardization was that it was a completely foreign idea. The concept of having a standard language is a relatively recent one, and one that is not even universally accepted around the world. I work with a tribe that has the same word spelled two different ways on the walls of their church--they know they are different, but in their culture this doesn't matter.
Putting that aside, Great Britain was not too large for language standardization (of the sort you seem to be thinking of) at that time. Monarchs made all kinds of proclamations that were carried out across the island. If one had decided that there would be a single consistent spelling system to be used by all scribes and teachers, it would have happened.
But now that we have television, and the Internet, it would be a shame if we changed our language.
I don't really understand your point here. English was never consistent across its many regions before the invention of TV and the internet. Achieving the kind of consistency you seem to want would require massive changes to the way the language has been for all of recorded history. There has never, ever been a "Standard English" that everyone spoke or learned--there have always been regional differences, even standardized ones. To make a single Standard English for everyone might now be possible with our new forms of communication (actually, I doubt it), but to do this would require massive changes.
e. It would move us away from our cultural heritage linguistically.
Impossible to avoid due to the fundamental natures of language and culture.
My roommate was born and raised in Tehran, and he confirms this. The average joe in Iran wants the current mullahs gone, though only a little bit more than the average slashdotter wants the Republicans gone.
In other words, things are bad, but not violent-revolution bad.
And certainly not please-liberate-us-President-Bush bad.
That's why she's taking her vitamins.
Good point. Let's check the Oxford English Dictionary.
The official name for the Mormon church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The subtitle of the Book of Mormon is Another Testament of Jesus Christ (the first being the Bible). Articles of Faith 1, 3, and 4 (which they basically brainwash their children with via ritualized repetition) all claim belief in Jesus Christ as a member of the Godhead and their personal savior.
Ergo, Mormons fit the definition of "Christian".
As you said "There is no need for this to be an issue of opinion. Words have definitions."
(For the record. I'm an ex-Mormon. I was raised one, but left once I actually started thinking about what I was told rather than just accepting things.)
I don't disagree with you about the validity of ID, but I do like SciFi and valid reasoning, so...
Intelligent design and spontaneous order from first principles are not logically exclusive.
Say, for the sake of argument, that our universe emerged from basic principles of physics -- no designer. Now, Earth, AD 3,000; we can manipulate the most fundamental particles of existance, particles of such small size that quarks look like galaxy clusters. Based on this knowledge, we design miniature universes, put these fundamental particles together in a way to create life, ecosystems, etc, all in an effort to try to model the complexities of our universe in a good scientific manner.
The people in these little universes are the result of intelligent design. The designers did not have designers, because they were the result of spontaneous order (by stipulation).
It seems, then, that ID could be a valid scientific theory iff they start coming up with ways to test for the existence of design versus spontaneous order and define what it means to be intelligent. Neither of these are being done, AFAIK, and that is the real problem.
I did that in an English class once. The teacher seemed to accept just about anything as an answer, so I figured she was just checking to see if every question was answered. One day I answered the question with "I bet you don't even read these." When I got the assignment back, she had written "Yes, I do." in the margin. At the end of the quarter she admitted that she usually didn't, but her eyes just happened to fall on that sentence.