These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes or references that only make sense from a certain cultural standpoint.
I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.
Almost all foreign language studies I know of include a collection of stories / literature where a number of common sayings are from.
Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".
Chinese studies includes Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A Chinese Friend of mine explained the meaning of the phrase "Pour the oil", based on some Sima-Yi / Zhuge Liang story from RotTK. (Which IIRC, means something along the lines of "I'm not going to be a sore loser about this")
Japanese studies include something about an impenetrable shield and the all-penetrating spear, which apparently is the root word for contradict. Using "Google Translate" on this one, "矛盾" translates into "Contradict". But "矛" means Spear, and "盾" means shield.
So a dumb translation would translate "矛盾" into "SpearShield", which is nonsense. But the meaning is "To Contradict".
Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".
Most of the vocabulary you pick up from context; idioms aren't fundamentally different from other parts of the language in that regard. You don't need to know an idiom's source material to understand its meaning, no more than you need to be aware of a word's etymology to use it. Though it doesn't hurt and it's often fascinating.
A good example of this, in English, is the meaning of the phrase "O.K.", which is "oll komplete", a funny 1700s-era meme when newspapers (at the time) would misspell words on purpose.
Most of those misspellings have been forgotten, but the most common: Oll Komplete (All Complete) was so common, it became ingrained in our language. Today, everyone knows things are Okay, despite not remembering the original story.
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Still, learning some degree of stories helps remind us that not all words are to be taken literally in a language. That meanings are assigned based off of shared experiencnes.
From a practical perspective, I believe the whole point is that an idiom is fundamentally different. If you are a non-native speaker, you can look up a word you don't know. But if it's an idiomatic phrase, like "waiting for the other shoe to drop," looking up each word in the phrase does you no good. Studying fables etc. is a great way to learn them.
Same here, and another one that irritates me is "being left high and dry", which is a bad thing. But I envision high and dry as a good thing, isn't that where you would want to be in a storm or at sea?
Truth be told I never actually looked up where a lot of these idioms come from. I just heard other people using them and then I started to use them too.
But not if you tied your boat up in a harbour, and then when the tide went out, you can't sail it because it is high and dry sitting on it's hull instead of floating.
Interestingly, the first given translation is itself an idiom (lit. "to wait for the thick/fat end"). An idiom I understand, even though I had no idea where it's from; I looked it up, it relates to corporal punishment. The second translation is a more generic one.
The second translation is a biblical reference, where a "Hiobsbotschaft" implies receiving news of a further tragedy, invoking the Old Testament character Job (Hiob), whose faith was tested by suffering great losses.
Unfortunately neither of these help to understand the English shoe idiom which I, as a native English speaker, have no clue about.
You can look up the entire phrase or just ask someone. There’s no need to know where it came from, although it might make retention easier, or comprehension better. Nothing beats time spent immersed in the language and just asking questions or looking at context when something seems odd. Living languages aren’t static targets either, you’ll sound formal or just plain strange if you elevate dictionary definitions over experience and practice with common usage.
In some cases, there's an equivalent idiom in the native language, and while the scenario may be very different, the underlying similarity is readily apparent.
It's not quite the same (less action for one), but if the "humans have crazy ideas" aspect is interesting, then the Starfleet Corps of Engineers (aka Star Trek: SCE) novels might be worth a look. Haven't read many of them myself, but "make things work any way you can" is basically how they function.
This quote sums up my Italian experience. The language is so full of phrases which - like everything - are regional, that Google Translate often just gives up.
My favourite is "in bocca al lupo", which roughly translates to "break a leg" - note the lack of verb.
Also that's the current meaning, which changed over the last century.
On top of that I remember three commonly used gestures two of which look the same to the uninitiated eye on photos.
kkndve English speaker checking in, I did not know that the phrase "sour grapes" comes from Aesop.
Honestly I only vaguely recall reading a few stories from Aesop when I was in second grade or something. Maybe a story about a wolf and another animal and a river? None of it really stuck.
矛盾 is used the same in Japanese - 'onyomi' words use Chinese readings of hanzi, as opposed to 'kunyomi', which uses the Japanese reading.
Though, as someone who speaks a little 日本語 (though nowhere near fluent), I don't quite understand the significance being ascribed here. There are huge numbers of Jukugo ("compound kanji") [which are frequently, but not exclusively, onyomi words] where trying to understand the word as a compound of the kanji/hanzi components would be equally nonsensical, and aren't anything that requires special mention in language learning. Having multiple readings of even a single kanji is also pretty normal, and sometimes those are not all readily apparent from understanding one definition, either. Also plenty of kunyomi words where the reading would end up with a word totally different from the initial kanji/hanzi.
To my knowledge, this is no more due to idioms from culturally significant literature than the word 'novel' being used to describe books and new ideas is.
Edit: Looks like a fable is the origin for the word in Chinese, but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese, or indication that it was any different than any other word where the component hanzi/kanji (or radicals therein) would not make sense as the definition.
> but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese
I personally learned of it from the Japanese game "Ace Attorney".
There's a spear/shield ornament somewhere as evidence, so the game spends a decent amount of time introducing the myth to the audience. The myth is seen again in Trigun (impenetrable shield was one of the enemies that Vash took down), and again in "Rising of the Shield Hero" where Shield-guy's biggest rival is the Spear-guy.
A lot of Japanese media talk about this spear-vs-shield story. If it was a myth borrowed from China, that still makes sense. (Aesop is Greek after all, but still influenced English).
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My overall point is that some words reference stories rather than the actual meaning of the word. Learning the underlying stories can help when learning those languages.
To me, it's interesting in the "Huh, neat" kind of way in the same way knowing the etymology of "sour grapes" is. At least personally, I don't find it particularly useful for actually learning the language - there's just too many words like this for it to provide me any real advantage, and I'd likely end up confusing myself more when running into the words where there isn't any similar significance. For example, irresponsible/sloppy is 'いい加減', and 加 means increase while 減 means decrease - I could see myself going 'hmm I know the word contradiction is one where the two kanji actually contradict each other... increase and decrease contradict each other, I bet this is it!"
> I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
It's actually pretty rare, at least for me when I was learning English. Usually I would understand from the context what the idiom must mean, but not necessarily what each word means.
For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs".
I think there's 2 styles of learning - breadth-first and depth-first. My wife is a depth-first learner. She would look up every definition as many levels down as needed before going to the next part. It drove me crazy when I studied with her because my stack would overflow.
I try to understand the general idea, look how it works, and only then go down into details. She was very frustrated with this because she couldn't deal with "details we ignore for now".
In language learning I think depth-first is a bad idea, because meaning of the details change with context. So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. After encountering a word many times in different contexts you get intuition on what it means and how it's used much better than if you looked it up and took the first meaning as gospel.
> For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs".
Nearly monolingual English speaker here.
I'm very familiar with the noun "hatch" meaning a kind of door, and the verb "hatch" meaning to emerge from an egg. But until just now I had never noticed that they're spelled and pronounced the same way. (And apparently they're etymologically unrelated.)
One thing I learned recently is the etymologies of the words for “Orange”.
The Orange Order is a fraternal order in Northern Ireland named in honour of the (Dutch) William of Orange, whose title is from the Principality of Orange (in what is now southern France), named after the city of Orange, whose name reached that after a few rounds of minor corruption from the Gaulish “Arausio” meaning cheek or temple.
The Orange Order likes the colour orange. I don’t know where on that etymological chain the connection stops, but the word for the colour is derived from the fruit, the fruit has the name “an orange” as a corruption of “a norange” (except the language this happened in varies from English, French, Spanish and Italian depending who I ask, so might have been “une norenge” but all the stories agree the “n” shifted), that from the Arabic nāranj, and that is apparently fairly close to the Dravidian root word.
Returning to William of Orange, the Dutch word for the fruit is “Sinaasappel” - Chinese Apple. And of course, “Mandarin” is the English words for both a type of orange and a branch of the Chinese language.
Interesting… in Bangalore fruit vendors call loose-skinned oranges “Nar Oranges” and apparently the first plantation of these was in Narpur, introduced from China. In South Africa these same kinds of oranges are called nartjies.
I remember that reading bash.org 15 or so years ago was pretty hard for me, because many puns and slang was confusing or ambiguous for me. I wish I remembered specific examples.
Well actually I do have one from that time, but not from bash.org: when I started playing nethack I remember being confused because the game would describe foul foodstuffs as "tasting terrible", but in colloquial French (my native language) "terrible" is often used as a positive adjective (much like "awesome" shifted from meaning "inspiring terror" to "excellent" in the English vernacular).
So, when the game says that something "tastes terrible", does it mean that it tastes awful or awesome? I now know the answer, but back then it wasn't so obvious.
This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Pterry and the Discworld:
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
> So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning.
This is the kind of thinking that led to a friend of mine and his entire family, touring Germany, saying the word for "apple juice" whenever they meant to say "thank you".
I'm not even kidding.
Comic example in film: in the Oliver Reed film Hannibal Brooks, a misunderstanding leads one of the major characters to believe that elephant translates into english as "we're-here".
There are several misunderstandings in translation between Australian Aboriginal languages and English.
Perhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out the first.
That misquote would confuse even somebody who knows baseball. The actual quote is, "There are many people who don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple."
True, though "thinking they hit a home run" is a nice extension of the same concept: not only do they think that they deserve what they got for no effort, but are actually angry that they didn't get more.
(Coincidentally, I used exactly that expression, precisely that way, earlier today. Unless somehow the OP read what I wrote, which isn't impossible.)
Idioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a home run." I would know what it means no problem.
Most of the replies here kind of miss the point and talk about idioms (hatching eggs, dropping shoes, etc.). Idioms are indeed hard, but every languages has their own. So, when you meet eggs, shoes or whatever in a discussion that was not about chickens or fashion, you can at least suspect it's figurative.
Meanwhile, "To fall for someone" is not an idiom but a phrasal verb, and these are (imho) much harder than idioms because they do not "signal" their exceptionality as strongly. How am I supposed to know that "falling for someone" does not involve any actual falling, or that when you "make up with someone" you are not really making anything?
> For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.
This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there are three words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I", "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the sentence; nothing tricky is going on.
(The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".)
[1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard sense of the preposition "for". ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them work.
> [...] you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
This is further exacerbated today where the contexts could be cross-cultural, due to the Internet fostering quicker and communication over borders. I recently ran across a (somewhat off-color) humorous username 「一哭二鬧三上悠亞」: it would have made no sense at all if you only know the Chinese context (first six characters) or the Japanese context (last four characters)! Even though all eight characters are intelligible independently in both Chinese and Japanese.
It turns out there are a lot of poems, stories, etc a native speaker would learn in school and apply to their speech that a foreign learner might not even know about. One of the teachers compared this to learning Shakespeare, but I don't think it's nearly as involved in day-to-day speech the way it seems to be for native speakers of Chinese languages. I certainly don't know anything about Shakespeare other than what I picked up from Star Trek even though I'm sure I use things that came from his works all the time without knowing.
I used to work with a lot of Swedes. I learned literal English translations of several Swedish idioms. I don't think any relied on wordplay, so they worked fine as standalone idioms, with some having similar versions in English (holding thumbs vs. crossing fingers).
- Burrito... ew
- Alambre. huh?
- "al Pastor" ok, that must be lamb... it's PORK??? WTF???
And then I order "papas con cuero" thinking this must be yet another poetic name for food, and find that it's exactly what it says on the tin[1]. /facepalm
[1] "What it says on the tin" is a reference to canned food, where the label on the can is important, because you can't see inside. Of course, the cans are made out of steel these days, but we still... ugh, never mind.
One of my biggest epiphanies was realizing how much dumb hit music was actually partially catering to English as a second language speakers for broader appeal.
This is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural context that language is being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by example.
"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations
[0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.
"We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea
One could argue that this isn't talking to a well adjusted animal living in its native habitat. It is talking to a long term research subject/victim suffering at the hands of "researchers" while trying to teach it a language that is utterly alien to it. Of course knowing how animals communicate in their natural habitat is not useful if you want to ask them deep questions like "what do you think about global warming" or "do you think god exists", to which they probably wouldn't have an answer anyway.
More seriously, I think humans and other mammals generally can learn to share an “animal” language which uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to human, human to animal).
Elements used for prediction include:
- Predictable timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial events
- body language
- sound patterns
- touch patterns
- performative actions with environmental objects
It’s not so much a “universal” language, but rather that mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to train each other in these cues and learn them. They can be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication and over time both parties move a lot of the inference and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even taking active brain power to decipher intent and meanings.
I’ve also done this when I was working very closely with just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke the others language but we had to get the job done for 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of different grunts and cues that we used first for several weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate everything that we needed to, we started replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own language words and that’s how we taught eachother the others’ language. At least for the domain of our work.
I have no idea if any of these would be possible with cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the ability to create novel games to play with eachother.
It’s hard to say as the further you get away from a common ancestor the more the behavior of different species diverges (maybe a bit tautological, but still worth pointing out).
I played with my pet rat and we were good friends. We’d play little games and I’d tickle her Rats and humans diverged maybe 80 million years ago. Interestingly, humans and dogs diverged perhaps 100 million years ago, and we know we can communicate with dogs.
However an octopus is ~600 million years away from a mutual common ancestor, which is way back in the Precambrian. It’s an order of magnitude more time.
Dogs created civilization out of humans by consistently helping the most cooperative ones. Even today, dog “owners” live longer and attract more mates. It’s consistent selection pressure.
> The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.
I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.
I believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.
I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
> I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
In general you are correct, but there is the special case of a person using machine translation as a tool to try and communicate with someone they don't share a language with.
Of course, the first approximation is the person performing all the stereotypical monolingual behaviors of speaking extra slowly and loudly, using pseudo-simplified language, accompanied with exaggerated hand gestures that don't really help.
BTW, I've seen people struggling with voice assistants in almost exactly the same way (absent the hand gestures).
But the point is that people modify their language to try and compensate for communication barriers all the time, and it is just a skill, whether it is speaking to children, or foreigners, or code switching to speak to someone in a different class or subculture. Machine translation adds a new wrinkle to the mix, but it isn't all that different.
Maybe not stop completely, but certainly in some contexts, e.g. when using machine translation to produce text in a language you can passively understand but don't have a large active vocabulary in.
Which I did just yesterday by putting the text I wanted to convey into Google Translate and then tweaking it until the translation looked reasonable. In the end, I still had to postprocess the output a bit, but I ended up with something which I couldn't have written if starting from scratch, which was entirely worth the small pain of using slightly less colorful language.
Of course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).
I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese.
I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct.
We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain.
So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.
Isn't Chinese actually a best case scenario for machine translation, with huge amounts of text available, and little if any variance (no tenses, no persons, no plural, no declinations)?
The (very old) machine translation joke: The computer was asked to translate the phrase: "The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak" into Russian. The output was: "The vodka is great but the meat is rotten".
It's not really a great argument. Languages are always evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend or maybe urbandictionary.
EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good luck...
You're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be able to handle it if it can not understand it from the context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI needs to be continuously updated.
I think Humans are pretty good at at least recognizing that a particular phrasing doesn't make sense as a literal statement and so must be a reference to something. Often you can get an idea of what it's meant to mean just by context. Sometimes if you see a dozen or so usages, you get the idea of what it means without ever having it explicitly explained.
Good luck accurately machine translating the infinitely growing idiom of jokey Twitter conversation, which most native speakers can pick up pretty quickly.
"The speaker became attracted to the person they are talking about" is definitely not the way I (native US English speaker) would explain falling for someone, and any person or robot using it that way is likely to sow confusion.
"Falling for someone" can mean both "falling in love with someone" and "to be trapped/tricked by someone" according to both my experience and my go-to dictionary [1] [2]. "Falling for something" is clearly in the realm of "being tricked" according to [3] (but that source also puts "falling for somebody" squarely on the "love" side of things [4]).
So I would say that, while you may have never heard it used that way, it certainly has that meaning in practice to many people. Don't judge the robot so harshly.
No cap, there was a translation of Beowulf a few years ago that deadass translated the first word of the saga, "Hwæt", as "Bro!" (like how a drunk storyteller sitting next to you at the bar might say "Bro, listen to this shit" instead of the more staid/traditional openers like "Harken!")
I don't know if this is a reference to the recent South Park episode, but do teenagers really say "bruh" so much? I thought that was something people said a decade ago, although they used to ironically spell it "bra" sometimes.
The spelling change seems to be indicative of the generation shift (and a slightly different pronunciation). From what (little) exposure I've had to teenagers in recent years "bruh" is "correct" (and "bra" is "ancient" and "bro" is "boring"). Slang usage shifts in weird ways.
I'm sure both still exist. Slang always is prone to regionalisms and in-group markings. What I've heard (on Xbox voice chat primarily) as commonly used today is "bruh" like much closer to how most people pronounce "duh". I don't know where it originates dialectally other than "often heard in Fortnite and Minecraft".
(Definitely the one closer to my youth came closer to "bra"/"brah", and while some of that was assumed to be surfer-originated, I can't tell you how much it was related to Hawaiian pigdin or just convergent evolutionary vowel shifts.)
>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
I know someone who won't sympathize with this difficulty, as he insisted on an obscure abortion joke in the man page for abort(), which will come off as super confusing to anyone who doesn't know the reference.
RMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice) where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.
If the documentation is intended to be used as a technical reference by people who won’t get the reference, that is, by its nature, unsympathetic to the people who will be using it, no matter what he claims — and I don’t think he has ever actually shown how he’s weighed such concerns.
For anyone interested in learning Sumerian, there is really nice introduction "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian"[0] by J. Bowen and M. Lewis, which gives you rough ability to understand some grammar and also read cuneiform. It's extremely niche topic and I can guarantee that you'll have absolutely no use for this knowledge[1], but if you're into learning exotic languages, this can be fun. At least it was for me.
I've been warned by a Sumerologist that the book is idiosyncratic. It does seem to be the only in-print and inexpensive option aimed at amateur scholars.
More mainstream options:
Hayes, John. A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. A teaching grammar for the beginner. In print, but quite expensive.
Edzard, D.O. Sumerian Grammar. A reference grammar rather than a teaching grammar with exercises and the like. It's really good if you already have some familiarity with linguistics. It's in print and inexpensive.
Thomsen, Marie-Louise. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. A reference grammar. Out of print but available on the high seas.
I'm sorry I can't add much more detail as I'm no expert and I'm paraphrasing an off-hand comment I heard around the time the book was published. The short of it is that Bowen & Lewis seem to take grammatical positions at odds with the rest of the field. This doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong. As you are likely aware, the Sumerian language is poorly understood and there's plenty of disagreement among Sumerologists.
I don't know about original clay tablet on which this was written, but it can be found through the original publication I think: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1359157, if someone has access to JSTOR.
About the interpretation, I myself understand only the:
A friend of mine was taking Akkadian or Sumerian (I can’t remember which) and described the wide range of possible correct translations of a text with a story from class.
One student said it was a receipt for the sale of a cow. The prof said that was one real possibility. Another said it was a love poem. Prof agreed again. :shrug:
But my favorite translation disagreement is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, I think, where one man insists the proper translation of a line is “the lords of the land of the blazing rockets.”
> One student said it was a receipt for the sale of a cow. The prof said that was one real possibility. Another said it was a love poem. Prof agreed again.
Neil Postman: "Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.”
Every time I see a Twitter post like this, I remember this quote.
My immediate response in this context is the back button - if you haven't given much thought to the medium, you likely haven't given much thought to the content itself.
Why? I must be missing something because Native Americans definitely had philosophy, oral traditions, and the like - smoke didn't change that and a vaguely racist comment about how they wouldn't be able to form thoughts because they didn't have some special medium for doing so just comes off as that.
You’re inserting intent that isn’t in the text - a sign of our times. It only says such thoughts can’t be transmitted via smoke signal. Here it’s used to say, “Fuck Tweet threads.”
And yet, they can be used to transmit such thoughts and the Native's communication is used as a frame - so what was that about me inserting things again?
So can Twitter threads. The bit about wood and blankets alludes to impracticality. It’s not about information theory. Why shouldn’t smoke signals be the frame? It’s an analogy. Why do you feel smoke signals are taboo for that purpose?
The comment had nothing to do with forming thoughts, but instead how thoughts can be meaningfully conveyed. If the mention of a minority or Native American technique in the analogy makes you close your mind before being able to understand:
Telegrams are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a frontier philosopher would run short of either money or time long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.
Hahaha. As a Mexican, I find the American focus on racism so simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary.
In Mexico, we don't have clean water in our faucets. Electricity and the internet shuts off, randomly due to infrastructure problems or maintenance. And yet, we are humorous. We make fun of each other. And yes, this includes racial and cultural differences which we laugh at, in poking fun at each other, together. In England they might call it "taking the piss out of you". In Mexico, it's normal.
And yet in the US, there's not these "third world problems",
So the aspect of "simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary" I mention is regarding how people in the US, since they don't have "third world problems", they make their own problems to create drama about... I suppose so that they can feel some sort of relevance of a struggle.
In doing so, they reduce the capacity of dialogue, and they ruin and potential existence of Humor in a conversation -- because people are expected to walk on egg shells on certain topics.
It really destroys the fun in conversations when you have to worry about "oh my goodness, I am risking talking about something that's not politically correct! Someone who isn't actually related to the conversation content might pretend to be offended for the sake of some other non-existing-in-the-conversation person to show off their virtuous nature".
This is a better way of expressing a thought that I've had for a couple years now. Indulge me in this thought experiment.
Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The same is true of science with its big bang. I argue that these stories perhaps tell us about the early universe, but not how it was created.
Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect?
I believe that human language has not yet reached a point where it could describe anything like that. If that has true we have debated for centuries about a question that even if an individual knew the answer they would be unable to express it to anyone else.
> describe where our universe came from ... that obeys the laws of cause and effect
All you've done is ask a trick question, like "prove Fermat's Last Theorem without using any math". The problem is you used the words "where", which means "a place in the universe", and "cause and effect", which means "tracing the causes of something backward in time", with "time" again existing only within this universe. It's a little like Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. All we've found is that this particular way of asking the question or describing the question is insufficient.
Obviously in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you need to use math. Obviously to talk about anything "external" to the universe, you need to use something that is not a "where" within this universe and does not follow the cause and effect defined within this universe. The question is: is it, therefore, useful to ask the question, given that we are stuck in this universe?
> Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created.
I haven't seen much arguments about this. In most civilized countries, religions have stopped to make factual claims about the "antediluvian times", because all their previous claims were proven false. For many decades, scientists have almost stopped arguing with religious figures. The tendency is that scientific people are less permeable to religious beliefs, and religions are almost powerless in scientific domains. Lastly, religions don't argue, internally or with each other, over the origin of the world.
> Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that.
The religious explanations failed to satisfy you, but at least some of them provide a consistent explanation. For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. You may dislike this "story before that", but it is clear and consistent.
> The same is true of science with its big bang.
It's not true. There are several theories about the origins before the big-bang, or at the big-bang. Science does provide the stories you long for, but at the same time science asserts that these are just hypotheses, and that it's highly probable that models in this domains are won't ever be proved.
> For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world.
Hmmm? It doesn't state anything about what happened before the creation, or where God came from.
It starts with "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (or "when God began to create heaven and earth") and nothing in Genesis mentions any moment or occasion prior to that.
Are you thinking of other aspects of Jewish or Christian tradition that aren't derived from the text of Genesis?
There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him. There has never been a time when he has not been, because he is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God. This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham and Isaac were, I AM."
This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'?
This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ?
If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.
The distinction is that unlike everything in creation, God does not derive His being from an outside source. You and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We are, out of, something else.
Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc.
God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be.
I could say, for example, that our universe was created when a 5th dimensional alien named Parkus Mersson ran universe.jar. But that only expands the notion of universe. I don’t think I can make the kind of statement you mean without regressing to something else that needs explaining.
> Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect?
Mathematical realism ala Tegmark's level 4 multiverse is a concrete example; if mathematical consistency causes existence then the big bang and our universe have a definite, understandable cause.
They don’t lack the language, they lack knowledge beyond that. As anything beyond that is down the rabbit’s hole of “everything is possible” and thus the story is as boring as the 10 season of your sci-go show when they have reached beyond unifinity of galaxies and you just can’t make a proper narrative about something that no longer has any reference to the viewers
i partially disagree. I agree that formal philosophical axioms as we understand them are out of reach by puffs of smoke, since philosophy tries to begin from a place of as limited context as possible. I disagree that the lack of that formality is an appropriate litmus for the sufficiency of a medium to harbor successful communication.
pairing known ideas can create new ideas by guiding a contextualized listener to discover the essence of the idea themself. if a cloud of smoke could represent a well known idea, which it can, and about 10 different smoke shapes are possible (for example).. then after 8 puffs of smoke the shaman can create up to 100000000 distinct chains of ideas to direct his audience to whatever it is he wants to them to understand. with smoke symbols for north south east and west, and the delays between when he creates them having assumed meaning, he could give directions to any location on earth - theoretically - with just two to three puffs of smoke
since language is shorthand and referential, it can never contain all the knowledge within itself that is necessary to properly understand it - which is part of the point of the original post. within my tribe, a single word might need a novel to explain to yours, if it is explainable at all. Kind of like being at the bar and something is said and a bunch of people start laughing and all they can communicate to you about it is "you had to be there". the ability to describe details is not the same as the ability to communicate
The smoke puff might be nonsense to an outside observer, but after a few carefully selected puffs curated for the perfect audience - you can communicate literally anything.
likewise, although i have given up on twitter - i do respect that there is often a mountain of context behind popular tweets. although those tweets might not be saying much to me, there is a tribe out there who have a much deeper experience with it than i do. And timing is a huge part of it, as well as the context of mainstream news, and a bunch of other things depending on the intended audience
I fail to see the problem. What content does the form of a sequence of tweets exclude? Run-on sentences? Does that sentence really need to be a hundred words long?
Isn't it objectively primitive technology? As for the blankets, it comes from the stereotypical image of person covering a smoldering fire with a blanket to release individual puffs of smoke, as in this [1] sketch.
> Why is it certain that this is a joke and not some kind of wisdom, charm or unknown literary category?
The distinction between those may not always be that well-defined.
I once read that the story of the Good Samaritan (by Jesus) follows the structure of a popular set of jokes (or possibly self-congratulatory "wisdom") of the time: something happens, a priest comes by and is useless, a Levite passes by and is useless, and finally a common Jew comes by and fixes the problem, and everybody gets to feel good about being a commoner and not some useless elitist. Except Jesus tripped up his audience by replacing the Jew with a Samaritan.
There is a famous story about Zhuangzi [if you prefer, Chuang Tzu] that goes like this:
-----
Zhuangzi and Huizi were crossing a bridge over the river Hao.
Zhuangzi said: the fish have come out to play; this makes them happy.
Huizi said: You are not a fish. How do you know what makes fish happy?
Zhuangzi said: You are not me. How do you know that I don't know what makes fish happy?
Huizi said: I am not you. Of course I do not know you. [But] you are certainly not a fish. Your non-knowledge of what makes fish happy is total.
Zhuangzi said: Please stick to your original [question]. You asked how I know what makes fish happy. You already knew that I knew this and [still] you asked me. I know it over the Hao.
-----
"I know it over the Hao" makes sense because in the original language, the word "how", 安, is also the word "where".
The story comes down to us as part of a foundational text. Is it wisdom or a cheap joke?
A lot of humour consists of buildup followed by a twist - the humour is in the contrast between the expected and the actual. This is very similar to explaining a concept that is flawed or misunderstood by building up a scenario where the expected outcome can be contrasted with an actual outcome. A smaller set replaces 'actual' with 'nonsense'.
The text may present this as wisdom, but I would say it is both wisdom and humour.
How rough is this translation? Does the "...walks into a bar" joke predate monotheism? Though we know that the Egyptian neighbours were drinking beer at the time, did either culture actually have drinking establishments?
As I understand it, Sumerian culture had drinking establishments. Though they don't seem to have been freestanding business establishments, and were often part of some larger organization (like a temple).
So "bar" would be an updated translation that preserves the essence of an idea of walking into a drinking place, but obviously a lot of the cultural nuance around the social role of a Sumerian tavern is lost. It doesn't really seem important for this joke though.
Different cultures may assign different connotations to what "bar" means, but first line of the original text says "walks into a [place]" and other sources using that same word [place] involve serving beer to patrons and/or prostitution there, so "bar" or "brothel" or "inn" may be roughly decent approximations; but "bar" has the "... walks into a bar" English trope going for it.
For what it's worth, I've also seen someone interpret this joke as related to prostitutes and windows (as Sumerian bars were apparently also brothels). I think this just goes to show how much one needs to understand about a society's culture to fully understand its jokes.
Even live languages have words, that are often used in normal speech, but cannot optimally be translated to other languages, and carry no real meaning on their own, except in some cases set the tone.
eg. "bre" in serbian is one of those words, where "nemoj da jedeš to" i "nemoj bre da jedeš to" mean basically the same thing ("don't eat that").
I don’t know Serbo–Croatian at all, but Wiktionary suggests colloquial English interjections like ‘man’, ‘the hell’ as adequate translations: ‘don’t eat that, man!’.
Another example: ¡Vamos!
It's kind of like "let's go", but carries more weight than its English translation. Some other languages have similar idioms for hurrying people up, but some languages simply don't.
Forget language, I once asked a Taiwanese colleague to tell me joke that is really considered funny in Taiwan, his response: "For example this is funny, a Polar bear that is cold on the North pole." Ok... I wonder what our jokes sound like to him...
I'm not sure if he is trying to tell some version of this joke, but here it goes:
(for context, dad jokes are often categorized as "cold jokes" here in China/Taiwan, since often its humor is not appreciated by the audience and thus making the vibe "cold")
So a polar bear become bored one day and had nothing to do. So he started to pull off his own hair. One, two, three. One by one the hairs were pulled off. After a while, the polar bear suddenly said: It's pretty cold out here!
Every couple of weeks I decide that the current state of affairs simply takes too long and switch things around, only to keep that going as an infinite loop :/
Haha, well, I hate shaving and that's why I often have a beard, you could call me lazy. My Taiwanese colleague was usually not so direct by the way, I'd call him shy but a very nice, warm person.
If you're referring to people spamming "desu" with a picture of Suiseiseki from Rozen Maiden, that's not meaningless. The original joke is that the character uses "desu" at the end of her sentences way more than is required by normal Japanese grammar. Other characters have similar verbal ticks, e.g. Kanaria with "de kashira".
There's a joke in French about two horses that go to the movies, I usually can't finish telling it from laughing too hard, yet people often find it extremely lame and unfunny. You can't explain humor I guess.
OK, I'll try. Keep in mind that English is not my first language.
Two horses go on a date. First they go and have a few drinks, and then they go to the restaurant. After that, they decide to go to the movies, and they go in one of those theaters with a big balcony in addition to the floor seats. They sit on the balcony and the movie starts.
After a while, one of the horses gets bored and decides to stretch its legs a little and walk around. It approaches the balcony railing and has a look around, at the people down on the floor seats, because it's more interesting than the movie itself. But suddenly, from leaning too hard against the railing, the horse falls down the balcony onto the people below.
The other horse doesn't notice at first. But after a while, it realizes the first horse is missing, so it looks around, looking for it. It approaches the railing, looks at the floor seats, and suddenly trips and falls down on the people below.
At this point, a very annoyed gentleman shouts: "hey, up there! Would you stop throwing horses??"
I think a polar bear that is cold on the north pole would be funny as a visual gag most places if executed well, because it breaks assumptions about polar bears. But for some reason when written down it's harder to make it fit the assumptions of the structure of a written joke in many cultures that seems to expect an action. To make it funny in writing, I think many place you'd need a more complex delivery wrapping creating a story around how you ran into this polar bear and it terrified you, but it turned out it was just cold and looking for some way to stay warm.
To throw a wrinkle into that, the joke was lost on me, despite being someone who logged several hundred (if not thousand) hours into the original Starcraft between 1998-2003 or so.
However, the distinction is my idea of "online play" back in the day was either playing with friends whom I knew personally, or playing an "All vs Comp" match where several human players would play against a single computer component. And we'd still lose about half the time.
But point being, I never really played PvP, and I don't think that term "counter" came from the original Starcraft manual or strategy guides. It was a term that evolved into the meta community. And if you weren't sufficiently plugged into that community, you wouldn't encounter the term.
There's probably tons of other examples of this, e.g. in the fighting game community.
Yeah, it's definitely in the sliver of the venn diagram where Starcraft and competitive gaming overlaps.
Here is another Starcraft joke you may appreciate:
> A dragoon walks into a bar. No, not around to the bar. A dragoon walks next to the entrance of a bar. A dragoon takes a step toward the bar. A dragoon walks into a bar. Nooo! Not that way!
I suppose the assumption is that the path is calculated based on a constant (I assume either average or current) speed, when in reality the speed varies?
I have a similar experience with Age of Empires 2. I played it a lot as a kid and only recently realised there's a pretty active multiplayer community with a few popular streamers like T90 on YouTube commentating on matches. They have a lot of custom lingo, so you'll hear something like "looks like he's going for fast imp" (meaning the commentator thinks a player is following a strategy whereby they prioritise advancing their civilization to the Imperial Age).
Wait, that game is still around!? I played it so much as a kid. I actually logged a lot in the original AOE. That is fantastic and a testament to what is lost with modern games requiring a server to be continually provided.
I find the "nothing" maps like that to be quite entertaining, but there are a number of good ones out there, and there's plenty of creative strategies and personalities. My favourite was a player called "WALL" who ... well maybe easier if I show you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ecZEs2Y0o
Marines are the basic unit of Terran. Terran will build marines throughout the game (unless they go mech, but bio is the primary composition for all matchups). With upgrades marines have high dps & speed. They're a small unit which means you can fit more dps within a small area. They're ranged, unlike zerglings & zealots. Terran's drop ship, medivacs, can ferry around 8 marines while healing them on the ground
In reality the counter to them is splash damage, though good micro can mitigate that somewhat, & Terran isn't going to stop building marines just because the opponent built some splash damage
In some regards this can be rooted in people expecting StarCraft to be like Age of Empires, where as you climb the tech tree you discard previous tech. StarCraft instead prefers tech to fill out a composition & late tech often provides a support role to earlier tech
In the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, each choice has a counter choice that thoroughly defeats it. If you knew that your opponent was going to reveal a scissors, you would counter with a rock.
In Star Craft, each unit has opposing units that are extra effective against it, so if your opponent had a bunch of marines, you might build a bunch of siege tanks.
You pretty much get balance whine in any competitive game. Sometimes the communities mature out of it, but the scrub mentality comes very natural to a lot of people.
I think it's a funny joke, though. Even though, when I've played Stacraft, I've been the one making marines.
I could view them before dinner, but it's indeed gone now: "Only approved followers". Guess this relatively "obscure" account got some attention he didn't expect/desired(?)
A healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these include:
"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"
"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"
"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way that medieval England still used Latin.
On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity) This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet
For refference, here is the opening of Beowulf written in English about a thousand years ago: "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning. ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned, geong in geardum, þone god sende folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat þe hie ær drugon aldorlease lange hwile." While you can kind of guess at some of the words and sounds, it's basically unreadable to a modern speaker.
Now here is the beginning of Canterbury Tales, written about 600 years ago: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, owthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." Still very difficult, but you can probably understand the gist of it.
Reading this thread and seeing the author complain about how ambiguous Sumerian is, I find it all the more incredible that we're able to figure out how to translate dead languages like this...
Generally speaking, translation of dead languages is done via means of bilingual texts. The Rosetta Stone is the most famous of these; for cuneiform, the key was apparently a trilingual Old Persian/Elamite/Akkadian inscription (the ‘Behistun inscription’). In this case, Old Persian is an Indo–European language, and Akkadian is Semitic, so those languages have plenty of modern-day relatives with very similar structures, which helps decipherment. Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian: again, the Semitic nature of Akkadian helped a lot here.
It also helps that most languages use more or less similar techniques to express certain concepts and relations. The elaborate case system and verbal morphology, though ‘exotic’ for Europeans, aren’t necessarily all that different to those found in languages elsewhere.
As for ambiguity… I’m not entirely sure how that particular problem is overcome, but the author mentioned duplicate manuscripts which together can remove some of the ambiguity. Beyond that, we just need to infer the missing pieces from the fact that languages are usually self-consistent to a large extent.
(Disclaimer: I know very little about this area, though I do enjoy reading about linguistics!)
> Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian
This isn't quite right; we didn't just find bilingual texts. We found curricular texts that were intended to train Akkadian speakers to be literate in Sumerian, which is obviously much better.
Sumerian was a dead prestige language used by scribes in ancient Mesopotamia. As such, there are parallel word lists and other such texts written in Akkadian (which is fairly well understood by modern scholars) meant for scribes learning the language.
Here[1] is a video covering how cuneiform (the writing system) was deciphered, most of it was solved after they found an inscription in three different languages.
This isn't just a problem for ancient languages and modern foreign languages. It's a problem for languages you speak fluently. And the implications are a lot bigger than understanding a joke.
Consdier a sentence like "Tim just squealed like a pig low key, actual" [1]. Throw in a few more choice phrases like "L plus ratio", "copium" and "dead ass" and someone from a few yers ago will have issues decoding all that. Many current people will be lost.
Words also disappear (eg [2]). Old English is essentially a different language. Middle English can be hars to parse.
~230 years ago the Bill of Rights became part of the US Constitution. The Firs Amendment [3] includes this text:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ...
"Establish" here at that time had a very specific meaning that differs from the current vernacular. This sprung from Britain where the Anglican Church was the Established church. That means it was responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages. Catholics, for example, would often get married twice: once in a Catholic church and a second time in an Anglican ceremony so it was official.
The framers here wanted to guard against there being an "official" religion in the nascent United States. All such official institutions were to be civil not religious.
Knowing this history makes this language more understandable yet an established religion is not something we in the West have dealt with in some time so the meaning has changed to the more general sense.
You can also have this discussion about the phrase "well-regulated militia" with respect to the Second Amendment too but that's a whole other topic.
The point remains: language drift has and will affect legal meanings and interpretations.
"You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets". Unfortunately my Twitter account was deleted for no stated reason a couple of days ago (maybe I expressed a thought crime, though I never discuss politics there...)
I love non-sequitur humor, so the idea of a Sumerian dog joke that (initially) makes no sense is already pretty hysterical.
> Sumerian doesn't really have "tense" as such. Instead, it has two "tense/aspects" (because Sumerologists don't like to overcommit)
The author himself has a pretty dry sense of humor as well. LOL.
Edit: After reading some of the author's other threads, I actually wonder now if anything he said in this thread is true. He seems to be an overly cynical know-it-all and not particularly accurate in what he talks about (for the subjects I recognize). Oh well.
One of my favorites in East Asia, well-known to everyone in China and Korea
四面楚歌 = 사면초가
"Four sides, Chu songs"
Refers to the conclusion of a bitter campaign in the 3rd century BCE for dominion in China. The famed general Xiang Yu (項羽) heard the singing of enemy soldiers of the enemy state of Chu and instantly grasped that he was doomed.
The phrase, used with cheerful irony, is very useful in many contemporary situations!
I would imagine this would be difficult to translate, unless "bar" has the two same meanings in language it is translated to. There might also be confusion where aquatic birds fit in, or if there a reference to the passage of time?
Whereas I would have taken the choice of location and animal to be an ancient root of, e.g.:
"They sent a sample of [SomeBeer] off to the state lab for analysis. The report came back: 'Shoot that horse, it suffers from diabetes.'"
Off topic to this interesting and really nerdy thread, but does anyone happen to know why, or does this show for anyone else, the "more tweets" segment below this one is a bunch of anti-trans rhetoric? I'm signed in but I only follow some software engineers, I don't follow these people, I've never interacted or liked any anti-trans sentiments. These are the tweets I'm seeing below the linked thread (TW: anti-trans sentiments):
etc etc etc; it's a heap of right-wing nonsense talking points, anti-Ukrainian sentiments crossed with anti-vaxxer posts, a comic claiming BLM embezzled money, a woman saying that if she cheated on a man it's the man's fault, Stonetoss, and even one claiming technology has made us all gay.
What the fuck Twitter? This is not what I signed up for, this is not relevant to my interests, this is not in any way related to anything I've interacted with Twitter for. Is this what you're earning money from these days? If this happens again I'll close my account. That'll teach 'em.
I got the same results. (Not logged in) I'd guess that these things are "trending" in "engagement" today because they are controversial and antagonistic.
My thinking is it is a problem of misaligned incentives. Twitter benefits from outrage through engagement. The perpetrators of hatred benefit from outrage through division. You and I, we do not benefit from this alignment.
This kind of discourse sort of exculpates the outraged. People have agency, however imperfect. We've gotten in a rut of blaming platforms for people's behavior -- both assholes that post in social media and brittle-porcelaine people who can't stand this torture.
Something needs to be done policy-wise about Twitter and Facebook, but we should also be telling each other to chill the frak out -- and to consider the truths (and every ideology has some truth to it, that's how it acquires verosimilitude and grows) behind the asshole's worldview. Maybe those damn transphobes are looking at some things that we've become blind to.
I am logged in and got the same results despite not following anyone close to connected to those tweets. There seems to be something specific about this thread that Twitter is connecting to the conservative side of the trans rights debate.
That's exactly what I'm thinking; these agitators generate tons of 'engagement' on twitter from both pro- and anti- whatever they're up for, which for Twitter translates to revenue.
It's why they didn't ban Trump for all this time until he was no longer president. I mean sure, as president of the US he would get special treatment, but he didn't use the official twitter account of the US presidency, and he caused a lot of issues. But also a lot of engagement for Twitter; I wouldn't be surprised if all the reactions, retweets and responses to his tweets, and the fact half the world news media would jump on top of anything he tweeted, were responsible for a big chunk of Twitter's usage during that period.
Many people are not at all pleased that this new gender identity belief system is being forced upon them. It's highly controversial to assert that men can become woman and women can become men, and this generates a lot of argument with people who recognise the biological fundamental of sex as holding primacy.
Twitter, being Twitter, is something of a battleground of opinions on this issue - so you're just seeing what are currently hot topics.
- BLM is unusually opaque about how it uses donations, particularly for something that's promoted by XKCD (usually a seal of quality).
- The current understanding of gender is very very new, and JK Rowling is 56. Also, are we saying no trans kids ever regret their choices?
- There are complaints by female athletes -- possibly just sour grapes -- that transwomen are unreachably strong. The usual rebuttal is that hormone therapy "undoes" in some sense the muscular advantage that testosterone produces, but the timeline for that is unclear, and not all of the peak male physical superiority is due to sheer muscle (bone structure and mass, etc.) These aren't talking points, it's other people's lives.
At any rate, your complaint is that someone is wrong on the internet! That does happen every once and then.
"More tweets" seems specifically designed to show you content you hate. No idea why. If you followed the people you list above it would show you the most extreme left-wing talking points instead.
I wonder what a Sumerian bar was like. Also, they must have had pretty lax public health rules if they let dogs go in. I can't take my dog to my local coffee shop!
Back then dogs would probably be preferable over the kind of fauna that would impose on you, even in the city. Besides they are a walking hand-towel, are they not.
It pisses me off people write long things like as a Tweet rather than a blog. I have to scroll over a dozen tweets before being hit by the "you need to login" popup.
Serious question: Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter? This looks like the textbook definition of something that should be in a blog.
>Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter?
Easy to catch audience. Yes, you can make a blog post and tweet a link. But tweets without links get more engagement and reach. (Something that can be attributed to users or/and site's algorithm.)
I think a blog would be held to more scrutiny than a series of tweets. The latter seems to give authors a way to rant about a topic without providing much in the way of exposition.
I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.
For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.