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SlothfulCobra posted:I have heard that Korean is so intuitive with its written language that you can flash a bunch of numbers to a native reader and they'll automatically add them all up This sounds like Korean nationalist BS. There's nothing "intuitive" about the Korean alphabet (usually they like to call it "scientific"). It's just an alphabet with some very strict syllable rules.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:36
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Arglebargle III posted:did the ancient egyptians pee yes, and in fact, a large enough portion of the population was infected by a parasite that your pee turning red was considered a rite of passage or so I read somewhere once years ago and can't find a source for. But there is a parasite native to egypt that makes you pee blood every so often which is common enough that as recently as the 20th century many egyptians thought it was a male equivalent to menstruation, where you just let out blood every so often
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Sep 8, 2020 23:38
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Arglebargle III posted:did the ancient egyptians pee Why else do you think those aliens built the Pyramids?
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Sep 8, 2020 23:39
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Language is tied to nationality, descent, ethnic origin so it’s pretty wrapped up with racism imho Just look at the word barbarian for example
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Sep 8, 2020 23:54
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If you drank as much beer as the pyramid builders probably did, you'd see some pee.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:57
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Koramei posted:I hope this isn't veering into the anecdotal, but I am really curious about this. I learned my second language as an adult and I definitely find I don't intuitively remember stuff from it as well as I do in my native language. Like it's not at the point where I don't remember the general gist of a conversation or something, but where in English I'll often remember distinct phrases from what we were saying that stuck we me, for my second language it's usually much less specific. Harsh words also feel a lot more cushioned when I hear them. So far as I know, that was the basis for the whole attempt at trying to integrate ebonics into school curriculums in areas with a lot of black people to help them learn. I heard it worked pretty well until the controversy over the concept drowned the whole thing. Maybe people also got uncomfortable because it acknowledged the de facto segregation in a lot of American school districts. There's probably an aspect of not everyone learns the "proper" language or dialect all that well, and even if you do, classrooms alone aren't a great place for learning languages. cheetah7071 posted:Even then written language is an invented tool, which can be adapted to be more suited to some tasks and less suited to others. Or even in extreme cases like mathematical or musical notation drop any connection to natural language entirely in order to excel at communicating information in a where niche area. Well, spoken language is an invented tool. Sorta. There's a very strong instinct for a human brain to adapt to some kind of language at some point, and even people who can't talk or hear tend to figure some way to get their ideas across, so long as there's somebody receptive on the other end.
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Sep 9, 2020 00:01
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Arglebargle III posted:did the ancient egyptians pee When you really think about it, the Nile is peeing into the Mediterranean
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Sep 9, 2020 00:16
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How much of the med is statistically egyptian pee?
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Sep 9, 2020 00:31
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Koramei posted:I hope this isn't veering into the anecdotal, but I am really curious about this. I learned my second language as an adult and I definitely find I don't intuitively remember stuff from it as well as I do in my native language. Like it's not at the point where I don't remember the general gist of a conversation or something, but where in English I'll often remember distinct phrases from what we were saying that stuck we me, for my second language it's usually much less specific. Harsh words also feel a lot more cushioned when I hear them. That mirrors my experience quite closely. My personal theory on it is that it has less to do with how old you are when you learn the language and more to do with how much time you spend *fully* immersed in the language. Friends of mine here who started learning at the same age as me but didn't have convenient opportunities to revert to English have a much more internalized grasp of the language than I do.
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Sep 9, 2020 00:41
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Colonel, is pee stored in the pyramids?
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Sep 9, 2020 00:45
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Soldiers, remember that from the tops of these pyramids, 40 centuries of piss contemplate you
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Sep 9, 2020 00:47
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:How much of the med is statistically egyptian pee? All water is pee, so all of it.
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Sep 9, 2020 00:48
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GoutPatrol posted:All water is pee new thread title?
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Sep 9, 2020 00:49
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Arglebargle III posted:did the ancient egyptians pee can't become a mummy if you don't pee
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Sep 9, 2020 00:57
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Grand Fromage posted:This sounds like Korean nationalist BS. There's nothing "intuitive" about the Korean alphabet (usually they like to call it "scientific"). It's just an alphabet with some very strict syllable rules.
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Sep 9, 2020 01:08
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pompee magnus
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Sep 9, 2020 01:27
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Nessus posted:What I've heard is that hangul is really easy to learn, which I can absolutely buy if it follows very regular rules. But if Japanese only used kana that would also be true of that language. You can teach yourself katakana and hiragana in like a week, but actually trying to read japanese without the context provided by the kanji is a miserable experience.
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Sep 9, 2020 01:31
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Gaius Marius posted:You can teach yourself katakana and hiragana in like a week, but actually trying to read japanese without the context provided by the kanji is a miserable experience.
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Sep 9, 2020 01:42
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Nessus posted:What I've heard is that hangul is really easy to learn, which I can absolutely buy if it follows very regular rules. But if Japanese only used kana that would also be true of that language. It's easy to learn, but it's not any easier than any other alphabet. It just happens that compared with its Chinese and Japanese neighbors, it's simple. Nessus posted:Yeah, my understanding is that Korean is written in 100% hangul although I presume Chinese characters are well known. Hanja, the local name for Chinese characters, are not used in everyday life and for a while were not taught at all. They reintroduced hanja classes, but if you ask Koreans what subject they hated most in school they usually say hanja, people don't learn it. I had one friend in Korea who knew hanja reasonably well and everyone thought she was a huge weirdo and nerd for remembering any of it. You will occasionally see hanja in newspapers (if you see a newspaper; I assume they still use some hanja since only olds are reading them anyway) but the only place you see them used regularly is on menus. Small, medium, and large size portions are frequently indicated with 小, 中, and 大. Hangeul is all you need for modern Korean. North Korea also does not use hanja at all.
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Sep 9, 2020 02:08
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Grand Fromage posted:Hangeul is all you need for modern Korean. North Korea also does not use hanja at all. Interesting, I would think their stronger ties with China would reverse that. Is it just that they're too nationalistic to use Chinese characters?
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Sep 9, 2020 03:33
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Fuschia tude posted:Interesting, I would think their stronger ties with China would reverse that. Is it just that they're too nationalistic to use Chinese characters? Basically. Hangeul is a Korean invention by Koreans for the glory of Korea and its superiority over all neighbors.
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Sep 9, 2020 03:58
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I don't get it. It's kind of non-sequitur. It starts with Arglebargle III posted:tbh it's kinda racist to associate language with race at all Then turns into Arglebargle III posted:did the ancient egyptians pee then there's a bunch of pee jokes and maybe some more relatively interesting conversation So what did I miss?
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Sep 9, 2020 04:14
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I think it was his way of saying he disapproves of the preceding conversationFuschia tude posted:Interesting, I would think their stronger ties with China would reverse that. Is it just that they're too nationalistic to use Chinese characters? Yeah despite the diplomatic ties, North Korean scholars tend to actually be way less receptive to acknowledging historical Chinese cultural influences and so on in general than scholars in South Korea. Grand Fromage posted:It's easy to learn, but it's not any easier than any other alphabet. It just happens that compared with its Chinese and Japanese neighbors, it's simple. I dunno, I think it is genuinely easier than most other alphabets to learn, especially to learn it to the point you can use it functionally. It's just not some quasi-mystical thing like it's often portrayed. Koramei fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 04:22
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Koramei posted:I dunno, I think it is genuinely easier than most other alphabets to learn, especially to learn it to the point you can use it functionally. It's just not some quasi-mystical thing like it's often portrayed. I disagree on it being easier intrinsically. As an English native speaker it has the advantage of being entirely different, so you aren't tripping yourself up with "oh wait no P is an r sound in Cyrillic" all the time. But if you were Thai and both the Roman and Hangeul alphabets were equally alien I don't think it would matter. People will claim it's pronounced exactly as written, but that's not quite true for even Seoul dialect and sure isn't the case for the Gyeongsang Korean I learned.
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Sep 9, 2020 04:38
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euphronius posted:Language is tied to nationality, descent, ethnic origin so it’s pretty wrapped up with racism imho Barbarian isn't as great of an example IMO, that's just the Ancient Greeks deriding foreigners for having languages that sounded like "bar bar bar" to their ears. The principle would apply well to words like Goths, Vandal, Vulgar (named after Bulgars) and etc. Words like Frank also still preserve their original meaning too, but the modern Anglo world views the French as charming rather than blunt these days. In English specifically, most of our swear words come from a Germanic or Anglo Saxon origin, while our sophisticated words mostly come from French (as an result of William the Conqueror's invasion). As for arithmetic and Chinese (and also other languages like Turkish, Japanese and etc), there's been plenty of research done on it. For numbers, every numeral (0 - 9) has one syllable, and ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand etc all also are pronounced in one single syllable. Saying something like 90 is literally translated as "nine-ten". Compare that to French, where ninety is "quatre vingt dix", or "four twenty ten", and you can quickly see how doing timetables in French might be more difficult than in Chinese (In Chinese, the tunes for timetables go like "two six one ten two, two seven one ten four", with each word taking just one syllable). At the same time, any learner of the French language will tell you that there might be a lot of rules in French, once you get the rules it mostly applies. It's got less edge cases like in English where it's "i before e except after c". That's why learning French also makes you better at English grammar, as it makes you think about English in terms of French grammatical rules (which do have many equivalents, as English is about 60% French anyway). Anecdotally (and also proven with a lot of research), with the written Chinese language, it is significantly more difficult to learn, and creates a huge barrier to entry to the point where there are words that poorer people just wouldn't know at all, and even looking them up in a dictionary is significantly harder (almost impossible in the past before pinyin unless you happened to have access to an imperial dictionary, and had the training to actually use it). This also echoes in Chinese history, where they had 'meritocratic' exams for entry into becoming an official, but poor people would never have the time to sit down and just memorize lines from Confucius and perfecting their calligraphy to pass. These days, a lot of Chinese youths actually write in pinyin instead of the traditional (already simplified by Mao) characters when they're online, and the trend is pretty likely that then traditional script will only be used by academics language in a few generations. The Chinese language has no sound etymology either (the hints to the meaning of the word mostly lies in the look of the character rather than the sound and many words sound very similar to each other and depend solely on context, but the look has also been heavily stylized with time), so it becomes significantly harder to guess the meaning of the world if you don't know the word at all. This does hurt vocabulary learning a lot, and hence creates another barrier between poor people (who stick to using words they know rather than learning new words that they wouldn't be able to look up at all) and richer people and thus denies the poorer part of society the chance to participate in debates and papers with more complicated language. In the past, this heavily hurt social mobility alongside cultural norms that frowned upon social mobility itself, and lowered creativity due to a smaller pool of people who could actually become inventors. Koramei posted:I hope this isn't veering into the anecdotal, but I am really curious about this. I learned my second language as an adult and I definitely find I don't intuitively remember stuff from it as well as I do in my native language. Like it's not at the point where I don't remember the general gist of a conversation or something, but where in English I'll often remember distinct phrases from what we were saying that stuck we me, for my second language it's usually much less specific. Harsh words also feel a lot more cushioned when I hear them. Interestingly, English is my second language, and I also do remember distinct phrases better in English as well compared to my first language, and I can also think of different phrases for the same meaning more easily in English compared to my first language as well. Maybe it has something to do with English being an imperial language, and it's just easier to mix and match pieces of it because while it previously wasn't correct to mix things that way, enough people (mostly non native speakers who learned it as an additional language) did it, and so it got accepted as correct over time. Cetea fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 08:07
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-accidental double post, please delete-
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Sep 9, 2020 08:28
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Also, written and spoken language are completely different, to the point where any advantage a written language has has no bearing on the spoken language
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Sep 9, 2020 08:31
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In some other thread someone linked to a study that iirc used machine learning to figure out that different cultures perceive the meaning of words, that are ostensibly translations of one another, differently. I'll link to it if I can find it. Also, it's been noted for a long time that certain words in the classical languages are hard to translate because their meaning is very specific to a certain time and culture. For example καλός, nominally "beautiful", has a wide range of meanings from good to noble to virtuous. λογος is another one that means a lot more than just "word".
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Sep 9, 2020 10:14
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cheetah7071 posted:Also, written and spoken language are completely different, to the point where any advantage a written language has has no bearing on the spoken language That's very true, but given that scientific invention requires the written word, it's easy to understand how the barrier to entry caused by the Qin Logograms reduced overall creativity in pre-modern China due to cutting off a vast group of people from learning enough of the language to participate in scientific discourse, compared to societies that used an alphabetical system (like the Greek, Cyrillic, Latin or Arabic alphabet systems). Of course the barrier to entry was still high in Renaissance Florence, but it was lower than in medieval China, especially since in traditional Chinese society, the merchant class was considered the lowest of the low. This further erodes opportunity for social advancement, which was and remains one of the keys for scientific development. Grevling posted:In some other thread someone linked to a study that iirc used machine learning to figure out that different cultures perceive the meaning of words, that are ostensibly translations of one another, differently. I'll link to it if I can find it. Also, it's been noted for a long time that certain words in the classical languages are hard to translate because their meaning is very specific to a certain time and culture. For example καλός, nominally "beautiful", has a wide range of meanings from good to noble to virtuous. λογος is another one that means a lot more than just "word". Yes, this is exactly the case in my personal experience as well; words in different languages generally have different connotations. A good example between English and Chinese would be "Human Rights", where rights in English is associated with justice and the natural order, but the same term "人权" in Chinese is literally translated back into English as "Human Power", and in Chinese, it also has that more aggressive tone and feel in the language (the term for power, also has the exact same sound as the word "fist"). Cetea fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 11:19
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What is "the natural order"?
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Sep 9, 2020 11:39
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Stringent posted:What is "the natural order"? It's like AEWs The Dark Order except instead of gimp suits they wear leaf bikinis.
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Sep 9, 2020 11:43
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Stringent posted:What is "the natural order"?
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Sep 9, 2020 11:45
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So I have some questions about this.Cetea posted:That's very true, but given that scientific invention requires the written word Why is that a given, does it? Cetea posted:it's easy to understand how the barrier to entry caused by the Qin Logograms reduced overall creativity in pre-modern China due to cutting off a vast group of people from learning enough of the language to participate in scientific discourse Ok, but is that a fault in the language or the education system? Seems like the literacy rate in China atm is pretty high? Cetea posted:This further erodes opportunity for social advancement, which was and remains one of the keys for scientific development. Sorry, I'm not familiar with any literature correlating scientific development and social advancement, could you link something?
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Sep 9, 2020 12:07
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Stringent posted:What is "the natural order"? It might be pretty memeable, but I'm pretty sure the idea comes from classical times (at the very least, the idea features pretty prominently in Cicero) where people believed that there was some sort of natural law that could not be broken, but that humans haven't quite figured it out yet, but it was our duty in some ways to try to understand it and get closer to it as much as possible. To the ancients, it would probably be stuff like "what goes up must come down" (which we have disproved now with our knowledge of gravity), and they also heavily associated it with mathematics, like the value of pi, and things like that. In the modern world, I'm pretty sure most scientists will agree that the natural order is stuff like the constant speed of light, the fact that time can only move forwards (although the rate of that time moving is altered by relativity); on a more biological level, you'd also have the idea that all life will seek to expand until it fills every available niche, along with a ton of other stuff that I'm sure I've missed that we know to almost certainly be universal constants (though given our recent understand of quantum mechanics, they may not be multiversal).
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Sep 9, 2020 12:10
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Cetea posted:It might be pretty memeable, but I'm pretty sure the idea comes from classical times (at the very least, the idea features pretty prominently in Cicero) where people believed that there was some sort of natural law that could not be broken, but that humans haven't quite figured it out yet, but it was our duty in some ways to try to understand it and get closer to it as much as possible. To the ancients, it would probably be stuff like "what goes up must come down" (which we have disproved now with our knowledge of gravity), and they also heavily associated it with mathematics, like the value of pi, and things like that. In the modern world, I'm pretty sure most scientists will agree that the natural order is stuff like the constant speed of light, the fact that time can only move forwards (although the rate of that time moving is altered by relativity); on a more biological level, you'd also have the idea that all life will seek to expand until it fills every available niche, along with a ton of other stuff that I'm sure I've missed that we know to almost certainly be universal constants (though given our recent understand of quantum mechanics, they may not be multiversal). Ok, but that's physics and it seemed like you were applying it to the phrase "Human Rights", or did I misread?
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Sep 9, 2020 12:17
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Stringent posted:So I have some questions about this. Imagine a world with no written word (which is most of human existence); knowledge was passed down orally, which is not conductive to scientific advances because all knowledge becomes part of a giant telephone game. With each generation, the words change slightly until the original story is lost entirely. Now if a written language existed, but the barrier to entry was extremely high, then the knowledge transfer becomes much harder because there's nobody to read it. This is pretty much what happened in Western Europe in the dark ages, as basically only monks and priests could read. Scientific advances did continue, but were much slower compared to the later eras. Imagine if you were a modern person who could not read; I doubt you could contribute in any meaningful way to scientific advances except for becoming a test subject. To your second point, as this is an ancient history thread, I am talking specifically about medieval and classical China's scientific advances and development. Literacy in all the dynasties before modern times was restricted mostly to the upper classes. Unlike in Europe, where the literate people were mostly monks who did nothing all day except copy texts (and were therefore bored out of their mind, and more likely to engage in experimentation that lead to scientific advances), in China literate people were mostly bureaucrats who had to deal with the day to day number crunching grind of running an empire, leaving not much time for individual enterprises. To your last point, social advancement (getting richer, having a higher social station) is directly correlated with the quality of your education. In medieval times you would almost never find a farmer who could read, and if you can't read, you wouldn't be able to engage with other people scientifically, and the chances of you having spare time to 'waste' on creative thinking instead of plowing some field is slim. This still exists in the modern world today, despite public education funded by the state, something that did not exist at all in classical or medieval times: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html
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Sep 9, 2020 12:26
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Stringent posted:Ok, but that's physics and it seemed like you were applying it to the phrase "Human Rights", or did I misread? To a great number of modern activists, Human Rights is as universal to them as the speed of light (the same concept exists in the US declaration of independence that "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.") Whether they are correct or not is up to interpretation, but I'm saying that is what the word 'Rights' means in terms of how a great number of people feel about the word, and that is a cultural connotation that has been passed down from classical times (through the Catholic Church's claim to universalism). That same term, "Rights", translated into Chinese has a completely different cultural connotation, as "权" means power, authority, expediency, expedience, or advantageous position. Cetea fucked around with this message at 12:38 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 12:31
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Stringent posted:Ok, but is that a fault in the language or the education system? Seems like the literacy rate in China atm is pretty high? I can’t speak to your other questions but chinese primary students take several years longer than english students to become literate due to the need to memorize a minimum of thousands of characters. These extra years represent time not spent on math, science, history, etc. Officially the current literacy rate is 97% which compares favorably with the us’s 99%, but what counts as literate for official purposes may differ from what’s functionally literate in daily use. hypnophant fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 12:34
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Cetea posted:To a great number of modern activists, Human Rights is as universal to them as the speed of light (the same concept exists in the US declaration of independence that "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.") Whether they are correct or not is up to interpretation, but I'm saying that is what the word 'Rights' means in terms of how a great number of people feel about the word, and that is a cultural connotation that has been passed down from classical times (through the Catholic Church's claim to universalism). That same term, "Rights", translated into Chinese has a completely different cultural connotation, as "权" means power, authority, expediency, expedience, or advantageous position. Ok, if we're arguing that the English term "rights" doesn't equate with "power, authority, expediency, expedience, or advantageous position" I don't think we're going to make any progress here.
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Sep 9, 2020 12:43
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Stringent posted:Ok, if we're arguing that the English term "rights" doesn't equate with "power, authority, expediency, expedience, or advantageous position" I don't think we're going to make any progress here. Certainly it doesn't hold the same connotations in English if you read it in context of the US Declaration of Independence (from which its modern definition comes from, at least in English). Life, liberty and happiness is not exactly authority (although that does make some people happy, other people are happy to just worship some tree without anyone telling them it's stupid, and for others it's eating Big Macs). An example is that a person that has rights doesn't have the power to kill someone, but a person with enough authority certainly can (extreme case: random citizen in the USA has the right to insult someone, and Kim Jong Un has the authority to execute almost anyone he wants as long as they're in his country). It certainly doesn't have the same tone as "Fist" in Chinese, which sounds very much the same as the word "权", and human brains do associate one thing with another if it is similar. Indeed as a speaker of the language, "权" has always had an association with violence mentally for me. Cetea fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Sep 9, 2020 |
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Sep 9, 2020 12:51
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