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India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

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Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#261

Post by JohnStrangeII »

BurningCycles wrote: post #240
naravara wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>s to your second point—no government today is as large in scope as say Rome, the British Empire, the Persian empire, etc. Utter hogwash. In terms of scale and intensiveness if state powers even small nations can easily outstrip the bureaucratic complexity of any ancient empire. The challenges of maintaining a welfare state is no small thing. And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 5…

>And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 50 official languages on its own, and that’s ignoring dialects and weird subgroups. Indo-Aryan is spoken by ~74% of India, with Dravidian spoken by ~24% of India. So in practice the real-life language diversity is very small. As for 'managing diversity', India has historically 'solved' this through a caste system, not a solution I would propos…

Non-linguists tend to grossly underestimate the number of languages and diversity in regions of the earth. Because "language" is a political construct, it also depends a bit on how you count. According to official classification there are actually around 447 languages spoken in India by native speakers from the region. Of these, 122 are spoken by 10,000 people or more, and of these 22 are official languages.

Source: I'm trained as a general linguist, but are not specialized in ethno- and sociolinguistics. Check out https://www.ethnologue.com for more information.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#262

Post by speedplane »

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #261
BurningCycles wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 50 official languages on its own, and that’s ignoring dialects and weird subgroups. Indo-Aryan is spoken by ~74% of India, with Dravidian spoken by ~24% of India. So in practice the real-life language diversity is very small. As for 'managing diversity', India has historically 'solved' this through a caste system, not a solution I would propos…

Non-linguists tend to grossly underestimate the number of languages and diversity in regions of the earth. Because "language" is a political construct, it also depends a bit on how you count. According to official classification there are actually around 447 languages spoken in India by native speakers from the region. Of these, 122 are spoken by 10,000 people or more, and of these 22 are official languages. Source:…

> Non-linguists tend to grossly underestimate the number of languages and diversity in regions of the earth.

True, but old-school linguists tend to revel in this diversity, whereas more modern linguists try to find commonalities between these very diverse languages.

I remember auditing a linguistics class in college largely because I was interested in NLP. Sadly, I got the old-school professors who were more interested in students memorizing hundreds of variants of sounds than understanding the links between them. I dropped the course. Maybe if I stuck around long enough they would get to more global insights, but I was turned off by their entire approach.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#263

Post by JohnStrangeII »

BurningCycles wrote: post #254
hollerith wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that every speaker of an Indo-Aryan language can understand every other speaker of an Indo-Aryan language?

My understanding is that yes, to a very large extent, since they are dialects of the same language foundation, which is sanskrit and later prakrit.

No, you're referring to very broad language families. See my other post or www.ethnologue.com for accurate information.

It's a bit of a tricky business, because what counts as a language is often also determined by political decisions. Mutual comprehensibility is not a reliable criterion. However, modern linguistics uses pretty good sets of "soft" criteria for the classifications.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#264

Post by whoisninja »

dragonsh wrote: post #7

It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…

agreed, should be like that.

but play Sid Meier's Civilization

read about operation paper clip

and read about Helium on the moon

and it's not just space, you can say same about any technological advancement. why re-invent? why not collaborate? I guess, you've think deeper about nation states in current form.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#265

Post by JohnStrangeII »

speedplane wrote: post #262
JohnStrangeII wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-linguists tend to grossly underestimate the number of languages and diversity in regions of the earth. Because "language" is a political construct, it also depends a bit on how you count. According to official classification there are actually around 447 languages spoken in India by native speakers from the region. Of these, 122 are spoken by 10,000 people or more, and of these 22 are official languages. Source:…

> Non-linguists tend to grossly underestimate the number of languages and diversity in regions of the earth. True, but old-school linguists tend to revel in this diversity, whereas more modern linguists try to find commonalities between these very diverse languages. I remember auditing a linguistics class in college largely because I was interested in NLP. Sadly, I got the old-school professors who were more interest…

Since I'm trained as a new linguist, not the old school you're referring to, I feel compelled to reply in order to correct some potential misunderstandings here. Structurally, you could also just take the position of Pollard & Sage (1994), for which they were so heavily criticized, and assume that every language on earth has the deep structure of English. By purely structural criteria many languages that historically unrelated would be somehow closely related to each other.

That is clearly not adequate if you want to take a look at languages and culture (in that language). Classifications of languages as languages are partly political, sometimes even highly political, and mutual comprehensibility is not a working criterion.

I don't recall the details, but the classification used by ethnologue.com are a fairly reasonable set of soft criteria. The alternative would be not to speak of languages and dialects at all, and instead only about varieties of various language families with a certain degree of mutual comprehensibility to other varieties, but that would be even more counter-intuitive to laymen.

As to your personal experience: That's sad, you merely seem to have ended up in the wrong department / with the wrong professors. Find some general linguists and computational linguists and you should get your global insights. Phonology was actually at the forefront of general structural descriptions, sometimes even earlier than in syntax. For example, they invented optimality theory. It's worth giving it another try!

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#266

Post by whoisninja »

whoisninja wrote: post #264
dragonsh wrote: post #7

It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…

agreed, should be like that. but play Sid Meier's Civilization read about operation paper clip and read about Helium on the moon and it's not just space, you can say same about any technological advancement. why re-invent? why not collaborate? I guess, you've think deeper about nation states in current form.

also universities, internet and open-source software has bridged lot of that gap but then we also have claims like China stealing IP from US (not suggesting who's right or wrong, but stating a fact)

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#267

Post by plibither8 »

happy-go-lucky wrote: post #259

Latest update... looks like they've found the location of the lander on the lunar surface, the orbiter has clicked a thermal image of the lander, and they're trying to establish a contact with it. Don't know how reliable this source is: https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1170610654232731648

Edit: This is a fake account. My apologies.

From the ISRO Chief himself: https://twitter.com/KailasavadivooS/status/11706129755828879...

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#268

Post by kerng »

hollerith wrote: post #241
BurningCycles wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 50 official languages on its own, and that’s ignoring dialects and weird subgroups. Indo-Aryan is spoken by ~74% of India, with Dravidian spoken by ~24% of India. So in practice the real-life language diversity is very small. As for 'managing diversity', India has historically 'solved' this through a caste system, not a solution I would propos…

Are you saying that every speaker of an Indo-Aryan language can understand every other speaker of an Indo-Aryan language?

Can someone with more linguistic background compare this to Roman languages for me.

Is this like saying Italian, French, Spanish are pretty much the same because they are Romamtic languages? Or English and German are interchangable, because English is a Germanic language?

Or, is much closer like British and American English- just mostly difference because of accents and dialects?

Trying to understand how different Indian subgroups of languages are.

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#269

Post by kerng »

coldtea wrote: post #97
selimthegrim wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kashmir would like a word with respect to 2)

Kashmir, and Pakistan and Bangladesh, and co... Still, India as of today remains huge (1.4 billion people) and mostly homogenous and more long lived than most other nations, the claim wasn't that it was a monolithic thing that never had any splits/ethnic issues... The comparison I explicitly made was to e.g. the Babylonian empire (now totally gone), the Roman empire (now totally gone), the British colonial empire (no…

You can argue they regrouped via the European Union, like both Austria, Hungary as well as Italy and France are members of the union - to name a few.

They all even use the same currency too!

Re: India Loses Contact with Probe Just as It Prepares to Land on Moon

#270

Post by sqldba »

dragonsh wrote: post #7

It's a good effort by ISRO and it's scientist. Just can't understand why so many countries reinventing the wheels. Space missions should be multi-country efforts continuously as it belongs to all. We should not extend our tribal nationalistic thinking to space. Best scientist can be in any nation and more diverse the group and experience the better chances of success. I know I am just dreaming, but hopefully we can c…

I also have to disagree. There’s a difference between working with others to achieve a certain familiarity with the science and industry to sustain it, and riding on the coat tails of other countries who can provide all of that for you but may pull it at any time such as for trade war purposes.
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