91–100 of 110 posts
This is attracting some reader interest here, so I should probably mention, for other Hacker News participants deeply interested in human languages, a definitive analysis of Esperanto[1] explaining why Esperanto has not caught on with more speakers. [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
I found this article fascinating and satisfying. I'm curious about the desire to reduce ambiguity, which seemed to be emphasized as a motivation for the creation of Ithkuil and some of the other languages mentioned. Is it desirable to completely eliminate ambiguity? I can see why it would be desirable in a scientific paper or a public political debate. But in everyday interactions, (intentional) ambiguity plays many…
Steven Pinker explores this point in an entertaining presentation[1] for RSA. He also covers other language topics such as spacetime encoding, and profanity but the last part analyzes the need for ambiguity in a language. I deep-linked into the relevant portion of the presentation although the the entire talk is very enlightening. It's worth rewinding to the beginning to watch the entire talk. The 2nd youtube video[2] is the mostly the same material but it's the older one he presented at Google TechTalks.
If anyone wants to hear what Ithkuil sounds like : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ithkuil_... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Language should not be concise. Redundancy is built into the language for a reason - language communication is extremely noisy and if there's two-bit-error distance between "I love you" and "I killed and ate your dog" then the usage of this language by humans would not be comfortable. Moreover, people communicating are imperfect. So if you have a language which is very precise and concise, you would have to spend a l…
In some languages the meaning of a word is highly dependent on the pitch accent, like ancient Greek. If you're 1 bit off you have trouble :) Surprising enough I read an example of this yesterday evening: "Hegelochus, the actor in Euripides' Orestes, which was presented in 408 BC, in line 279 of the play, instead of "after the storm I see again a calm sea" (galeén' horoo), Hegelochus recited "after the storm I see aga…
Mark 10:25 (and parallel versions in Matthew and Luke) has prompted much speculation over the centuries with regards to the origin of it's evocative metaphor: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."
But when you consider that the word for camel (kamêlos) and for rope (kamilos) differ by only one vowel, quite a mundane explanation springs to mind: someone in the early church misheard, misspelled, or mistranslated Jesus' original admonition.
The more satisfying explanation, the one that I prefer, is that this is a pun that happens to have gotten lost in translation.
The few comments in this blog article offer some interesting explanations:
http://rambambashi.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/common-errors-36...
I found this article fascinating and satisfying. I'm curious about the desire to reduce ambiguity, which seemed to be emphasized as a motivation for the creation of Ithkuil and some of the other languages mentioned. Is it desirable to completely eliminate ambiguity? I can see why it would be desirable in a scientific paper or a public political debate. But in everyday interactions, (intentional) ambiguity plays many…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ithkuil is not simple. It's so ridiculously complex that it is just not possible for anyone to learn to speak fluently. It never stood any chance of being adopted in the way Esperanto has. I'm surprised that it found any use at all, but people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered.
>people without linguistics training seem to find it useful for discovering nuances in their own languages that they hadn't considered. Learning any foreign language will tend to do that, though. It's a function of being forced to consider your native tongue as a language, rather than just speaking it. Plus if you learn a foreign language, you will have the advantage of being able to talk to an established base of pe…
I found this article fascinating and satisfying. I'm curious about the desire to reduce ambiguity, which seemed to be emphasized as a motivation for the creation of Ithkuil and some of the other languages mentioned. Is it desirable to completely eliminate ambiguity? I can see why it would be desirable in a scientific paper or a public political debate. But in everyday interactions, (intentional) ambiguity plays many…