This age old saying comes from the days of public hangings. On the day of execution the condemned man would be taken from the prison and driven down the main thoroughfare of the town through screaming crowds, to the gallows. It was customary at the time for him to be given a drink from every ale house that stood between him and the rope, (which could be as many as 20) the intention being to make the poor soul completely bladdered before reaching the rope, thus making his passing easier. Hence, ‘One for the road‘.
Tag: languages
Non-leaky abstractions in physics
i talked to prof. eberhard hilf yesterday. hilf is a retired professor of theoretical physics who is now working on the problems around long-term storage of electronic scientific data. we talked about the change in semantics as science moves forward, and the need to not only port content from old storage media to new ones, but also the need to transcribe the content itself to make it accessible to scientists of another age.
hilf demonstrated how equations as jotted down by einstein in 1905 would be almost incomprehensible to modern scientists today. over the years, verbose notations have been replaced by increasingly more succinct ones, new symbols have been introduced. i immediately had to think of leaky abstractions. hilf was adamant that physics was not prone to those problems because it is grounded in solid math.
good for them physicists, and too bad computer science cannot claim the same currently.
English
Germish, also referred to as Denglisch, Engleutsch, Genglish or Ginglish is a jumble of English terms embedded within a grammatically German sentence (or vice versa). It is spoken in all German-speaking countries and owes its existence in part to the cultural predominance of English language pop music and international computer slang.
How can you not love a free encyclopedia?
2008-04-19: Nerdic catches on
~100 new words are added to the language of technology, dubbed ‘Nerdic‘, every year – 3x as many as make it into the Oxford English Dictionary.
2008-09-14: France learning English
I’ve had enough of hearing that the French do not learn English. It’s a big disadvantage for international competition. Yet in the globalized, internet age, the French seem to realize that the losers from a refusal to learn English are themselves—and that speaking it need not make them less French.
2009-05-30: Wow. 1000s of Chinese school kids shouting english in a stadium, to learn.
2010-03-30: The world language is coming, globish
More than a lingua franca, the rapid adoption of ‘decaffeinated English’ makes it the world’s most widely spoken language.
2014-02-04: Other languages may exist
The Coca-Cola Company ignited a firestorm of controversy on Sunday with a Super Bowl ad that appeared to make the inflammatory claim that other languages besides English exist. “Last night, Coke assaulted millions of Americans with its misguided and inappropriate view that other languages exist. In the future, we strongly hope that Coke will keep its crazy theories to itself.”
2015-07-19: Everything is becoming english. Many languages borrow not just words but grammar from english.
GERMANS joke about their bad English. In Berlin, you can buy fridge magnets with German expressions over-literally translated into English, like “It is me sausage”—a word-for-word rendering of Es ist mir Wurst, or “it’s all the same to me”. “German Quatsch” on Twitter has many more. But educated Germans usually speak English quite well. The reality is that, to a deeper extent than commonly realized, German is changing under constant influence from English.
2017-01-07: Many countries would benefit from this. I’m always embarrassed for companies that can’t communicate.
Japan continues to work inside a linguistic bubble – not least because many firms in Japan are oriented towards the domestic market and pay little heed to global trends. But this approach is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Switching to English makes Japanese firms more competitive, while opening employees’ eyes to the outside world. There is another benefit to using English in business: The language has few power markers. Its use can therefore help to break down the hierarchical, bureaucratic barriers that are entrenched in Japanese society and reflected in Japanese conversation, which could boost efficiency.
Also, Education Ministry to begin using English. Reminds me of the lonely guy in the us government who has been responsible for metrication since 1970.
the Japanese Ministry of Education will soon begin conducting their meetings in the language. As using English in meetings is highly unusual in the country, the ministry will start implementing it slowly, beginning with high-level officials in their department.
2023-05-04: LLMs will accelerate the winner takes all dynamics. The proposed countermeasures are ineffective and weak.
A tool like ChatGPT has yet to be trained on a massive amount of high-quality, diverse and representative Arabic written data. Its lack of data makes the tool’s results in Arabic unable to distinguish the nuances, accuracy and depth needed to generate quality content. Arabic-speaking users of AI tools face profound consequences of the language divide. At the top of the list is the limited access to information, as the vast majority of references and big data these tools scan to generate their results are mainly available in English.
This discrepancy hinders the ability of Arabic-speaking users to leverage AI for professional and personal growth and perpetuates a digital divide with long-lasting repercussions.
Forking languages
having finished the power of babel, a book on language evolution, i found the following comment on how the internet promotes “bad” spelling insightful:
Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that “Thomas Smith” and “Tomas Smythe” were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.
it would be highly ironic if electronic media eventually led to the emergence of many new dialects after having contributed substantially to the demise of most of the world’s languages. these new dialects would not necessarily form along geographical lines, but would connect social subgroups independent of location.
one particularly amusing slip i am seeing more and more is “bare with me”.
Hokeyness
sarah: “hokey” is slang for something… corny, “mawkishly sentimental”, etc 😉
Owning a term
Hyperfluency
While extinction has been the fate of many creative entrepreneurs of the late 60s and 70s and 80s, why has the INTERCONTINENTAL FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAM – whose symbol is the living Phoenix bird, so familiar to people on the street through millions of language fliers over the years – flourished? In part, the answer lies in the way its founder, director, and principal instructor, Lee Riethmiller, honed his fluency in the 26 languages he currently speaks. Riethmiller’s unique septalingual course (where students learn to speak 7 languages simultaneously) drew interest from The Christian Science Monitor, The Brookline Tab, US Magazine, CBS Television, and National Public Radio.
carl made me aware of this guy. i would love to go to a class, just to see how the system works. and picking up 7 new languages, why not 🙂 my list would be:
- chinese (mandarin)
- spanish
- japanese
- portuguese
- sanskrit
- russian
- arabic
we’ll get perfect translation via AI before we get this sort of hyperfluency (16 languages!) from a large part of society.
12 years on, Fedorenko is confident of certain findings. All her subjects show less brain activity when working in their mother tongue; they don’t have to sweat it. As the language in the tests grows more challenging, it elicits more neural activity, until it becomes gibberish, at which point it elicits less—the brain seems to give up, quite sensibly, when a task is futile. Hyperpolyglots, too, work harder in an unfamiliar tongue. But their “harder” is relaxed compared with the efforts of average people. Their advantage seems to be not capacity but efficiency. No matter how difficult the task, they use a smaller area of their brain in processing language—less tissue, less energy.
All Fedorenko’s guinea pigs, including me, also took a daunting nonverbal memory test: squares on a grid flash on and off as you frantically try to recall their location. This trial engages a neural network separate from the language cortex—the executive-function system. “Its role is to support general fluid intelligence”. What kind of boost might it give to, say, a language prodigy? “People claim that language learning makes you smarter,” she replied. “Sadly, we don’t have evidence for it. But, if you play an unfamiliar language to ‘normal’ people, their executive-function systems don’t show much response. Those of polyglots do. Perhaps they’re striving to grasp a linguistic signal.” Or perhaps that’s where their genie resides.
Barring an infusion of Valproate, most of us will never acquire Rojas-Berscia’s 28 languages.
Symbolism
Mr. Bayley started out researching the meanings of watermarks found on old (9th through 13th century) papers. Examining the designs for the root meanings, he delved deep into myths, stories, language, religion and root meanings of words and syllabic sounds that he thought might compose surviving parts of the oldest spoken language. The religious composition of the language and the constructs of words indicating an omnipresence of religion within the spoken society demonstrates the roots of all human language and societies have been Edenite.
i just finished the lost language of symbolism by harold bayley, written in 1912. a wonderful book that intrigued me with it’s startling revelations about the origins of words and symbols, and how truly universal some of them are.
Names
People ask me sometimes why I insist on my full name, including the middle name, in attributions. Most people do, but you have to search for both Gregor J. Rothfuss and Gregor Rothfuss to get the full picture, and that leaves out attributions like Gregor or Greg (don’t use Greg, btw). You could argue that you don’t want that level of transparency, but face it, it is here. so anyway, I did a search on friendster to find a friend of mine, and I got 8 results. which one is it? Names define our identity. In the past, with very localized exchanges, it did not matter if there was someone else with your name somewhere. Now it does. So I am wondering, how much would it take to give every human being a unique name? Some considerations:
- Only use meaningful combinations of characters. No ewrjp ewrerwh
- Make it future-proof, for we may live a very long time
- Have mappings between languages
- Would numbers be impolite? Somedude23 certainly is
A linguist may be able to calculate how many characters it would take to achieve this feat. I wonder if it would be at a manageable length? Elke suggests Indian names (based on deeds) or email-style names which are based on association: someone@somewhere. Of course, for the glut of people at hotmail, that does not work, because the association is meaningless. I wonder what other naming schemes may be of interest?
2007-12-06: Thais try to have names as UUID: Any 2 families that are related will have the same last name, and usually quite complicated ones at that.
I guess that historically the main reason for the dominance of given names in Thai culture is because family names are a relatively recent innovation: they were introduced by King Rama VI towards the beginning of the 20th century. Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related. This leads to Thai family names being quite a mouthful. Here’s a sample from people in the news over the past couple of days: Leophairatana, Tantiwittayapitak, Boonyaratkalin. Even Thais have difficulty remembering each others family names.
If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family name. Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone. So the more recently your family has become Thai, the longer and more unwieldy your family name is likely to be.
2015-04-23: I’ve wondered about this for a long time.
2016-03-11: Changing your last name for some dude had always been in extremely bad taste. The confusion leading to it has always been puzzling to me.
We’ll each keep our last name and take the other’s name as our middle name.
2022-07-04: Names should be chosen
I am willing to bet that 200 years from now (2222) more than 66% of people born on the planet will have adult names they chose themselves. Having a name chosen by your parents will be like having a marriage arranged by your parents. It’s not the modern thing to do, and a sign of a very conservative traditional family.
Being assigned a name at birth will still be common place, but this name will primarily be a placeholder until the name choosing ceremony, when you get to choose your legal adult name. Perhaps this happens at 12, or 16. The bureaucratic friction in changing your name which is currently normal will be reduced to make it super easy to do. The name changes will also be tracked on the blockchains, making it both easy to monitor and hard to scam. They system would only work if there was a continuum between names, so changing a name was not a way to hide.
Once changing your name at the threshold of adulthood is easy, changing your name later during adulthood will also be easy. I’d expect people to go through life with multiple name stages. We see the hints of that now with nicknames, and trail names, and playa names, and online handles and pseudonyms. The main difference is that these new names will be legal and it will be easy to track their lineage, since the ledger of names is public. The average person might have 3 of 4 hames in their lifetime.
2022-07-19: Dolphin names
Dolphins cannot use voices as their identifying feature because it becomes distorted at different depths. They instead invent a melody – a pattern of sound frequencies held for specific lengths of time – that they use to identify themselves for the rest of their lives. Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) can even imitate the whistles of their friends, calling out their names if they are lost. Additional information, such as reproductive status, can be conveyed by changing the volume of different parts of the whistle, not unlike how people emphasize certain words to add nuance. Dolphins living among seagrass gave themselves a short, shrill name compared to the baritone sounds of dolphins living in muddier waters. Meanwhile, small pods displayed greater pitch variation than larger groups, which may help with identification when the probability of repeated encounters is higher. Marine researchers still don’t know why some bottlenoses base their whistles on family members and others on lesser acquaintances.
While the signature whistles of female dolphins will barely change throughout their life, male dolphins may adjust their whistle to mirror the signature whistle of their best friend. In addition to an individual signature whistle, groups of dolphins may invent a shared whistle to promote social cohesion.
problems in solution
i ran across this beautiful example of the power of metaphors in metaphors we live by (page 143ff)
Another example how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems” –which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without another one precipitate out. And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constantly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do.
The chemical metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The chemical metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. To live by the chemical metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem disappears forever. Rather than direct your energies towards solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies towards finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse ones. The reappearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to “find the right way to solve it.”
To live by the chemical metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you. A temporary solution would be an accomplishment rather than a failure. Problems would be part of the natural order of things rather than disorders to be “cured.” The way you would understand your everyday life and the way you would act in it would be different if you lived by the chemical metaphor.
i have long been fascinated by the power mental concepts hold over our perception of reality. many would argue that metaphors like the chemical one cited above cannot shape our reality because they are constructs of language, while our reality is real. while this is true from an objectivist viewpoint, there is a lot more to human perception than objective reality, or what our sensory organs perceive. our daily experience is shaped by motivations, categorizations and other mental models, and this daily experience is what matters most to us.
imagination is key.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 