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Noble: This will be the last post I ever write in response to one of yours. (In my eyes you have demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to follow standard procedures of dialectical enquiry. This puts you into the category of people whose opinions I'm indifferent to.)
I would suggest that you consider what fun you'll get from this forum when all regulars ignore you (either by putting you on their ignore list or, like me, simply not reading your posts). You might be able to engage casual visitors in short quarrels, but is that enough in the long term? If not, then you'd better start changing your argumentation style - it's not a coincidence that you (and you alone) get into eristic dialogue in every thread where you get a response.

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Originally posted by trancaholic Noble: This will be the last post I ever write in response to one of yours.

As yours was the other bigoted and sterotyping post I was referring to, my heart truly bleeds. Seriously. Thanks for not responding; you're saving me the time of trying to show you the error of your racist, sheltered ways (I have thus far been dumb enough to try).

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Originally posted by trancaholic (In my eyes you have demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to follow standard procedures of dialectical enquiry. This puts you into the category of people whose opinions I'm indifferent to.) I would suggest that you consider what fun you'll get from this forum when all regulars ignore you (either by putting you on their ignore list or, like me, simply not reading your posts).

I point you to my earlier comments: if you're here to collect approval for your opinions, you're definitely in the wrong forum and shouldn't be talking "politics" anywhere.

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Originally posted by trancaholic You might be able to engage casual visitors in short quarrels, but is that enough in the long term? If not, then you'd better start changing your argumentation style - it's not a coincidence that you (and you alone) get into eristic dialogue in every thread where you get a response.

I'll never apologize for treating racist, ignorant remarks with the just scorn they deserve.

Have fun the in the sandbox,
-Noble

Is it just me who finds it funny when a person who knows that it is being ignored still keeps trying to say something?

I didn't feel like reading the whole thread, but as someone who speaks both french and english perfectly, I can assure you that there is a very big difference. English is a very simple and basic language, and it's more efficient for communicating day-to-day ideas, which is why I suppose it's become so popular. But French is far more efficient at expressing complex ideas. It doesn't really have anything to do with the ammounts of words a language has, because different expressions can have more than one connotation. On a near-daily basis, I come across things I could easily express in french, but couldn't communicate in english because the language isn't as efficient at expressing more complex ideas.

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Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0 Is it just me who finds it funny when a person who knows that it is being ignored still keeps trying to say something?

Well, he managed to (deliberately?) misunderstand practically every sentence I wrote in some other thread (when I still paid attention to his replies), so by induction it shouldn't be a surprise that he doesn't understand a post where I state that I'm not reading his posts.

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Originally posted by Aquarian I didn't feel like reading the whole thread, but as someone who speaks both french and english perfectly, I can assure you that there is a very big difference. English is a very simple and basic language, and it's more efficient for communicating day-to-day ideas, which is why I suppose it's become so popular. But French is far more efficient at expressing complex ideas. It doesn't really have anything to do with the ammounts of words a language has, because different expressions can have more than one connotation. On a near-daily basis, I come across things I could easily express in french, but couldn't communicate in english because the language isn't as efficient at expressing more complex ideas.

OK. Good--a person who claims to know both. Could you provide some examples? Is it just that the French connotation for a word like "beautful" can connote something much deeper? Perhaps there's just a general language barrier between all unrelated languages that makes it difficult to translate between them.

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Originally posted by trancaholic I don't know anything substantial about Asian languages and how they manage to capture pronounciation, but I work in a mathematical research environment, and the students and co-workers we get from China are *severely* handicapped when it comes to reductionist reasoning (which is what science is about) because of their habit of talking about all things at once and lack of intuition on emergence through construction from smaller pieces.

Now that's something I wouldn't be able to talk about, since I don't the context in which these phenomena were seen. Could there have been a linguistic shock? How is their English?

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Originally posted by trancaholic And as "technology" is science among people, it does make sense to talk about technologically superior languages or frames of mind.

The problem with "superior" itself is that, in order to say what's superior (or not), you must have standards, which are often subjective, depending on the needs and culture of the judge.

Interesting example: There's an indigenous tribe here in Brazil known as Pirah� (I'm not sure if the name is related to the fish). Their language and culture are extremely odd for us for its simplicity, as they don't have numbers in their language and, among the "bizarre things", they also don't necessarily sleep through the night, but instead, they take naps throughout the day. They do not learn Portuguese because they claim the language doesn't fit their needs because their language is the "best language in the world", and they couldn't care less about buildings (I'm on a hurry and I can't look for the actual quotes but there are statements such as "building a house and building a house on top of another house is no different" and "Documents being worthless if compared to the word of a person").

Back to why China didn't kick Europe's ass technology wise, it's not because China wasn't developed - they had maps of Europe before the Europeans got there and their ships were far greater (and more reliable) than the ones from Europe. Europe is not located in a very fertile land (with exceptions) - besides, it's full of mountains (hence the first expansion, i.e. the Greeks), among other problems. China, on the other hand... they had all the rice they could possibly want, why leave?

Sorry if there are some flaws, but I'm really in a hurry to double check everything. However, I'm really enjoying this discussion

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Originally posted by trancaholic Yep, it's: http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...threadid=274085

Move requested (I can't do it myself because I'm not a mod at the chill out room).

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Originally posted by Shakka Could you provide some examples? Is it just that the French connotation for a word like "beautful" can connote something much deeper?

Something like that. I think french is a language that's especially tied to it's culture. If you look at all the countries where french is spoken (Quebec, France, Africa, Haiti..), you can see there's a sort of bond between those cultures and the people who live in those countries. This means that words have different meanings and connotations, and the context of things can have a larger impact as well. It's very hard to explain, but I think overall you'd have to understand the culture behind the language to really understand it perfectly, that's what I meant.

For example, in french, there isn't a direct equivalent to the english word "evil". This seems especially strange, considering that evil is a word that's used very frequently in english dialect. English-French dictionaries or online translators will tell you that it translates to "mal", which isn't really false, but the word "mal" has a slightly different meaning than "evil". For instance, in the phrase "C'est mal �crit" (it's badly written), the word really means "badly". But the english word "bad" would translate as "mauvais" in french. So what I'm getting at is, in english a word has a direct meaning and that's it. You understand the sense of the phrase by interpreting the meaning of every word that's in it. In some other languages, it can depend on context, connotation, and culture - not just the sense of the words in the phrase. We don't have a direct translation for "evil" because we don't need one - the idea is communicated differently.

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Perhaps there's just a general language barrier between all unrelated languages that makes it difficult to translate between them.

I think this is the reason why so many people who speak english as their first language have so much trouble learning french. In their minds, they try to match every french word with it's equivalent to understand the sense of phrases, and that just confuses them. What they should really be doing is try to forget that they can speak english in the first place, and learn the new language as if they were learning to speak for the very first time.

I also speak French. I've been learning it ever since I was born and I speak it with my family so I agree with you Aquarian and I think you put it quite well.

So is the following statement plausible?

A person who is equally fluent in English and French and who would like to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn would get more out of the work if they read the French version.

I am making the following assumptions:

- Russian is a language which, as far as I can tell, is no more similar to French than it is to English.

- Cancer Ward has been published (in the West) for at least 30 years now and so "good" translations of the work should exist in both English and French.

In my opinion it is plausible.

It's plausible. It all depends on what the author was trying to express, and to answer that question you'd need intimate knowledge of all three languages. But some meaning will be lost in almost any translation. The best thing is always to read the original. That's why I refuse to watch english movies dubbed or subtitled in french and vice-versa. They lose alot of their meaning.

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Originally posted by Lira Now that's something I wouldn't be able to talk about, since I don't the context in which these phenomena were seen. Could there have been a linguistic shock? How is their English?

It varies from awful to quite decent. In Denmark there has been some problems with chinese students coming to Denmark not to study but to work, yet they enroll in a school or university to get their visa. These kind of students tend to have awful English, whereas those I've met here in the US and the chinese faculty staff I know from Denmark are pretty adept at everyday English. That is, I can easily talk with them about what they did this weekend, when we should meet again, how they like this or that, and so forth. The communication problems only arise in some situations where they need to explain ideas, as they tend not to be clear on what's assumptions, what's conclusions, and what reasoning that connects the two. But even if these problems happen when English is spoken, I wouldn't say that lack of English skills are the cause.

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Originally posted by Lira The problem with "superior" itself is that, in order to say what's superior (or not), you must have standards, which are often subjective, depending on the needs and culture of the judge. Interesting example: There's an indigenous tribe here in Brazil known as Pirah� (I'm not sure if the name is related to the fish). Their language and culture are extremely odd for us for its simplicity, as they don't have numbers in their language and, among the "bizarre things", they also don't necessarily sleep through the night, but instead, they take naps throughout the day. They do not learn Portuguese because they claim the language doesn't fit their needs because their language is the "best language in the world", and they couldn't care less about buildings (I'm on a hurry and I can't look for the actual quotes but there are statements such as "building a house and building a house on top of another house is no different" and "Documents being worthless if compared to the word of a person").

While certainly interesting, I don't quite get what the example has to do with technology?
When I'm stating that something, X, can be superior to something else, Y, with respect to technology, then I mean that that X furthers technology more than Y. The "standards" that I judge by, are so to speak integrated in the sentence.

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Originally posted by Lira Back to why China didn't kick Europe's ass technology wise, it's not because China wasn't developed - they had maps of Europe before the Europeans got there and their ships were far greater (and more reliable) than the ones from Europe. Europe is not located in a very fertile land (with exceptions) - besides, it's full of mountains (hence the first expansion, i.e. the Greeks), among other problems. China, on the other hand... they had all the rice they could possibly want, why leave?

I didn't come up with the China example, and am a very bad historian, so I can't comment with much authority on it, but I think that the example was about Europeans taking resources from the Chinese? In that case, whether or not China had any enticement to invade Europe is of no consequence. The conflict is there anyway.

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Originally posted by Lira Move requested (I can't do it myself because I'm not a mod at the chill out room).

Thanks.

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Originally posted by Aquarian For example, in french, there isn't a direct equivalent to the english word "evil". This seems especially strange, considering that evil is a word that's used very frequently in english dialect. English-French dictionaries or online translators will tell you that it translates to "mal", which isn't really false, but the word "mal" has a slightly different meaning than "evil". For instance, in the phrase "C'est mal �crit" (it's badly written), the word really means "badly". But the english word "bad" would translate as "mauvais" in french. So what I'm getting at is, in english a word has a direct meaning and that's it. You understand the sense of the phrase by interpreting the meaning of every word that's in it. In some other languages, it can depend on context, connotation, and culture - not just the sense of the words in the phrase. We don't have a direct translation for "evil" because we don't need one - the idea is communicated differently.

I don't get this. You're saying that French doesn't have a word for "evil". Couldn't you just as well say that English doesn't have a word for "mal"?

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Originally posted by trancaholic I don't get this. You're saying that French doesn't have a word for "evil". Couldn't you just as well say that English doesn't have a word for "mal"?

Well it does, a couple of them in fact, but none of them as accurate. But my point is that the communicating of ideas isn't done almost exclusively through the meanings of words like in english. A greater importance is put on other factors, and that allows you to communicate more complicated ideas that normally wouldn't work in english.

i speak various romance languages, including french, italian, and spanish that is my native toungue, i also fare very well in english. when it comes to expressing different things in languages, i will talk only about english and romance languages, i think the main difference has already been stated in the thread it is that the english language, and english speaking countries tend to write in a more concise way, u can see this when u take an english writing class, the professor will tell you that it is your job as a writer that the reader understands your point,
now in spanish, and spanish speaking country, and probably the same in other countries where romance languages are spoken and written it is not like this, yes as an author u have the responsability of writting in a clear, concise fashion, but the rules and standarts are a lot more flexible and the reader is more involved in the reading, meaning that has a more active part in determining the meaning, that with works written in english where the meaning is almost completely embedded into the writting thus giving the text a narrower meaning, while in the case of romance languages the meaning can be expanded by the interpretation of the reader,
note that i say expanded not misinterpretated(sp?)


another point is that words in romance languages have a broader meaning than words in english most of the times, not always of course, but a lot of words have very broad meanings in romance languages, maybe this is way ur buddy thinks they are more flexible and can convey "deeper" meaning.

as for english having more words than french (or other romance languages) and russian or greek i am not completely sure but i dont think this is the case, at least i know that spanish has more words than english, i do not know about the other languages

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Originally posted by Lira The problem with "superior" itself is that, in order to say what's superior (or not), you must have standards, which are often subjective, depending on the needs and culture of the judge. Interesting example: There's an indigenous tribe here in Brazil known as Pirah� (I'm not sure if the name is related to the fish). Their language and culture are extremely odd for us for its simplicity, as they don't have numbers in their language and, among the "bizarre things", they also don't necessarily sleep through the night, but instead, they take naps throughout the day. They do not learn Portuguese because they claim the language doesn't fit their needs because their language is the "best language in the world", and they couldn't care less about buildings (I'm on a hurry and I can't look for the actual quotes but there are statements such as "building a house and building a house on top of another house is no different" and "Documents being worthless if compared to the word of a person").

I agree that for any sort of superiority you need to have a reference point in order to claim that something is superior to something else. Inuit language is superior to most other languages regarding descriptions of snowfall, a mice is superior to elephant regarding the amount of energy required to sustain vital functions of the organism, and so forth. Therefore we may define one language as superior to another if it better suits the need of the people using it. As for the chinese script, it is not better suited for the needs of the chinese people than the latin alphabet (perhaps art-wise, but that's absolutely subjective and therefore not debetable), simply because of it's unnecessarry complexity, and therefore it should be considered inferior to latin (and most other) scripts.

Culturally, things aren't really that black and white, because it's something much more difficult to measure. Even so, we can not say that all cultures are equal, nor can we always say that some cultures inherent in indigenous groups are better suited to the needs of those groups than some other non-indigenous ones. Many indigenous cultures, while functional and apparently compact are only functional because a lack of sufficient contact with more advanced forms of society. And although people do not in any way manifest their unaware desire for change, latently they are dreaming for one to happen, and as soon as they are introduced to a more advanced form of society, their culture falls apart and they usually end up on the margins of the new culture. A good example for that would be the cultures of pre-Columbian latin americans. While nobody really complained about sacrificing children and virgins so that the sun will rise every day because everyone took it as a normal part of life, once they have been introduced to christianity which at least, despite all its flaws, didn't sacrifice children and virgins every day, their culture and religion lost its appeal to most of the people that came in contact with the europeans. Granted that the spanish conquistadors were a bunch of violent thugs, but do you think it would really be possible for a culture to dissolve so quickly in front of a several hundred raiders if the people unconsciously didn't want a change? It is true that there were some other factors involved, amongst them were the myths of the indians about white skinned gods, and horse riders which were thought to be a single creature, but if the indian culture was stronger and superior to that of spaniards, it couldn't have perished so quickly. Most of the time when people achieve a higher form of society than their surroundings, they either spread it or defend it mercilessly. Now, I hate to be an advocate of christianity, but a similar thing happened to the Roman Empire. People lived under the old roman culture for centuries, considering slavery, torture, and inequality as normal things. Yet latently they strived for a more equal system which was offered to them by christianity, and that's why they so wholeheartedly embraced it. Similarly, when christianity turned into a tyrannical and opressive system, the more advanced parts of Europe quickly embraced Martin Luther's ideas and split up from the rest of the church, and later their culture, although mildly different from that of catholic origin, did show itself to be superior considering that the newly declared protestant countries underwent a much faster social and especially technological development than their catholic neighbours. Not to say that some local cultures aren't better suited to their local needs, but overall it does make sense to talk about superior and inferior cultures in regards to how well they can suit the needs of their people.

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Back to why China didn't kick Europe's ass technology wise, it's not because China wasn't developed - they had maps of Europe before the Europeans got there and their ships were far greater (and more reliable) than the ones from Europe. Europe is not located in a very fertile land (with exceptions) - besides, it's full of mountains (hence the first expansion, i.e. the Greeks), among other problems. China, on the other hand... they had all the rice they could possibly want, why leave?

The reason why China ultimately lost its upper hand in the race with european countries is not so much because of the european expansionism (which, of course, did play a role), but more because of the fact that their technological and scientific development ground down to a halt, mostly as a result of their culture and mentality. After a significant period of exploration and advancement, China switched to an isolationist conservative policy which basically froze it in place and enabled the rest of the world to catch up. The basic flaw that stopped China from further advance was also the same one present in Europe in the period between the fall of Roman Empire and the rise of rennaisance, and the only reason why Europe managed to beat China was that it managed to get over it earlier than the chinese (largely in part because it was composed of many small competing territories and because the Turks blocked the ancient silk road so inventivity and exploration were needed to get around their blockade). That flaw was basically the development of an introverted, non-inventive, and backwards-looking mindset that gave too much importance to honoring ancestors, conserving the status quo, and mystifying knowledge, while not supporting inventivity, exploration, and rational thinking. Of course, after China got defeated by european powers on multiple occasions, the general mindset of the people did start to change, so that now they do have a more "westernized" mentality, the remnants of the old mentality are still there, and will be hard to get rid of (of course, assuming that they do want to get rid of it in the first place - but they already showed their desire to do so).

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Sorry if there are some flaws, but I'm really in a hurry to double check everything. However, I'm really enjoying this discussion

I didn't find any

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Move requested (I can't do it myself because I'm not a mod at the chill out room).

Great..maybe we should have a classic thread section opened up soon

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Originally posted by trancaholic Yep, it's: http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...threadid=274085

just flicked through it, occrider and renegade taking the WhoaNellie approach to debating

fucking hilarious!!

i wish i had stumbled on it sooner, i've always wanted to be a fundamentalist

ps. heh at the newbie trying to prove himself to the big boys, rip him apart Tito

"People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." - Asimov

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Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0 I agree that for any sort of superiority you need to have a reference point in order to claim that something is superior to something else. Inuit language is superior to most other languages regarding descriptions of snowfall. a mice is superior to elephant regarding the amount of energy required to sustain vital functions of the organism, and so forth. Therefore we may define one language as superior to another if it better suits the need of the people using it.

hmmm... I wouldn't say "superiority~ is the proper word to be used here, but rather ~suitability~... as it even depends on the occasion.

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Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0 As for the chinese script, it is not better suited for the needs of the chinese people than the latin alphabet (perhaps art-wise, but that's absolutely subjective and therefore not debetable), simply because of it's unnecessarry complexity, and therefore it should be considered inferior to latin (and most other) scripts.

This would be true if the latin alphabet were well suited for the needs of the Chinese people. However, it's not (at all).

Firstly, but not mainly, because of tones. Like I said before, the latin alphabet has a poor support for tonal languages, which have to use features such as diacritics and even letters combination - as happened to Vietnamese (2). Although it does have its advantages, it was designed by Portuguese missionaires (them bastards ), and shows how Euro-centered the alphabet is, with all its problems (and a few solutions). Chinese speakers often use numbers to indicate the tones, though.

Also, the so-called "Chinese language" would be as comprehensive as a family of European languages (i.e. it would be like saying that all countries that speaking Romance languages talked Romance, and that would cover completely distinct languages, such as Spanish, French and Romanian). Mandarin is an official language, but that does not mean all Chinese people speak it. However, the ideograms are quite handy because you read a word not necessarily based on its sound (which may be confusing), but it's meaning. An example, in Japanese would be the word "Kami". In Latin Alphabet, it doesn't mean much, as it could mean either "paper", "God" or even "hair", and the tone system is not as simple as the ubiquitous "ma" example in Chinese that could be solved with diacritics. However, if you type 紙 you know it means "paper" and if you type 　神 you know it's God.If a place has "hami" for "paper" and "kemi" for "god, the writing would be able to unify the dialects and lower the chances of misunderstanding. That's worked this way in Chinese for quite a long time. If Romance speaking countries adopted a similar system, it would be marvellous as the grammar structures are not much different and 心 could be read as cuore (italian), coeur (french), cora��o (portuguese) and coraz�n (spanish). There would be almost no difficulty for a Portuguese speaking reader to understand a French text.

Finally, Chinese is mainly constituted by monossylables and there are eventually loads and loads of homophone words. Having different symbols makes it easier to know what is what.

(I've got to go now, I'll talk about the rest when I come back)

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Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0 Culturally, things aren't really that black and white, because it's something much more difficult to measure. Even so, we can not say that all cultures are equal, nor can we always say that some cultures inherent in indigenous groups are better suited to the needs of those groups than some other non-indigenous ones.

Now, that's up to the groups themselves to decide, isn't it? This Piraha tribe I told about does have much contact with Europeans (now Brazilians). They have words such as ~commercial goods~ and they even wear "Nike~ shirts. However, that doesn't mean they look the other culture as superior (in fact, it's often quite the opposite).

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Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0 Many indigenous cultures, while functional and apparently compact are only functional because a lack of sufficient contact with more advanced forms of society. (...) A good example for that would be the cultures of pre-Columbian latin americans. While nobody really complained about sacrificing children and virgins so that the sun will rise every day because everyone took it as a normal part of life, once they have been introduced to christianity which at least, despite all its flaws, didn't sacrifice children and virgins every day, their culture and religion lost its appeal to most of the people that came in contact with the europeans.

They didn't lost their appeal. A single sentence sums it up:

~When Cort�s arrived in Tenochtitlan, he forbid human sacrifice, so the Spaniards did not witness human sacrifice in the city.~ (Source)

They didn't stop at will, or because they had been "enlightened" by Christian thoughts. They simply weren't as strong since those empires were far from being centralised nations, and the several civil wars weakened their governments. Most of their original culture disappeared because they were slaughtered and/or died of diseased brought by the Europeans.

The colonisation of America was completely different from what happened in the Roman Empire.

(The rest to come tomorrow, hehe)

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Originally posted by trancaholic I don't get this. You're saying that French doesn't have a word for "evil". Couldn't you just as well say that English doesn't have a word for "mal"?

I believe Aquarian is mistaken.

Evil in french is "Mauvais", and not mal. As such his supposition that the word "evil" doesn't exist in french is mistaken.

The other issue, is one of Homonyms.
He is "Evil" = Il est "Mauvais"
That thing is "bad" = C'est chose est "mauvais"

As in, just because Mauvais can mean bad, in no way precludes it from also meaning Evil.

***
However if you really want examples of what Aquarian is going for then the best is Russian. Since there is technically no word for "Blue" in Russian.

in Russian that colour would be: Голубой
in Russian that colour would be: Синий

And if you really want to find a place where there is no evil, then Norse Mythology is a great place to start

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Originally posted by Subey Evil in french is "Mauvais", and not mal. As such his supposition that the word "evil" doesn't exist in french is mistaken.

It doesn't. You can use 'mal' or 'mauvais' to substitute it and essentially express the same idea, but it's not the same word at all...

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The other issue, is one of Homonyms. He is "Evil" = Il est "Mauvais" That thing is "bad" = C'est chose est "mauvais" As in, just because Mauvais can mean bad, in no way precludes it from also meaning Evil.

This is essentially what I was trying to say. The word "mauvais" doesn't mean evil - but you can express the idea of "evil" by using the context, like you did in your examples. Now let me elaborate on that example...

In english, the word evil means evil in any situation. Mal and Mauvais can be synonyms. You can use both to communicate the idea of evil. But...

In french, mauvais can mean:

-Mean
-Cruel
-Dreadful
-Unhappy
-Terrible
-Hard (as in difficult)
-Morbid

Mal can mean:

-physical or psychological pain
-sadness
-boredom

(But wait - physical or psychological pain could also be expressed with the word "Douleur" - which would be a direct translation of the english word "pain")

Even that example is flawed because I'm translating those words to english. Each of those words in french have a broader meaning as well.

Now to make things slightly more confusing, you can take the word "terrible" that I've put in the list up there, and if you use it in a higher form of language (langue soutenue in french), it can mean:

-Good
-Enjoyable

and even..

-Delicious

Now try that in english:

This caramel sundae is so evil!

Doesn't really work now does it?


So, to recapitulate what I was originally trying to say - in english you communicate the sense of the phrase by interpreting the direct meaning of every word, while in french you interpret the sentence as a whole.

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Originally posted by Aquarian So, to recapitulate what I was originally trying to say - in english you communicate the sense of the phrase by interpreting the direct meaning of every word, while in french you interpret the sentence as a whole.

I wouldn't agree with that. There are words in english too that have different meanings. Like the word hot. It can mean warm like in "this oven is hot", spicey as in "this tabasco sauce is hot", or attractive, as in "this moose is hot".

Anyway, Lira, I really don't have time to answer your posts..I hope I'll be able to do it in the next few days.

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Originally posted by Aquarian So, to recapitulate what I was originally trying to say - in english you communicate the sense of the phrase by interpreting the direct meaning of every word, while in french you interpret the sentence as a whole.

I stand corrected on mauvais.

I also missed Lira's mentioning of blue in Russian and the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", that'll teach me to skip to the end of a thread.

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I think the issue of context that you bring up goes far furthur. Take the following example.

You are reading a book, and I come along and point to a random word on a random page, its the word "stone", and ask "what does that word mean?"

To answer the question, you would really need to have read the entire book as the entire meaning of the word "stone" on that page may not be given until you've read the entire book and are able to look back and see that it was a key symbolic element of the narrative.

Eventually you go home happy that you know what the word "stone" meant on that page.

But what if you later found out that the book in question was book 2 in a trilogy. And that the real meaning of the word couldn't be known unless you had read all three books...

and what if the trilogy was based on an Inuit myth... and learning that myth recast the meaning the of the word "stone" significantly.

I guess my point is that language interfaces with our knowledge to provide meaning. We have all lived unique lives, with unique minds, as such the meaning that is *created* when we read a sentence varies between all of us.

If we only needed to look for the meaning of words in a dictionary we would be a very poor species indeed.

*******
Scrap all the above - its too word
*******
Put it this way, if everyone had identical artistic skills. And we all read the first sentence of a book that said "A man and a woman came around the corner", and you asked everyone to draw what they say in their mind's eye, then you would get a huge range of pictures.

An author can go into infinite detail describing things (regardless if that author is writing a novel or description of what he ate for breakfast), but at the end of the day we have to recreate most of it with our minds, the author of anything is only providing a skeleton, our minds put the flesh on that skeleton and make it real.

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Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0 I wouldn't agree with that. There are words in english too that have different meanings. Like the word hot. It can mean warm like in "this oven is hot", spicey as in "this tabasco sauce is hot", or attractive, as in "this moose is hot".

I meant that in a general sense. Sure english can have words like that too. And vice versa. Like the example I gave earlier - "Douleur" in french is a word with a rather narrow meaning.

words

I know for a fact that english has more words than french, dunno about spanish. But there is one thing about languages besides their gramatical possibilities, the way the are actually used by people as it has been said many times already in this thread. Just to go a little bit further in this point I give this example exemple:
I can say in either french, spanish and english (or any other given language): Sir please have the kindness to take your seat. What would happen is that in both spanish and english I would sound as some snob bragging bastard, while in french it would be perceived as a polite ordinary thing to say. So english might have more words than other languages, but that doesn�t mean at all that they are ever used, and it doesnt mean that certain ways of saying thing are allowed. They sound eerie, bizarre to the native ear.
As a philosophy student I hear all the time from my teachers that the two "real" languages for philosophy are german and ancient greek. These two languages have supposedly a clarity of language unarchieved by other languages in philosophical matters. I don�t speak either of them, so I will have to take my teachers word on it.

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Originally posted by Lira hmmm... I wouldn't say "superiority~ is the proper word to be used here, but rather ~suitability~... as it even depends on the occasion.

I agree that suitability is a better term. Still, we may define superiority as a broader term than suitability as basically a property that allows a certain language to be suitable in a greater variety of occasions than an inferior one.

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This would be true if the latin alphabet were well suited for the needs of the Chinese people. However, it's not (at all).

I agree that the latin alphabet isn't the best suited one for the chinese language, but given the competition, it is my belief that it is better suited than their original one. Keep in mind that it does not have to be a direct copy of english or french or any other standardized latin alphabet, but rather a modified version with perhaps an additional few characters to suit the specifics of the chinese language. After all, almost every language has its own mildly modified version of the original latin alphabet (letters like w, �, ł, �, �, �, �, and even j don't exist in the original version).

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Firstly, but not mainly, because of tones. Like I said before, the latin alphabet has a poor support for tonal languages, which have to use features such as diacritics and even letters combination - as happened to Vietnamese (2). Although it does have its advantages, it was designed by Portuguese missionaires (them bastards ), and shows how Euro-centered the alphabet is, with all its problems (and a few solutions). Chinese speakers often use numbers to indicate the tones, though.

Yes, as I've agreed before, it is not perfect, and frankly it could have been better modified to suit vietnamese. However, the very fact that the vietnamese people choose that alphabet over the traditional modified chinese one says enough about what they themselves feel is better suited to their needs.

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Also, the so-called "Chinese language" would be as comprehensive as a family of European languages (i.e. it would be like saying that all countries that speaking Romance languages talked Romance, and that would cover completely distinct languages, such as Spanish, French and Romanian). Mandarin is an official language, but that does not mean all Chinese people speak it. However, the ideograms are quite handy because you read a word not necessarily based on its sound (which may be confusing), but it's meaning. An example, in Japanese would be the word "Kami". In Latin Alphabet, it doesn't mean much, as it could mean either "paper", "God" or even "hair", and the tone system is not as simple as the ubiquitous "ma" example in Chinese that could be solved with diacritics. However, if you type 紙 you know it means "paper" and if you type 　神 you know it's God.If a place has "hami" for "paper" and "kemi" for "god, the writing would be able to unify the dialects and lower the chances of misunderstanding. That's worked this way in Chinese for quite a long time. If Romance speaking countries adopted a similar system, it would be marvellous as the grammar structures are not much different and 心 could be read as cuore (italian), coeur (french), cora��o (portuguese) and coraz�n (spanish). There would be almost no difficulty for a Portuguese speaking reader to understand a French text.[quote] I agree that the east asian writing system does have that advantage of partial interliterary communication between different languages, and that is something that any phonetic alphabet can not achieve. Theoretically, you could have that with latin alphabet too, you would just need to memorize every single combination of letters as a word with a specific meaning, and then just pronounce it differently. Like for the word "yes", you could memorize the exact shape of the strokes needed to make that word and then just pronounce it differently according to the language required (yes, ja, da, oui...). But I suppose we both see that that is a huge complication whose bad sides seriously outweight the benefits. [quote]Finally, Chinese is mainly constituted by monossylables and there are eventually loads and loads of homophone words. Having different symbols makes it easier to know what is what.

I agree, and that's why I said it would be good to try a modified version of the latin alphabet (in a way something like the vietnamese one, but perhaps this time designed by the chinese themselves who probably have a better understanding of the specific requirements of their language than the rest of us do).

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