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

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

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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 Pirahã (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 écrit" (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.

Last edited by Aquarian on Jul-02-2005 at 16:33

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 Pirahã (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.