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Re:What would you choose? Why?
1.) Cats or Dogs?
Neither. I prefer to have a pet only if the pet prefers to have me. If I am forced to pick one, I will take the cat, as it is easier to keep, and with no loyalty to its keeper it is probably better equipped to make itself comfortable with human beings.
2.) A female [...] or a male president meeting your requirements?
What is wrong with emperors? :-)
We could also try a government with no single leader.
3.) A car or a truck?
A truck. It can serve as a car, while a car cannot serve as a truck. A helium blimp might be yet better.
4.) To study abroad, or in the U.S?
Abroad. "Abroad" is many countries, while U.S. is only one country.
5.) To learn 20 languages [...] or just 1 language [...] ?
20 languages, provided I have time to learn them. In practice I already have to satisfy with less.
6.) To go back in time and fix a mistake, [...] or leaving the past behind [...]
A third option would be to create something beneficial in the present time to compensate for the mistake.
7.) Reading or writing?
8.) Teaching or learning?
These cannot and should not be mutually exclusive alternatives.
9.) Indoors or outdoors?
My hobbies are indoors, but if I were forced to choose, I would feel like a prisoner in both.
10.) Enjoying what you have in life, or enjoying life itself?
"Life itself" contains plenty of "having". Do you mean to contrast material things with immaterial ones? This world is made of materials even though its people may have immaterial values. Therefore the choice cannot be made in a pure, absolute form.
Puti
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Language pair: English; German
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Juha-Petri T.
March 2, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: March 30, 2005
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Re:Something to think about.
Message 3 of 3
Anyway, when Saussure was trying to perfect language, we learned instead that not only do have no ultimate connection between the words and the ideas we tie them to, but that there will never be any way to solidify those connections. They are always unstable, and if you pick at the words just a little bit, they’ll all always come apart on you. That was discovered by Jacque Derrida, who just died a few montsh ago. His theory is called deconstruction. I’m sure he sat up in his grave and beamed when you posted your wonderful question, because that was excactly the kind of stuff Derrida spend his life wrestling with. There is nothing about a that makes it a, and nothing about b that makes it b. In fact, in Russia, b isn’t b at all, but v. C is S, and P is R. In Greek, X is Ch and H is e. In Arabic, b is t and T is h.
Anyway, Puti’s answer to your question was perfect; I hope having a little more of the background on it was interesting. Words mean what they mean because we all agree that they do, and we all reserve the right to renegotiate what the words mean at any time. You think I’m wrong? Go to your library, and find the Oxford English Dictionary. Look up the word “smart” and see how the meaning of the word has changed over time. Try it with the word, “dumb.” That which we call “sky” today was the whelkin in another age. Language, written or oral, is nothing but a rough social contract by which we enable ourselves to share ideas.
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
March 2, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: March 16, 2005
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Re:Something to think about.
Message 2 of 3
There have been some interesting theories about language and its relationship to the reality it describes. Ferdinand de Saussere developed this theory called structuralism—it’s the study of how meaning is connected to symbols. DeSaussure created this new idea which he called a sign – it’s a little different from what we mean by a sign normally. For de Saussure, a sign was a very particular thing that consisted of two parts. The signifier is any symbol representing an idea. This could be a picture of a cat, or the word “cat” or a paw print which informs us that a cat has been present. The other part of the sign is the signified, and it represents the idea in our mind of what we’re trying to describe. It is not a physical thing in the world. Actually, things in the world are classified as signifiers, because they reflect ideas in our minds, and in fact, we create them or describe them based on our ideas of them, more than on the things themselves. Saussure was the one who made a point to mention that the relatinoships between the signifiers and signifieds are completely arbitrary, but he hoped to nail down a way to perfect language so that we could express anything we ever wanted to complete accuracy.
Now de Saussure’s discovery that language has a purely arbitrary connection to meaning has a very interesting connection to the first question you asked, about multilingualism. Remember how easy it was for us to fall into thinking that there was something special about this word “cat” that made it’s relationship to the animal look like some we could think of as “right” or “wrong”? Then we looked at the tree and saw that there were a whole bunch of things we could call it. By looking at other languages we were able to see that our words for things had arbitrary connections, the words only felt right because they were the words we’ve been using all our lives, not because there is anything magic about them. This is an example of what I was saying before about how knowing about different languages helps us to get unstuck for limited ways of thinking.
(Continued)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
March 2, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: March 16, 2005
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Re:Something to think about.
Message 1 of 2
Dwyn, I really love your question, because as a student of language and literature, this is something I’ve learned some interesting things about. As you say, it really can mess you up, and it’s been messing people up for centuries.
Part of the problem is, so few of us were around when they decided to call those silly creatures C-A-Ts, and we’ve never been able to figure out what they were thinking of at the time. It’s very interesting, too, that so many words for cat in so many different languages are very similar: Cat, chat, katze, gato kedi, just to name a few. It almost looks like the same word, only just spelled differently, and it’s easy to think that there is something inherently “cat”ish about cats, that makes the word “cat” the only meaningful word we could call these things by. There’s a great line from Mel Brooks, “The 2000 Year Old Man,” when Karl Reiner asks, “why do we call a nose a nose?” and the 2000 year old man answers, “Well, what are you gonna blow, your eyes?” There is something about the words we use that makes them seem like there’s something inherently “right” about them, like no other word would effectively express what they express. On the other hand, look at the word “Tree.” In Spanish, it’s “árbol,” and “baum” in German. There is nothing to connect these words. Often we name things using some sense of onomatopoea, such as the Romans who came up with the word, “barbarian” to describe hoards of “uncivilized” soldiers whose language sounded like they were saying “Barbarbarbar.” But ultimately, words are completely arbitrary. They work, as Puti wisely points out, for no other reason than that we have all agreed to use them in the ways we do.
Dwyn asked about letters like, “Why is a a and b b?” As with the words, they are purely arbitrary. Compare the alphabet we use, for example, with that used by languages such as Russian, using cyrillic alphabets, or Greek. And then try comparing all of these alphabets to written languages such as ancient Egyptian or Chinese where there aren’t letters at all; they write down idiograms that represent ideas, whole words, and nothing there tells you how to pronounce the word. You have to know how to say it.
(Continued)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
March 2, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: March 16, 2005
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Re:Something to think about.
These things can be decided by a simple
agreement. If we cannot tell for sure that
the letters C, A, and T stand for the
sound of "cat", we can always declare
that from now on they will stand for "cat".
Most of the time ortography develops
all by itself, without anybody paying
too much attention to its details, but
if the correspondence between written
and spoken words becomes too complicated,
quite soon there will be a committee who
creates a better ortography and declares
that "this is how we will write from
now on".
Korean language got a completely new
alphabet a few centuries ago. Irish
ortography has been renewed, and a few
years ago there was some fine-tuning
done with German, too. There has been
some discussion about renewing English,
too, but English is so widespread that
changing it globally would be a very
difficult task.
My mother tongue is Finnish, in which
each letter can be read in only one way.
Therefore it has never really occurred
to me that I could be unsure about the
words I read. The reasons why a certain
letter is read the way it is, can in
most cases be traced to the history of
the surrounding languages, all the way back
to the dawn of writing.
Puti
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Language pair: English; German
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Juha-Petri T.
March 1, 2005
# Msgs: 10
Latest: March 16, 2005
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Mark S.
February 27, 2005
# Msgs: 28
Latest: February 27, 2005
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Dwyn Hart's Question on finding replies to messages
This is a response to Dwyn’s question about finding replies to messages.
Dwyn was asking if there were any ways of finding replies to messages other than paging back through all of the messages.
In order to answer this question, I'll use the word "thread" which means a sequence of messages that are all replying to other messages in the same sequence, all the way back to the original message that got the first reply.
Once you find any message in a thread, you can see them all, just by clicking on the orange (brown?) title of the message. The order they appear in may seem confusing, so be sure to watch the message numbers--they'll show you what order the messages were submitted in.
As far as finding any particular message from the thread, it is easiest if you know any message id for any of the messages, so I make a point to write that down for messages I'm looking forward to reading replies to. Without that information, the next best bet is to remember any special information from the subject of the message. I try to make very specific and descriptive message subjects because it makes them easier to find later when I want them. "Mark's Soap Box" was very easy to find with the search tool. "Mark's Soap Box on Dwyn's multilingualism and universal Language" would have been much more descriptive, especially since I'll very likely get on another soap box on a new topic soon. So I guess I made a mistake :-)
You can also find messages if you can think of something unusual that appeared in the body of the message. “Spanish” will get you way too many messages back, but the other day, I was looking for messages containing the word, “Esperanto”, and that was very easy to find. There weren’t a lot of those. When searching for something in the body of the message, you have to be a little more patient, because the body is a much bigger field than the subject is, so it takes the server longer to search message bodies than message subjects.
Of course, you can also find messages by the first name of the author. That’s great for an author named Dwyn, but when his name is John (or Mark), and especially if he's a busybody like me, always writing a message about something, you might have a pretty long list of pages to flip through in order to find what you're looking for.
I hope that's helpful. Please reply if I left anything out.
Cheers!
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
February 26, 2005
# Msgs: 28
Latest: February 27, 2005
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Spell Check
Hi Dwyn,
If you don't mind, I'm going to go over and post a message for you on the other board. There's one called "computing technology," and if I put it there, it will be easier for other people with the same question to find it.
See you there!
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
February 26, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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And don't you dare apologize!
Dear Dwyn,
Welcome back! I was wonderfully challenged by your question (and your new one too!). I teach college composition, and my great challenge is how to spark this kind of interest for eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students. You’re a bright and charming young woman.
Which is all the more reason why I was disappointed to see you apologize to Amanda. Her expectations are completely inappropriate here. When you work in a U.S. Foreign embassy, you can worry about offending people with spelling errors. This is not the place for that.
The Language Exchange is a learning environment. To learn, students have to be free to make mistakes. Otherwise, we stick to what we know well. We don’t stretch our abilities, and we don’t grow.
The only thing I can imagine that Amanda may have been thinking of, but didn’t really put into words was that if you want to exchange languages, and if your language isn’t “perfect,” maybe you shouldn’t exchange language with someone else and teach them imperfect English.
But that’s a bunch of crap. This is not a college course in formal written English. This site is not here to teach non-English-speakers how to write a doctoral dissertation or a diplomatic brief. This is a place where normal people from countries all over the world learn to speak everyday English with everyday Americans like you and me.
Americans speak English colloquially; we often have trouble spelling or we use non-standard grammar and all that. That’s the kind of English we all use. So if you were to teach your pen-pal perfect grammar, she might be troubled when she corresponded with someone else whose grammar wasn’t perfect. And just as you and I have to get used to that and learn to work with it, so will they.
May I suggest that you write in the best written English you can, become aware of your errors and make a sincere effort to do better, and then be honest with your correspondents about what you do well and what you need to work on? That way, they’ll know that it may be better to talk to Puti about rules of punctuation, and to talk to you about slang expressions that younger people use today. We all have different contributions to make, and that is as it should be.
But I hope you will never feel that you should have to apologize for making errors. Those who are offended by them on the language exchange are in the wrong place. Errors here are among our most important resources.
"We have to keep trying things we're not sure we can pull off. If we just do the things we know we can do... you don't grow as much. You gotta take those chances on making those big mistakes."
Cybill Shepherd
"To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."
Elbert Hubbard
"It is much easier to be critical than to be correct."
Benjamin Disraeli
"Correction does much, but encouragement does more."
Goethe
I look forward to seeing you make a whole lot more mistakes :-)
Cheers,
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
February 26, 2005
# Msgs: 28
Latest: February 27, 2005
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Mark S.
February 23, 2005
# Msgs: 28
Latest: February 27, 2005
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