h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Toxxin, ...You smell like a kindred spirit! refer to post 1729...and, while you're at it, if you feel like a hop about, check out Hasslefree's post 821. It'll bring the grissle to your bacon!

Love, Peace and Chicken Grease!

Oh yes, Hass. I've even heard it suggested that the religion should be called 'Paulianity'!

In some parts of Africa they call christianity the religion with three gods.

Adib

Oh and I would just like to say some thing to all you lot out there who are going to read the english translation of the Quran. Remember that it does not touch the Arabic version one bit. The English translation is not a subsistute of the Arabic one. Arabic is the best language to explain things in as it has such a wide range of words. No one can translate some of the words in the Quran to English because all other languages do not have the flavour to be able to give a accurate translation. Plus it is easy to make new words because in Arabic every word has a root.
So I challange you to read it and then learn Arabic and read the Quran in Arabic and you will see the difference.
That is why a lot of these web sites are inaccurate because when translating the Quran in to English it is the translaters interpretation to what is being said. As there is not a word or words to use in english to get the same meaning.
That is why all Muslims should learn Arabic as many muslims who can speak Arabic can't read it. Which is a problem and why mistakes happen and why people accutaly go against what the Quran and Hadith accutually means.

Adib

For hundreds of years people said much the same thing about the Bible and Latin.

There are always problems of nuances of meanings when translating from one language to another. It's not just a question of the range or number of words, though - English actually has the largest vocabulary of any language. Glossing and pointing out alternative interpretations should be sufficient for most purposes, so long as people bear in mind that something is always lost in translation. Can you point out any examples of where even a good translation completely loses the meaning of the original?

Noggin

Yes but the bible was origanly not written in latin.

Besides which latin does not have as much as a flovour of words than Arabic and Arabic actually has more words than English. Though in Arabic often the difference between one word and another is where in the mouth it is said. I.e with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth or the back of the teeth. An example is where it says in the english translation of the Quran about hitting women. It has lost its complete meaning because what it means is nothing like hitting and can not be desribed as hitting.
Its just that English lacks the words to accuratly portray what is being said.

Adib

Have you ever heard of 'The Sons of Joseph'; When Rome spread the doctrine of Christianity by military force, the Sons of Joseph retreated to their bases in Eire, England and elsewhere, retaliated against Roman shipping, and predicted the eventual fall and rebirth of Rome. Melvin J. Laney's ancestors say that the Sons of Joseph operated trade routes with bases in Egypt, along the coast of Africa, across the Mediterranean, around Spain, and up to the British Isles and Ireland. Joseph of Aramathaea is said to have brought the young Jesus to Britain and this Joseph was also one of 'the Sons of Joseph', so could Jesus have been a 'Son of Joseph' not 'the son of Joseph'?

Joseph of Arimathaea was from Sumaria or Galilee but Arimathaea is said to be Rahmallah which was in Judea. There is a place in Sumaria called Thurmassia which was one of the Towns of the Sons of Joseph; so could they have got the wrong name in the NT? (There is no record of Arimathaea other than the NT)

Alji the Magus (don't forget to record your sun sign @ A712595 ) Pastor of the Church of Spiritual Humanism.

Adib, are you really saying that there is some form of assault that can't be described in the English language. If we had some sense of the action, we could supply our own cultural overtones - and why not? Arabic may have a word for wholly-beneficial-kicking-up-the-backside or whatever, but I don't think we'd have much of a use for it!

No thats not it. In translation it is interpreted as Hit where as it does not really mean that at all. I have tried to discribe it before but English lacks the ability to transcribe it to you.
I know it is hard for you to think that there is words that your langauge can not describe but there is.

Adib

Well, I'd like to ask whether the thing meant by the word could be shown to us, or is it the attitude rather than the action that can't be conveyed in words. How do Arabic speakers learn it? They aren't born speaking Arabic after all, so there must be a way.

Quite true. Some parts of the Bible have undergone several translations. Consequently a direct Arabic to English translation of the Quran should have fewer inaccuracies than the bible in English.
(Newer translations of the bible do refer back to the original languages of course, which does redress the balance). What's wrong with a gloss pointing out that the word 'hitting' is more severe than the Arabic original? As I said, translation may never be 100%, but it should be close enough to avoid a complete breakdown of communication shouldn't it?

Noggin

I have tried before to explain it to you. When learning Arabic you have to learn it as a seperate language you will fail if you try to think like this means this in english.
The word can be discribed as a very light tap on a uncensitive body part that does not leave any redness or pain and does not harm the individual or some thing familier.

Adib

I think we might come close with 'a gentle smack of chastisement'. 'A loving tap' or some such. OK, I accept that sometimes there is no exact translation into an English word. It's hard to imagine that a phrase or sentence can't capture the subtleties of meaning, though.

'Even the infinite can expand. Consider the infinite set of odd numbers, then add the infinite set of even numbers. You get an expanded infinite set of all positive integers.'

Well toxx, according to the Discrete Maths module we're taking - particularily, the unit concerning infinite numbers - the cardinality of the odd numbers is precisely the same as the cardinality of the integers, on account of being able to put the former into a one-to-one correspondance with the latter. Thus, by adding the set of even numbers you are not expanding the infinity. The size of both sets is equal to aleph-nought. (In fact, even the rational numbers can be put into a one-to-one correspondance with the integers.)

To expand infinity as you propose, you would need to look at the real numbers, which have a cardinality equal to aleph-one, or 2^aleph-nought. (By the way, Adib, you might be interested to know that that's the Hebrew letter aleph I'm talking about.) In fact, we're not even sure that you would /need/ to go as far as the real numbers yet, the continuum hypothesis states that there is another infinity between aleph-one and aleph-nought, but no one has proven this yet...

So, Gaffer, we can deal with infinity using maths, if not our imaginations!

- Jordan

Adib, English is infinitely expandible. It has words such as 'floccinaucinihillipillification,' which comes from an Eton schoolbook on Latin, and merely means 'to set to nought' - indeed, as it has been said, English is quite a linguistic whore, it steals words from almost every language on the globe and has been known to drive them kicking and screaming into back alleys in its search to expand its own vocabulary.

The number of words in English, is in fact infinite. It's only the number of roots that has a limit. Turkish words can have, if I recall correctly, several million verb forms (according to Stephen Pinker), and there's the Bantu language where the phrase 'the boy ate the apple for her' can be contracted into a word about ten or less letters long. Comparing this language to English is like 'comparing chess to checkers.' And recall that most languages come from a common linguistic source - Arabic and English share a common root, you know.

I don't think that going around saying 'my language is better than yours is' will get us anywhere, though, and I don't think that's what Adib is trying to say. I think he just means that there are fundamental differences and subtleties that are not captured in the English translation - or are added. Recall that in 1913, 'dildo' was a botanical term, and not long before that it referred to a burden in a popular song...

- Jordan

Jordan. All math is based on arbitrary and unjustified assumptions. Telling us what symbols are used to represent these assumptions is supremely uninformative!

Someone said something quite interesting to me:

Say we were in vessel A. its traveling faster than light (i know is imposible)then when u stopped at point b. after coming from point a. u would get there faster than the image of u moving, cause that would be moving at speed of light, so would u get stuck in a time loop?

Gonna lay down mah dildo [ba, dum, dum] down by the riverside........

'All math is based on arbitrary and unjustified assumptions.'

/All/ math? Are you sure? Hmm. Perhaps I should go over the logic with you. Here's the simple version: we have the number 1. Then there's 2, then there's 3, and so on into infinity. To put the numbers 1, 2, 3... into a one-to-one correspondance with the odd numbers 1, 3, 5... we simply write the first odd-number next to the one, the second odd number next to the two and so on - thus, (1, 1), (2, 3), (3, 5)... Since we can do this for /every/ odd number, we have a one-to-one mapping between the odd numbers and the even numbers of the type n: -> 2n - 1; thus there are only as many odd numbers as there are natural numbers, and vice-versa. Aleph-nought is simply the cardinality (i.e. the size) of the integers - for example, the cardinality of the sets {1, 2, 3} or {1, 8000, 3785} or {a, b, c} is three. The reasoning for some of my other statements is somewhat more involved, but it's simple enough and relies on little other than common sense and logic.

Math is originally based on an idealisation of the natural world. Occasionally, things are left out of these idealisations out of curiosity. Often they are later applied back to the real world, and the assumptions no longer seem so 'arbitrary' or 'unjustified' then - c.f. multidimensional topology, or the maths used to model nonlinear situations in the natural world.

The majority of sciences are based on mathematical formulations - even psychology depends on maths at a fundamental level to add weight to its hypotheses.

- Jordan