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

Excluding Mao Tse Tung, it is interesting that all the rest of them are Europeans. We really know how to screw things up big time, don't we.

Anyway....back to Language (passing up the opportunity to raphsodise the beaty and grandeur of classic dub reggae)

I was reading a linguistics textbook last night (as one does) which had asomething interesting to say aobout 'strong' and 'weak' versions of the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis.

The example it gave was of languages which have formal and informal forms of 'you' - eg vous/tu in French, vy/ty in Russian (the thou/you distinction being archaic in English). Now, someone of Tolstoy's class in 19thC Russia would have been bilingual in French and Russian, speaking French in 'polite society'. French and Russian have different conventions on circumstances in which one shifts between V and T modes. When Tolstoy was speaking French, he would have normally have used the V form (following 19thC cultural constraints of politeness). In Russian, he would have used the V form with his peers, but the T form to serfs. However - in Russian, one can move more easily between modes: During an argument, for example, one might move from V to T.

Now....to a Russian reader of 'Anna Karenina', various things would have been obvious from the context and from which forms were being used - eg whether the speakers would have been French or English (the T and V forms would not match up with what one would normally expect in Russian); When Anna was angry with Vronsky (a shift from V to T). These meanings cannot be expressed at all in English (other than in 'metatextual' footnotes).

What does this mean? Well - clearly our thoughts are not *dictated* as such by language - an English-speaking Anna can still be angry at her Vronsky - but we can't communicate it in quite the same way.

Neat, huh?

It's possible to show antagonism in English by a shift from informal to formal. It just isn't done using pronouns, Mr Smarty.

>> You know what teenagers are...

>> Anyway....back to Language (passing up the opportunity to raphsodise the beaty and grandeur of classic dub reggae

If only I had had the right sort of education, I would have liked to have written a thesis on the cultural and lingustic similarities and differences shown in the viking sagas, and gantsta rap.


>> (the thou/you distinction being archaic in English)

You do know that 'you' was the formal version, and 'thou' the informal version don't you? Still are in Yorkshire and other parts of Northen England.

The truly radical thing about Tyndale and thus the Authorised Version of the bible was that God was addressed informally.


On an allied note, my father said that the use of the second-person pronouns meant that you could tell in the Indian Army if a man had learned his local language skills from his teacher or his mistress.



B

Fr. Dougal: 'How are you, Ted - ya big bollix'
Fr. Ted: 'Dougal - have you been reading those Roddy Doyle books again?'

>>On an allied note, my father said that the use of the second-person pronouns meant that you could tell in the Indian Army if a man had learned his local language skills from his teacher or his mistress.

Actually - the book mentioned that Hindi has pretty strict pronoun distinctions. Other languages have even richer patterns of 'honorifics' - eg Javanese, Thai, Japan. I don't recall the details, but I understand that Japanese has whole vocabularies of nouns and verbs to denote different social situations. (As does English - the terms used to your doctor may not be the same as those used in bed or with children).

Another quick example - in Japanese, a superior can forgo pronouns and refer to himself (and, yes, it is generally a 'him') by his title: 'Boss wants you to do this.' Again there is a similar pattern in English: 'Mummy/Daddy/Teacher wants you to tidy up now.'

It is frequently noted that the Greeks had four words for love, and that there is only one in English, but I wonder if this is correct.

We have cherish, adore, worship, desire, lust and so on.

Do we have more words for love than we notice?

Ben

There are people I like, admire, fancy, get on with, cherish, sympathise with, identify with, enjoy, wish well, remember . . .

Undoubtedly! We have a set of words with a non-isomorphic mapping against Greek words (see the influence of my recent reading).

Did the Greek NT sources use 'agape' where churches would these days say 'love'? The innacuracy of the translation seems to have had various consequences - such as lukewarm attitudes towards anything approaching socialism and an over-emphasis (within the Western churches at least) on matters concerning sexual love ('eros'). Apparently sex is meant to be some sort of spiritual act, performed within the sanctity of holy wedlock. I can tell you - a good blow job hardly counts as 'spiritual'!

We also have many words for 'snow'. (blizzard; flurry; slush; drift; powder....)

Test: can I cut and paste Greek into here?: αγάπε

Looks Greek to me but, no.

Can this be true -- there's no ASCII for pi? All I can find is µ (Alt-230). Alt-225 is ß but that's the German double-s; Alt-155 is ø but that's the Danish stricken o.

The ASCII and ANSI character sets do not include Greek letters, except the ones you just mentioned. h2g2 entries can use Greek letters by using α etc, but this does not work in h2g2 conversations.

How do you guys manage when you include Irish in entries? (with the accents, I mean?) Cut and paste from Word?

Myself, I'm annoyed that I can't type French and German in Outlook using the same keyboard shortcuts as in Word (eg [ctrl+:, u] for ü; [ctrl+, , c] for ç)

Ctrl + Alt + a gives á
Ctrl + Alt + e gives é

and so on.

If you Google 'agape' - as I just did - on the first page you get a hit for a 'single Christians dating agency'.

Isn't this missing the point?

There is a handy keyboard configuration called "English (Ireland)" whereby AltGr-a or Ctrl-Alt-a gives á, and so forth for all the vowels in upper and lower case.

Damn Gnomon got there first. Shouldn't type while on the phone.

And my keyboard won't even give me a €. And neither, I suspect, will h2g2 - I mean a Euro symbol. But then, I live in a backwater of Europe.

Has anyone tried typing on a German QWERTZUIOPÜ or a French AZERTY... keyboard? They're murder!

And on that theme - anyone had any experience of typing languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc on an alphanumeric keyboard (which, I believe, is done)? If so - how does it work?

€


Zube

>> I can tell you - a good blow job hardly counts as 'spiritual'!

...!

>> Has anyone tried typing on a German QWERTZUIOPÜ

Zep!



>> €

Showoff!


B