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

I'd guessed that. I was hesitant, because I thought that, like the Germans, they might have been able to get away with abbreviating from their own language. (.ös? .oe? I can see why not, I guess. And .au is Oz - but why didn't they get precedence for .as over American Samoa?)

Moving on...the English verb 'to got' and it's variant, 'gotten' are interesting, aren't they?
- In most cases it's redundant. 'I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts' (Interestingly, in English English, it could be 'I have a...' but seldom 'I've a...'
- In AAVE (African-American English Vernacular) it replaces 'to have' entirely: 'I got rhythm'; 'He Got Game'.
- There is remnant of 'gotten' in English English - ill-gotten gains.
- My perception is that its less common in Scots English.
- It seems to be used in every tense but the perfect: 'I had'
- It is regarded as 'informal' - but it's used universally.

Anyone know where it came from? Is there anything similar in other languages? Casting mentally around, I can't see anything in the immediate neighbourgood.

British English seems to have adopted the US formula "do you have . . . ?".

In my youth (60s) the correct thing was "have you got . . . ?" and when I came out with "do you have" my brother told me off for picking up Americanisms from a New Yorker friend.

In Scots English it's 'Have you a...'

To me, neither seems strikingly American. 'Got' is the past participle of 'get', so "I've got" means the same as "I have", since you possess it after getting it in the past.

Of course, a lot of people think of and use 'got' as a present tense meaning 'have'. eg. I got rythym. This leads to them changing it to 'gotten' as a past participle. "I've just gotten a letter", etc.

Is 'gotten' the only known past participle of a past participle?

But isn't it (gotten) a very old form? One that has survived in the US, but not in the UK?

I get
I got
I have got/gotten

?

Squillions of NZers use 'gotten', even where it doesn't really fit. It bugs me.

The "got" word is complicated by the fact that it means two different things - the act of possessing and the act of acquiring.

1. I have a large car.
2. I got a large car.
3. I have got a large car.
4. I have gotten a large car.

I believe that the usage of these was different in England and America up to about 1960. After this, English people started to use the American usages some of the time, making a huge confused mess. I'm not in the mood to sort it out this morning.

In my youth "have you got" did not normally refer to a past acquisition. "Have you got a moment?" "Have you got a light?"

'Have you got a light, Mac?'
'No. But I've a dark overcoat'

(c) Chic Murray

In French there's 'Aller Chercher' - literally 'go (and) find' but more equivalent to 'go (and) get'. (Note, in the US you'd omit the 'and's).

I realised the difference, but my take on it is that it started off meaning to acquire. So in a sentence saying "I have got sugar", there's nothing to say you lost it again, so in the absence of info to the contrary, the assumption is that you still posess the sugar.

'Have you got a light, Mac?'
'No, but I've got a dark brown overcoat' was on a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band record (Gorilla? The Big Shot: 'Remember the three Gs -- girls guns guts' 'Baby you're so far ahead of me it's beautiful')

Did they pinch it from Chic Murray?

"Whisky wow wow" I breathed -- http://www.gingergeezer.net/Morden.html

You may be right. I am possibly guilty of attributing all feeble jokes to the great Chic. http://members.fortunecity.com/gillonj/chicmurray/

'My neighbour passed my in the street. So I stopped. Just to show him that I could.'

'Now, I don't swim. I *can* swim - It's just that I don't have much cause to do so in the normal run of things.'

'Murray is only my stage name. My family name is Drawers. I have a brother called Chester. He's a tall boy.'

And one from Viv Stanshall...

'If I still had all the money I've spent on drink, I'd spend it all on drink.'

Aïna's comment on (Villayanur Ramachandran's comments on) Chomsky got me thinking.

My understanding of Chomsky is that his 'Deep Structure' is a mathematical expression of language stripped down to its first principles. If language is used to describe the world, it has to handle certain concepts - things acting on things, things having properties, etc. There can be no languages which do not have these concepts.

What he's slightly guilty of is implying that we are 'hardwired' to handle these processes (implying? He downright *says* it!) . This has given rise to two misunderstandings.
a) That his model has identified the specific, human hardwiring. But it's done more than that. Hypothetical alien languages would have to have the same structure.
b) That there are processing module in the human brain that can be identifies as corresponding to gramamtical components - eg. a module for handling noun phrases. I think it's the last bit that Ramachandran is (rightly) objecting to. In the same way as there are various possible biological solutions to the problem of vision, there are various ways in which the brain might be able to abstract the way the universe works into language. As a neuroscientist, Ramachandran is interested in testing out which one is right.

The hardwiring case is not dead. I'm currently reading Melvin Konner's "The Tangled Wing" which gives a varied overview of current theories, and hardwiring seems to be pretty much common ground, as far as the various language centres in the brain, and some of their functions, go.

If Chomsky overstepped the science, then he is guilty of no more than doing philosophy. I don't see (without having read the offending article) how hardwiring could require aliens to have the same brain structure as us. Did he really say this? Or did he say something more general, comparable with Dawkins saying that any aliens would also have to have evolved by natural selection, and must therefore carry much of that baggage, like us?

And if Chomsky has suggested the universal necessity of a module for handling noun phrases, is that really more extreme than proposing a module for, say, recognising faces?

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I'd say not...

How does this fit in with Wittgenstein's statement that if a lion could speak, we wouldn't be able to understand him?

I'm not criticising Chomsky per se. However, some have taken from him - perhaps supported by his statements - that the modules are known to exist. They might. But we haven't found them.

Gnomon's Wittgenstein comment is interesting.

Richard Dawkins said something about how pre-1859 (ie pre-darwin) philosophy has to be re-evaluated. Do Chomsky and/or emerging neuroscience similarly negate Wittgenstein?

(I can see my brain aching before the discussion is over)

I suppose the question here is "Are there forms of intelligence which are not expressible in language?"

Roger Penrose, the celebrated Quantum Physicist, addresses this point in his book "The Emperor's New Mind". He says that since most of the people writing books are wordy types, they tend to start from the assumption that all thought is words. He himself thinks in geometry (he says). He gives stumbling attempts to explain his geometrical thoughts in words. This doesn't explain very much but it does lend credibility that he does actually think a lot of his more complicated Quantum Physical theories directly in geometry. This seems to go along with Wittgenstein, that there are forms of thought which are not language.

Chomsky on the other hand seems to be saying (from what has been reported here) that even Aliens will tend to use speech in the same way as we do. It he committing the error of assuming that language is thought?

For clarification...I don't think that Chomsky has ever said anything explicitly alon the lines of 'Aliens will have the same sort of language as us.' That inference was mine.

What I'm taking fom him, though, is that language is an abstracted description of (the behaviour of things in) the universe. Thus, if we strip languages down mathematically they can all be shown to have the same descriptive capabilities. A man can bite a dog. All languages have to be able to express the man as an agent, the bite as an action and the dog as the thing being acted on. If the dog is hairy, languages have to be able to express that the dog has a property of hairiness.