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Linguistics

Little real-world factoid: I was listening to a lady on the bus who agitatedly pointed out a bee trapped inside; I could only pick out mosca from her rapid-fire Spanish. That's not the right word for bee (which is abeja), but it clicked something in my mind when I remembered hearing that mushka means "small bug" in Russian, (strongly) suggesting that the word has an Indo-European root. :)
 
mosca=mosquito yes?? fun pass to travel on the western slope of the sangre de cristo mountains is mosca pass-factoid #2
 
^
Re: mosquito: Yep! And, the Spanish word mosca comes from the Latin musca.
 
I remember the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson once commented that Czech patients diagnosed with aphasia were wont to pronounce a certain phoneme that was considered incorrect in Czech but was allowable in Russian. So "what appears to be a pathological phenomenon..corresponds to the normal pattern in Russian". It sheds into light the importance of linguistics in bringing into consciousness the dominance that language has over man, even though he never avows himself of the fact.
 
slimvictor:

I'm surprised this wasn't shown before 2001. I mean, when we make a relative clause, we often omit 'that' entirely. I suppose the same goes for a lot of what you call complementizer clauses (I know them by the name 'that-clauses', but, alas, Chomsky's ideas and vocabulary didn't really penetrate European linguistics departments all that much. On the other hand, when we echo Iago and say: "Ha! I like not that." (Othello, 3.3.35) or something to that effect, 'that' in effect becomes what we could call a content word (nouns, adjectives, verbs) because it occupies a syntactic slot usually reserved for content words, namely that of the direct object in the S-V-DO word order. Am I rambling here or just wrong about how recent these developments are?

Also: I completely agree with your assessment of Chomsky. His conception of the LAD/UG appears to be under increasing fire from all sorts of directions it appears. (Cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics, cognitive science itself, studies of child language acquistion etc.)

Off-topic: I find it sort of intriguing that like 90% of the replies to this thread are from members of the Bluelight crew! Also: why Philosophy of Spirituality? :p
 
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^ Why not start now? :)

http://books.google.com/books?id=E4QP2wKp-NIC

This is a standard textbook for the Akkadian courses that I've seen on more than one university's reading list. I probably have an electronic copy somewhere if you find the above as interesting as you believe it to be.

And btw, could you please explain in more concrete terms? Are you saying that Akkadian is superior because it is old?

I said Akkadian and Sahran/Basque was superior, because it is, period.

look what started with your fancy dead dialect!

NSFW:

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
  Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat—
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
  Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
  So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
  Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
  Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
  Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
  Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
  He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

We shall march prospering,—not thro’ his presence;
  Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence,
  Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
  One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devils’-triumph and sorrow for angels,
  One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Life’s night begins: let him never come back to us!
  There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,
Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight,
  Never glad confident morning again!
Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly,
  Menace our heart ere we master his own;
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
  Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!

Robert Browning
 
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Here's a crackhead idea i've been rolling over in my head. I haven't really tied the loose ends and its gonna be a bit hard to describe, i dont by any means have a degree in linguistics but ehhh here i go...

I was just pondering the idea that like dogs barking at each other, we speak to one another and it doesnt mean jack. Sentences only have meanings we assign to them and those meanings are all subjective. If they are all subjective they arent solid and possibly we're not conveying anything when we speak to one another and it's all just an illusion :) lol.

On another note i was pondering the idea that conciousness is an extension of language. Thoughts? Ideas?
 
hmm, like patterns of speech maybe? the rhythms or sound waves with in our language and manner of speaking?

Or even in writing, an actual percussion amongst the meaning of the words used?

I think so yeah...




is reminded of the movie Dune
 
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im not sure which part u were responding to.

here's for the former: yeah i guess. idk it was just more of a scary thought contributing to the idea that everything is an illusion [which my last acid trip kinda has me stuck on...] - including what we percieve. we can only speak about what we percieve -> what we speak is false. i dont think that really makes sense but whatever.

here's for the latter: im trying to remember how i stumbled upon this notion a few weeks ago [i was stoned]... ill start at the foundation. consciousness is what seperates us from animals right? imagine at the very beginning of linguistics, when language was first developing. we would have words for the moon, the sun, the earth etc. we'd build off those words to describe them. being able to assign a word to a thing allows us to think about that thing more effectively. without language, our thoughts would have been so primitive, like animals. that's not how i stumbled upon the idea, all i can recall right now is i was thinking in cause and effect monologue/philosophy...
 
Here's a crackhead idea i've been rolling over in my head. I haven't really tied the loose ends and its gonna be a bit hard to describe, i dont by any means have a degree in linguistics but ehhh here i go...

I was just pondering the idea that like dogs barking at each other, we speak to one another and it doesnt mean jack. Sentences only have meanings we assign to them and those meanings are all subjective. If they are all subjective they arent solid and possibly we're not conveying anything when we speak to one another and it's all just an illusion :) lol.

On another note i was pondering the idea that conciousness is an extension of language. Thoughts? Ideas?

You want to read the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ;)

You linguistic determinist you.

Sé que ha llegado tarde mi repuesta, pero mosquito se dice mosquito en español y mosca se dice fly en inglés.

No mistranslations in the linguistics thread ;)
 
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