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Uncleftish Beholding
- UweSchmidt 8y agoThis reminds me of what our exhausted, delirious minds used to come up with after too much language study in school. Absurd literal translation highlighting the oddities of the respective languages, ultimately a futile excercise and a sign that a break is overdue.
- bhritchie 8y agoIt is interesting to notice that when people want to sound official or authoritative (in business documents, for example) they tend to lean more on long, latin-derived words rather than the plainer, earthier words of Germanic origin.
- microcolonel 8y agoWas going to link the Monty Python skit about words being comparatively woody or tinny (in relation to "earthy" words), but the rights holder has erased it from the internet. Added: Well at least the script is available <http://www.montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_4/23.htm> http://www.montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_4/23.htm>
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- microcolonel 8y agoSide note: can't edit the link above, but due to an ARC bug from more than a decade ago[0], HN does not correctly delimit it at the ">" (because they escape it a second time, but don't escape the escapes I guess, which causes the ">" not to match as a closing delimiter for the URI). [0]: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/03e329e9cec8ad4563b73690ba0f780060bdcfbc/lib/markdown.arc#L78 https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/03e329e9cec8ad456...
- vertline3 8y agoMakes sense, according to wikipedia "Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, "
- bhritchie 8y agoAnd then using latinized words also makes normal things sound more technical or scientific than they really are. For example you can say "let's implement business process improvements" or you can say "let's do things better."
- tragomaskhalos 8y agoIn medicine Latin and especially Greek terms are still ubiquitous of course, to the point where a classical education must be a huge leg-up in learning the terminology. Eg: I once astounded my medical student neighbour in halls at Uni by correctly guessing what a 'salpingogram' was, despite never having seen that word before. Similarly, for (modern) Greeks a lot of opaque medical jargon that baffles most of us must be more or less plain speaking to them.
- hprotagonist 8y agoBad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). ... It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness. Orwell (1946)
- gumby 8y agoI assume that's a fossil of the Norman invasion (1066) the way ordinary animals (cow, pig/swine) get transformed into fancy Romance words (beef, pork) when placed on the table. These kinds of linguistic scars can last a long time.
- kragen 8y agoThere's that, but also, Latin was the language of science throughout Western Europe until the 18th or 19th century; Euler, for example, published his papers in Latin, and if you browse the Mathematical Genealogy Project, you can see the transition from writing dissertations in Latin to writing them in local languages like German and Italian. Nowadays, English occupies a similar position in much of the world — if you study a scientific or engineering discipline in a non-English-speaking part of the world, chances are excellent that you will also have to study English in order to read the literature in the field. To take an example you've worked on yourself, GCC's comments are in English, and so is the mailing list. So it's quite common for people to use English loanwords in, for example, Spanish when discussing computers, video games, and so on.
- gumby 8y agoYes I remember in France in the 80s you had to translate all the technical words (stack, buffer, etc) into French equivalents in order to publish, even though we used the English words in conversation, email etc. I know Latin was the language of science (later German until the late 1910s) as French was in diplomacy, but the contemporary significance of the use of latinate words is more of an English thing IMHO -- certainly more than in romance countries like Spain! There are some use of latinate endings in loan words in German but technical jargon (e.g. legal language) tends to simply be complex German words. I gave long found it odd that English went through a phase of using Latin or Greek roots to construct a new word (e.g. television) while most people use their own language (e.g. Fernseh). Or jarringly, combine the two (e.g. "monolingual" -- yech)
- azeotropic 8y agoTelevision is the same kind of Greek-Latin hybrid as monolingual
- FabHK 8y agoThat reminds me of what I think was a flaw in the computer-based adaptive GRE. "Adaptive" because it gives you harder questions when you're doing well, and easier ones when you're doing badly, thus allowing for the same measurement precision, if you will, with fewer questions. My Spanish girl friend and I studied English vocabulary to prepare for the GRE, and took many old-fashioned paper based tests (non-adaptive) for practice, then later the actual (adaptive) one. Her result on the actual test was much worse than on the practice tests, by many standard deviations (only in the verbal section, not in the quantitative section). Now, in English, the more difficult words are frequently the words of Latin origin (for example, "to lament" vs "to mourn"). However, those were often cognates of the equivalent Spanish words, thus easier for her. So, the hypothesis is that she got some questions wrong initially, and the algorithm decided to give her "easier" questions (with more Germanic words), which would be harder for her, though; while withholding the harder questions which she could have solved correctly. Intriguingly, it might have gone the other way around (depending on whether you first got predominantly Germanic words, answered them wrong, and got even more of them, or first got predominantly Latinate words, answered them correctly, and got even more of them.) Thus, if ETS tested the adaptive algorithm on native English speakers, the adaptive test might have lined up very well with the traditional test, validating it. (Now we're coming to the intriguing part.) If they tested it also with Latinos/native Spanish speakers, it might well have been that the mean deviation (between adaptive and paper based result) was also very small, but the variance of the deviation larger: many large deviations to the upside, many large deviations to the downside. I wonder whether that was ever researched in depth, and whether it could have been grounds for complaints (that members of some community had measurements that were "worse", but not in the sense of biased, but of "less precise", with more variance!)?
- jessaustin 8y agoYou're hypothesizing an additional axis of question variation, "Romance-Germanic", in addition to the well-known axis "difficulty". Do we have any reason other than this anecdote to believe this other axis actually exists for GRE? Why wouldn't easy Romance questions be sorted in with easy Germanic questions?
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- abecedarius 8y agoYou can find lovely examples of this in The Lord of the Rings -- like the chapter "The Voice of Saruman" or how the language of the narrator modulates in describing Sam being tempted by the Ring versus his more down-to-earth thoughts. (IIRC. I don't have it handy to check.)
- hprotagonist 8y agoLoTR gets way more complicated than this, but you're right. There are very localized changes in language and dialogue throughout the book, and they're all intentional. Note that the Rohirrim alliterate, for example (they're saxons!), and the elves don't.
- hojjat12000 8y agogoodstuff.
- hprotagonist 8y agoFull text archived here: https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language... "coalstuff" always makes me smile a bit because it is the literal etymology of "carbon".
- tigerlily 8y agoIn the Dutch language, carbon and nitrogen are referred to as koolstof (coalstuff) and stikstof (chokestuff), respectively.
- FabHK 8y agoJust as "waterstuff" ("Wasserstoff" in German) for "hydrogen" ("hudro" = water), and "sourstuff" ("Sauerstoff" in German) for "oxygen" ("oxys" = "sharp, acid"). Anyway. Also, "airplane' = "Flugzeug" in German = "Flying stuff". This is fun, actually. Flystuffs are outsending so much coaltwosourstuff that it is enharming the vapourball.
- mc32 8y agoHuh, I always had thought ‘zeug’ was ‘thing’ rather than ‘stuff’ (quantifiable vs. unquantifiable). (lighter, toy, plane, etc.) But... it looks like I’m wrong and most of the time it refers to ‘stuff’.
- FabHK 8y agoHmm, "Zeug" is uncountable and without plural (like "stuff"), while "Ding" is countable and has a plural (like "thing"). I think I've seen "Flugzeug" rendered as "Flything", but "Flystuff" feels closer.
- tigerlily 8y agoDiscussed at some time previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7671549
- colanderman 8y agoXKCD's "Up Goer Five" (written using only the 1000 most common English words) was no doubt inspired by this: https://xkcd.com/1133/ https://xkcd.com/1133/
- schoen 8y agoNot likely, since it uses tons of Romance vocabulary. For example, right at the top we can see space using people escape problem [Greek] decide control direction Not all constrained writing exercises are directly inspired by one another!
- Zarel 8y agoUp Goer Five is most likely inspired by Randall Munroe's general fascination with Simple English Wikipedia: https://xkcd.com/547/ https://xkcd.com/547/
- enriquto 8y agoNot at all; I'd rather say that "up goer five" is the exact opposite of "unclefish beholding". One uses common words to refer to advanced things; the other invents a new vocabulary to refer to things that already have plain names.
- BerislavLopac 8y agoYou might want to check Randall's "Thing Explainer": https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
- yesenadam 8y agoI don't know who the audience is, or that anyone would want to read it more than once, but it's a unique marvel. Amazing and highly recommended!
- BerislavLopac 8y agoOne very grateful audience is non-native speakers learning English.
- btilly 8y agoI am vaguely reminded of plans for spelling reform to make English look more like German, https://www.smart-jokes.org/english-spelling-reform.html https://www.smart-jokes.org/english-spelling-reform.html.
- failrate 8y agoI love "bulkbits".
- zw123456 8y agoA friend of mine who is a lawyer jokes about how the amount of money he make is directly proportional to the amount of Latin he uses. :)
- philwelch 8y agoI’ve learned that there is sort of an accidental Anglish that already exists. The Scots language (dialect?) is a partially-intelligible tongue spoken in Scotland that, due to the Normans not conquering Scotland right away, wasn’t subjected to contamination from Norman French. That’s obviously not the only difference, but it’s a perfect English-language example of that gray area between mutually intelligible and not quite mutually intelligible.
- mabbo 8y agoThe sad part is that even many Scots don't know it's an independent, old language. They've been convinced that they simply speak 'bad' English.
- philwelch 8y agoScottish English, Scots Gaelic, and Scots are three distinct tongues though.
- falsedan 8y agoThe Scots leid branched off from Middle English tho, well after 1066. There’s plenty of French in the bonny north’s tongue. Scots Gaelic was the language untouched by the Normans, and quite a few words got transferred into Scots when the Gaelic-speaking populations were forcibly migrated into Scots areas.
- philwelch 8y agoSure. My impression was that Scots and Middle English sort of co-evolved and fewer Norman loanwords made it all the way north, though obviously some did. Scots Gaelic is another tongue entirely, with no direct Anglo-Germanic descent.
- falsedan 8y agoTo be clear: Modern English and Scots share the same direct ancestor of Middle English. They’re both about the same age, they both diverged from Middle English. The Romans made it all the way to Aberdeen, the Normans got up north no problem and did pretty well e.g. the De Brus family of Annandale neé Normany.
- enriquto 8y agoI use this text as a kind of informal test for my collaborators/phd students. If they can decipher most of it, then they are true hackers and good to go working on open problems. Otherwise, they will be assigned more menial tasks.