[HN Gopher] Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating...
___________________________________________________________________
Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages
Author : jsnell
Score : 406 points
Date : 2022-03-21 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| teekert wrote:
| Forget language, I once asked a Taiwanese colleague to tell me
| joke that is really considered funny in Taiwan, his response:
| "For example this is funny, a Polar bear that is cold on the
| North pole." Ok... I wonder what our jokes sound like to him...
| Biganon wrote:
| There's a joke in French about two horses that go to the
| movies, I usually can't finish telling it from laughing too
| hard, yet people often find it extremely lame and unfunny. You
| can't explain humor I guess.
| riskable wrote:
| Modern version of an E.B. White quote: "Explaining a joke is
| like dissecting a frog. Sure, you learn something but the
| frog dies in the end."
|
| Original version:
|
| "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand
| it better but the frog dies in the process." - E.B. White
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| By the unwritten rule of jokes, you must now tell us the
| joke.
| mushyhammer wrote:
| A priest, a rabbi and a horse walk into a bar.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The horse says, okay I absolutely fucked up that jump,
| but what the hell are you two doing here in the middle of
| a hurdle track?
| mushyhammer wrote:
| Weren't they two horses?
| mushyhammer wrote:
| Exactly.
| vidarh wrote:
| I think a polar bear that is cold on the north pole would be
| funny _as a visual gag_ most places if executed well, because
| it breaks assumptions about polar bears. But for some reason
| when written down it 's harder to make it fit the assumptions
| of the structure of a written joke in many cultures that seems
| to expect an action. To make it funny in writing, I think many
| place you'd need a more complex delivery wrapping creating a
| story around how you ran into this polar bear and it terrified
| you, but it turned out it was just cold and looking for some
| way to stay warm.
| tokai wrote:
| Or some places on the internet where a joke can be the same
| meaningless word spammed for more that a decade. Jokes are
| weird desu.
| vharuck wrote:
| Good to know one-liners are a universal concept. My favorite
| English one:
|
| "A cannibal passed his brother in the woods."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It's tasteless, but I like this one for the unusually
| intricate ambiguity:
|
| Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?
|
| He worked it out with a pencil.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| worked the logs out with a pencil.
| nathancahill wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
|
| My favorite: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a
| banana.
| webmaven wrote:
| A cannibal refused to eat clown soup, claiming it tasted
| funny.
| zeteo wrote:
| I once played Taboo with a Taiwanese colleague. I still
| remember when he gave the clue "you get this if you're really
| lazy". The word was "beard".
|
| (BTW I had a beard at the time.)
| dorchadas wrote:
| Let's be honest -- that's part of why I have my beard. The
| other reason is because I'm bald and it helps balance things
| out. But mostly lazy.
| vidarh wrote:
| I'm still undecided whether I'm saving time having a beard
| or have created more grooming work than a quick shave took.
| shrikant wrote:
| Every couple of weeks I decide that the current state of
| affairs simply takes too long and switch things around,
| only to keep that going as an infinite loop :/
| [deleted]
| teekert wrote:
| Haha, well, I hate shaving and that's why I often have a
| beard, you could call me lazy. My Taiwanese colleague was
| usually not so direct by the way, I'd call him shy but a very
| nice, warm person.
| nichtich wrote:
| I'm not sure if he is trying to tell some version of this joke,
| but here it goes: (for context, dad jokes are often categorized
| as "cold jokes" here in China/Taiwan, since often its humor is
| not appreciated by the audience and thus making the vibe
| "cold") So a polar bear become bored one day and had nothing to
| do. So he started to pull off his own hair. One, two, three.
| One by one the hairs were pulled off. After a while, the polar
| bear suddenly said: It's pretty cold out here!
| slim wrote:
| I can't view this tweet. It seems this guy made his account
| private.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I could view them before dinner, but it's indeed gone now:
| "Only approved followers". Guess this relatively "obscure"
| account got some attention he didn't expect/desired(?)
|
| Anyway, can still read:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html
| laughy wrote:
| Put it here as well https://archive.ph/yuQyu
| lleb97a wrote:
| I must of really watched a lot of trash horror films as a
| teenager; I will forever associate the sumerian language with
| summoning demons.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Off topic to this interesting and really nerdy thread, but does
| anyone happen to know why, or does this show for anyone else, the
| "more tweets" segment below this one is a bunch of anti-trans
| rhetoric? I'm signed in but I only follow some software
| engineers, I don't follow these people, I've never interacted or
| liked any anti-trans sentiments. These are the tweets I'm seeing
| below the linked thread (TW: anti-trans sentiments):
|
| https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1505663712266493958
| (Babylon Bee complaining about getting suspended after calling
| Rachel Levine "man of the year")
|
| https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1505670109809070102?s=...
| JK Rowling pushing her "trans kids regret their choices" rhetoric
|
| https://twitter.com/RevengOfTheFlex/status/15055563131237908...
| Man going "May transition join a women's MMA league & win it
| all."
|
| etc etc etc; it's a heap of right-wing nonsense talking points,
| anti-Ukrainian sentiments crossed with anti-vaxxer posts, a comic
| claiming BLM embezzled money, a woman saying that if she cheated
| on a man it's the man's fault, Stonetoss, and even one claiming
| technology has made us all gay.
|
| What the fuck Twitter? This is not what I signed up for, this is
| not relevant to my interests, this is not in any way related to
| anything I've interacted with Twitter for. Is this what you're
| earning money from these days? If this happens again I'll close
| my account. That'll teach 'em.
| blamazon wrote:
| I got the same results. (Not logged in) I'd guess that these
| things are "trending" in "engagement" today because they are
| controversial and antagonistic.
|
| My thinking is it is a problem of misaligned incentives.
| Twitter benefits from outrage through engagement. The
| perpetrators of hatred benefit from outrage through division.
| You and I, we do not benefit from this alignment.
| prionassembly wrote:
| This kind of discourse sort of exculpates the outraged.
| People have agency, however imperfect. We've gotten in a rut
| of blaming platforms for people's behavior -- both assholes
| that post in social media and brittle-porcelaine people who
| can't stand this torture.
|
| Something needs to be done policy-wise about Twitter and
| Facebook, but we should also be telling each other to chill
| the frak out -- and to consider the truths (and every
| ideology has some truth to it, that's how it acquires
| verosimilitude and grows) behind the asshole's worldview.
| Maybe those damn transphobes _are_ looking at _some_ things
| that we 've become blind to.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's exactly what I'm thinking; these agitators generate
| tons of 'engagement' on twitter from both pro- and anti-
| whatever they're up for, which for Twitter translates to
| revenue.
|
| It's why they didn't ban Trump for all this time until he was
| no longer president. I mean sure, as president of the US he
| would get special treatment, but he didn't use the official
| twitter account of the US presidency, and he caused a lot of
| issues. But also a lot of engagement for Twitter; I wouldn't
| be surprised if all the reactions, retweets and responses to
| his tweets, and the fact half the world news media would jump
| on top of anything he tweeted, were responsible for a big
| chunk of Twitter's usage during that period.
| slg wrote:
| I am logged in and got the same results despite not following
| anyone close to connected to those tweets. There seems to be
| something specific about this thread that Twitter is
| connecting to the conservative side of the trans rights
| debate.
| hoseja wrote:
| Probably because it's trending and the censors haven't gotten
| around to it yet?
| PixyMisa wrote:
| "More tweets" seems specifically designed to show you content
| you hate. No idea why. If you followed the people you list
| above it would show you the most extreme left-wing talking
| points instead.
| prionassembly wrote:
| These things shouldn't make you this angry.
|
| - BLM _is_ unusually opaque about how it uses donations,
| particularly for something that 's promoted by XKCD (usually a
| seal of quality).
|
| - The current understanding of gender is very very new, and JK
| Rowling is 56. Also, are we saying _no_ trans kids _ever_
| regret their choices?
|
| - There _are_ complaints by female athletes -- possibly just
| sour grapes -- that transwomen are unreachably strong. The
| usual rebuttal is that hormone therapy "undoes" in some sense
| the muscular advantage that testosterone produces, but the
| timeline for that is unclear, and not all of the peak male
| physical superiority is due to sheer muscle (bone structure and
| mass, etc.) These aren't talking points, it's other people's
| lives.
|
| At any rate, your complaint is that someone is wrong on the
| internet! That does happen every once and then.
| peter303 wrote:
| Perhaps a sound-pun in there, not surviving translation.
| Gupie wrote:
| A man walks into a bar, the second ducks.
|
| I would imagine this would be difficult to translate, unless
| "bar" has the two same meanings in language it is translated to.
| There might also be confusion where aquatic birds fit in, or if
| there a reference to the passage of time?
| Lornedon wrote:
| I first interpreted that as "...the second walks into ducks".
| yeetard wrote:
| I love this. Too bad it will be lost forever to the world when
| the guy deletes his twitter account.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Fortunately IA also archives Twitter.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220321161743/https://twitter.c...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I love non-sequitur humor, so the idea of a Sumerian dog joke
| that (initially) makes no sense is already pretty hysterical.
|
| > _Sumerian doesn 't really have "tense" as such. Instead, it has
| two "tense/aspects" (because Sumerologists don't like to
| overcommit)_
|
| The author himself has a pretty dry sense of humor as well. LOL.
|
| Edit: After reading some of the author's other threads, I
| actually wonder now if anything he said in this thread is true.
| He seems to be an overly cynical know-it-all and not particularly
| accurate in what he talks about (for the subjects I recognize).
| Oh well.
| calibas wrote:
| I'm amazed that "An X walks into a bar..." jokes have been around
| for over 4,000 years.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Of course, XKCD already has a comic for this:
| https://xkcd.com/794/
| smitty1e wrote:
| Whereas I would have taken the choice of location and animal to
| be an ancient root of, e.g.: "They sent a sample of [SomeBeer]
| off to the state lab for analysis. The report came back: 'Shoot
| that horse, it suffers from diabetes.'"
| webmaven wrote:
| The variant I'm familiar with is "Congratulations, your rabbit
| is pregnant!"
| sir_eliah wrote:
| For anyone interested in learning Sumerian, there is really nice
| introduction "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian"[0] by J. Bowen and
| M. Lewis, which gives you rough ability to understand some
| grammar and also read cuneiform. It's extremely niche topic and I
| can guarantee that you'll have absolutely no use for this
| knowledge[1], but if you're into learning exotic languages, this
| can be fun. At least it was for me.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Read-Ancient-Sumerian-
| Introduct...
|
| [1] To some extent you can see the same cuneiform symbols in
| later Akkadian texts, but forget about the grammar.
| urubu wrote:
| There's also a video series to go along with the book:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTle8uT7NEM&list=PLmXNllWcFF...
| wl wrote:
| I've been warned by a Sumerologist that the book is
| idiosyncratic. It does seem to be the only in-print and
| inexpensive option aimed at amateur scholars.
|
| More mainstream options:
|
| Hayes, John. A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. A teaching
| grammar for the beginner. In print, but quite expensive.
|
| Edzard, D.O. Sumerian Grammar. A reference grammar rather than
| a teaching grammar with exercises and the like. It's really
| good if you already have some familiarity with linguistics.
| It's in print and inexpensive.
|
| Thomsen, Marie-Louise. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction
| to Its History and Grammatical Structure. A reference grammar.
| Out of print but available on the high seas.
| sir_eliah wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestions! By the way, what exactly did you
| mean by saying that the book is idiosyncratic?
| wl wrote:
| I'm sorry I can't add much more detail as I'm no expert and
| I'm paraphrasing an off-hand comment I heard around the
| time the book was published. The short of it is that Bowen
| & Lewis seem to take grammatical positions at odds with the
| rest of the field. This doesn't necessarily mean they're
| wrong. As you are likely aware, the Sumerian language is
| poorly understood and there's plenty of disagreement among
| Sumerologists.
| voldacar wrote:
| All three of those are on libgen just so you know
| andi999 wrote:
| Do you know if the original of the joke can be seen in Sumerian
| writing? (some picture). Also, do you think it could have been
| a pun?
| sir_eliah wrote:
| I don't know about original clay tablet on which this was
| written, but it can be found through the original publication
| I think: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1359157, if someone has
| access to JSTOR.
|
| About the interpretation, I myself understand only the:
|
| /igi nu-mu-un-du[8]/ - "I don't see anything"
|
| The rest is a bit above my level. But check this alternative
| interpretation of this joke:
| https://twitter.com/abbyfheld/status/1501880993833054208
| jtbayly wrote:
| A friend of mine was taking Akkadian or Sumerian (I can't
| remember which) and described the wide range of possible
| correct translations of a text with a story from class.
|
| One student said it was a receipt for the sale of a cow.
| The prof said that was one real possibility. Another said
| it was a love poem. Prof agreed again. :shrug:
|
| But my favorite translation disagreement is from the Epic
| of Gilgamesh, I think, where one man insists the proper
| translation of a line is "the lords of the land of the
| blazing rockets."
| skullt wrote:
| There's also a comment on that alternative interpretation
| here: https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/1505836278
| 1090611...
| notamy wrote:
| Reading this thread and seeing the author complain about how
| ambiguous Sumerian is, I find it all the more incredible that
| we're able to figure out how to translate dead languages like
| this...
| bradrn wrote:
| Generally speaking, translation of dead languages is done via
| means of bilingual texts. The Rosetta Stone is the most famous
| of these; for cuneiform, the key was apparently a trilingual
| Old Persian/Elamite/Akkadian inscription (the 'Behistun
| inscription'). In this case, Old Persian is an Indo-European
| language, and Akkadian is Semitic, so those languages have
| plenty of modern-day relatives with very similar structures,
| which helps decipherment. Once cuneiform was deciphered,
| Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher
| Sumerian: again, the Semitic nature of Akkadian helped a lot
| here.
|
| It also helps that most languages use more or less similar
| techniques to express certain concepts and relations. The
| elaborate case system and verbal morphology, though 'exotic'
| for Europeans, aren't necessarily all that different to those
| found in languages elsewhere.
|
| As for ambiguity... I'm not entirely sure how that particular
| problem is overcome, but the author mentioned duplicate
| manuscripts which together can remove some of the ambiguity.
| Beyond that, we just need to infer the missing pieces from the
| fact that languages are usually self-consistent to a large
| extent.
|
| (Disclaimer: I know very little about this area, though I do
| enjoy reading about linguistics!)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual
| texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian
|
| This isn't quite right; we didn't just find bilingual texts.
| We found curricular texts that were intended to train
| Akkadian speakers to be literate in Sumerian, which is
| obviously much better.
| bradrn wrote:
| Huh, I had no idea! As I said, I'm not an expert.
| josefx wrote:
| Here[1] is a video covering how cuneiform (the writing system)
| was deciphered, most of it was solved after they found an
| inscription in three different languages.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA?t=1542
| wl wrote:
| Sumerian was a dead prestige language used by scribes in
| ancient Mesopotamia. As such, there are parallel word lists and
| other such texts written in Akkadian (which is fairly well
| understood by modern scholars) meant for scribes learning the
| language.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's wild to consider that, thousands of years ago, there
| were already languages that were considered old and dead.
| xaedes wrote:
| Readable link:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html
| yreg wrote:
| I'm always surprised the lengths some go to write on twitter
| instead of a blog.
|
| See this "thread of threads":
| https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/14562816316024545...
| dexterdog wrote:
| I'm always amazed that people read what is a short article
| broken into 25 parts.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I thought the joke was quite funny, the barman opening one for
| the blind dog. Open an eye, see?
| hereforphone wrote:
| "You're unable to view this Tweet because this account owner
| limits who can view their Tweets". Unfortunately my Twitter
| account was deleted for no stated reason a couple of days ago
| (maybe I expressed a thought crime, though I never discuss
| politics there...)
| jcranberry wrote:
| This recently also had a post on the AskHistorians subreddit:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tbgetc/this_...
| blamazon wrote:
| From the linked set of proverbs: [1]
|
| "81-82. (cf. 6.2.3: UET 6/2 225) The dog understands "Take
| it!", but it does not understand Put it down!"
|
| This is ancient form of the modern "No take, only throw" meme!
| [2]
|
| [1]:
| https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p...
|
| [2]: https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/433/498/10e...
| emeraldunicorn9 wrote:
| I wonder what a Sumerian bar was like. Also, they must have had
| pretty lax public health rules if they let dogs go in. I can't
| take my dog to my local coffee shop!
| godDLL wrote:
| Back then dogs would probably be preferable over the kind of
| fauna that would impose on you, even in the city. Besides they
| are a walking hand-towel, are they not.
| meetups323 wrote:
| You're just in the wrong location -- every patio'd coffee shop
| and bar around me is dog friendly!
| JudgePenitent wrote:
| A healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training
| tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we
| copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an
| emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these
| include:
|
| "If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he
| is indeed a scribe!"
|
| "A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"
|
| "What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"
|
| Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern
| Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like
| Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way
| that medieval England still used Latin.
|
| On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved
| mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name
| given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning
| EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity)
| This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes
| changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within
| a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its
| there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a
| scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it
| has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet
|
| Source: Jon Taylor, "The First Scribes"
| kazinator wrote:
| > dog jokes as an excuse to embark
|
| I see what he did there!
| blamazon wrote:
| Copy pasting the completed translation:
|
| "A friendly dog walks into a bar.
|
| His eyes do not see anything.
|
| He should open them."
| dotancohen wrote:
| How rough is this translation? Does the "...walks into a bar"
| joke predate monotheism? Though we know that the Egyptian
| neighbours were drinking beer at the time, did either culture
| actually have drinking establishments?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It's well known that the Sumerians did indeed have drinking
| establishments. Lots of writings about them.
| blamazon wrote:
| Here's a Sumerian 'drinking song' about a drinking place, the
| female proprietor, and the process she performs to make beer.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-sip-from-an-
| an...
| Kalium wrote:
| As I understand it, Sumerian culture had drinking
| establishments. Though they don't seem to have been
| freestanding business establishments, and were often part of
| some larger organization (like a temple).
|
| So "bar" would be an updated translation that preserves the
| essence of an idea of walking into a drinking place, but
| obviously a lot of the cultural nuance around the social role
| of a Sumerian tavern is lost. It doesn't really seem
| important for this joke though.
| PixyMisa wrote:
| 4000 year old dad jokes. This is the content I come here for.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Why is it certain that this is a joke and not some kind of
| wisdom, charm or unknown literary category?
| blamazon wrote:
| Because it starts with "A dog walks into a bar"
| muzani wrote:
| There's a similar koan with a dog, which is not intended
| as a joke; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
| lanstin wrote:
| No bar tho.
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| For starters, it looks, and quacks, like a joke
| hoseja wrote:
| That's because it had a very convoluted plastic surgery
| to make it so.
| [deleted]
| mcv wrote:
| > Why is it certain that this is a joke and not some kind
| of wisdom, charm or unknown literary category?
|
| The distinction between those may not always be that well-
| defined.
|
| I once read that the story of the Good Samaritan (by Jesus)
| follows the structure of a popular set of jokes (or
| possibly self-congratulatory "wisdom") of the time:
| something happens, a priest comes by and is useless, a
| Levite passes by and is useless, and finally a common Jew
| comes by and fixes the problem, and everybody gets to feel
| good about being a commoner and not some useless elitist.
| Except Jesus tripped up his audience by replacing the Jew
| with a Samaritan.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There is a famous story about Zhuangzi [if you prefer,
| Chuang Tzu] that goes like this:
|
| -----
|
| Zhuangzi and Huizi were crossing a bridge over the river
| Hao.
|
| Zhuangzi said: the fish have come out to play; this makes
| them happy.
|
| Huizi said: You are not a fish. How do you know what
| makes fish happy?
|
| Zhuangzi said: You are not me. How do you know that I
| don't know what makes fish happy?
|
| Huizi said: I am not you. Of course I do not know you.
| [But] you are certainly not a fish. Your non-knowledge of
| what makes fish happy is total.
|
| Zhuangzi said: Please stick to your original [question].
| You asked how I know what makes fish happy. You already
| knew that I knew this and [still] you asked me. I know it
| over the Hao.
|
| -----
|
| "I know it over the Hao" makes sense because in the
| original language, the word "how", An , is also the word
| "where".
|
| The story comes down to us as part of a foundational
| text. Is it wisdom or a cheap joke?
| marcodiego wrote:
| Does the original text really says: "walks into a bar"?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Different cultures may assign different connotations to what
| "bar" means, but first line of the original text says "walks
| into a [place]" and other sources using that same word
| [place] involve serving beer to patrons and/or prostitution
| there, so "bar" or "brothel" or "inn" may be roughly decent
| approximations; but "bar" has the "... walks into a bar"
| English trope going for it.
| blamazon wrote:
| No, the original text says:
|
| ur-gir15-re es2-dam-se in-kur9-ma
|
| Alternatively notated as:
|
| /urgir-e esdam-se i.n-kur-ma/
| marcodiego wrote:
| Oh, sure. More accurately translated as "tavern".
| reaperducer wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "tavern."
|
| Having lived in both places, a "tavern" in New York and a
| "tavern" in Wisconsin can be different things, depending
| on a lot of factors.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Reminds me of a Starcraft joke:
|
| > A marine walks into a bar. He looks around and is confused,
| says "where is the counter?".
|
| I wonder if, in 3000 years, they'll be trying to figure that one
| out as well.
| _notathrowaway wrote:
| Please, do explain the joke for the rest of us.
| __s wrote:
| Marines are the basic unit of Terran. Terran will build
| marines throughout the game (unless they go mech, but bio is
| the primary composition for all matchups). With upgrades
| marines have high dps & speed. They're a small unit which
| means you can fit more dps within a small area. They're
| ranged, unlike zerglings & zealots. Terran's drop ship,
| medivacs, can ferry around 8 marines while healing them on
| the ground
|
| In reality the counter to them is splash damage, though good
| micro can mitigate that somewhat, & Terran isn't going to
| stop building marines just because the opponent built some
| splash damage
|
| In some regards this can be rooted in people expecting
| StarCraft to be like Age of Empires, where as you climb the
| tech tree you discard previous tech. StarCraft instead
| prefers tech to fill out a composition & late tech often
| provides a support role to earlier tech
|
| https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/174912-the-problem-with-
| mar... (2010)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| A counter is the play that beats a specific strategy. Rock is
| the counter to Scissors in Rock Paper Scissors.
| [deleted]
| danielvf wrote:
| In the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, each choice has a
| counter choice that thoroughly defeats it. If you knew that
| your opponent was going to reveal a scissors, you would
| counter with a rock.
|
| In Star Craft, each unit has opposing units that are extra
| effective against it, so if your opponent had a bunch of
| marines, you might build a bunch of siege tanks.
|
| Here's a whole article on counters to the marine unit:
| https://osirissc2guide.com/marine-counter.html
| baq wrote:
| There's no counter to marines
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| Wordplay on counter. It's a PVP game where players are
| constantly complaining about balance and or counters.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You pretty much get balance whine in any competitive game.
| Sometimes the communities mature out of it, but the scrub
| mentality comes very natural to a lot of people.
|
| I think it's a funny joke, though. Even though, when I've
| played Stacraft, I've been the one making marines.
| ChrisRackauckas wrote:
| It's not a PvP game, there's marines. (Now imagine 3000
| years from now trying to unravel this joke without a bunch
| of cultural knowledge haha)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| To throw a wrinkle into that, the joke was lost on me, despite
| being someone who logged several hundred (if not thousand)
| hours into the original Starcraft between 1998-2003 or so.
|
| However, the distinction is my idea of "online play" back in
| the day was either playing with friends whom I knew personally,
| _or_ playing an "All vs Comp" match where several human
| players would play against a single computer component. And
| we'd still lose about half the time.
|
| But point being, I never really played PvP, and I don't think
| that term "counter" came from the original Starcraft manual or
| strategy guides. It was a term that evolved into the meta
| community. And if you weren't sufficiently plugged into that
| community, you wouldn't encounter the term.
|
| There's probably tons of other examples of this, e.g. in the
| fighting game community.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, it's definitely in the sliver of the venn diagram where
| Starcraft and competitive gaming overlaps.
|
| Here is another Starcraft joke you may appreciate:
|
| > A dragoon walks into a bar. No, not around to the bar. A
| dragoon walks next to the entrance of a bar. A dragoon takes
| a step toward the bar. A dragoon walks into a bar. Nooo! Not
| that way!
| __s wrote:
| & this joke explained:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0G3Gm-1G2Y
|
| & this behavior explained: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcra
| ft/comments/ewsj2o/brood_war... https://old.reddit.com/r/st
| arcraft/comments/ewsj2o/comment/f...
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Further comments say that the reason given is wrong, and
| that it's a change in (animation?) speed instead that
| causes this.
| __s wrote:
| Change in movement speed, where movement speed is based
| on animation frame
|
| Notice how the zerglings don't smoothly move:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOMzUw2GSSk&t=144s
| jcranberry wrote:
| I suppose the assumption is that the path is calculated
| based on a constant (I assume either average or current)
| speed, when in reality the speed varies?
| smcl wrote:
| I have a similar experience with Age of Empires 2. I played
| it a lot as a kid and only recently realised there's a pretty
| active multiplayer community with a few popular streamers
| like T90 on YouTube commentating on matches. They have a lot
| of custom lingo, so you'll hear something like "looks like
| he's going for fast imp" (meaning the commentator thinks a
| player is following a strategy whereby they prioritise
| advancing their civilization to the Imperial Age).
| rietta wrote:
| Wait, that game is still around!? I played it so much as a
| kid. I actually logged a lot in the original AOE. That is
| fantastic and a testament to what is lost with modern games
| requiring a server to be continually provided.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| AOE2 has actually had a great renaissance fairly recently
| due to a remastered version being released.
| smcl wrote:
| Yep. In case you're curious, here's a funny example of a
| match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTRwNlRaw9Y
|
| I find the "nothing" maps like that to be quite
| entertaining, but there are a number of good ones out
| there, and there's plenty of creative strategies and
| personalities. My favourite was a player called "WALL"
| who ... well maybe easier if I show you:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ecZEs2Y0o
| __s wrote:
| The joke is about StarCraft 2, marines aren't a core unit in
| every matchup in Broodwar
| xkriva11 wrote:
| Neil Postman: "Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to
| express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were
| not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or
| blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use
| smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content."
|
| Every time I see a Twitter post like this, I remember this quote.
| swayvil wrote:
| Neither is any language for that matter.
|
| Empirical reference is central.
|
| You don't explain the taste of a lemon. You hand them a lemon.
|
| Everests of bullshit have been built upon merely metaphorical
| understanding.
| jl6 wrote:
| Yelling on a street corner is a poor medium for philosophy too,
| but if that's where the audience is...
| cupofpython wrote:
| i partially disagree. I agree that formal philosophical axioms
| as we understand them are out of reach by puffs of smoke, since
| philosophy tries to begin from a place of as limited context as
| possible. I disagree that the lack of that formality is an
| appropriate litmus for the sufficiency of a medium to harbor
| successful communication.
|
| pairing known ideas can create new ideas by guiding a
| contextualized listener to discover the essence of the idea
| themself. if a cloud of smoke could represent a well known
| idea, which it can, and about 10 different smoke shapes are
| possible (for example).. then after 8 puffs of smoke the shaman
| can create up to 100000000 distinct chains of ideas to _direct_
| his audience to whatever it is he wants to them to understand.
| with smoke symbols for north south east and west, and the
| delays between when he creates them having assumed meaning, he
| could give directions to any location on earth - theoretically
| - with just two to three puffs of smoke
|
| since language is shorthand and referential, it can never
| contain all the knowledge within itself that is necessary to
| properly understand it - which is part of the point of the
| original post. within my tribe, a single word might need a
| novel to explain to yours, if it is explainable at all. Kind of
| like being at the bar and something is said and a bunch of
| people start laughing and all they can communicate to you about
| it is "you had to be there". the ability to describe details is
| not the same as the ability to communicate
|
| The smoke puff might be nonsense to an outside observer, but
| after a few carefully selected puffs curated for the perfect
| audience - you can communicate literally anything.
|
| likewise, although i have given up on twitter - i do respect
| that there is often a mountain of context behind popular
| tweets. although those tweets might not be saying much to me,
| there is a tribe out there who have a much deeper experience
| with it than i do. And timing is a huge part of it, as well as
| the context of mainstream news, and a bunch of other things
| depending on the intended audience
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas
| on the nature of existence_
|
| Actually you just need to binary encode your mesage using puffs
| of smoke, something they are perfectly capable of.
| willcipriano wrote:
| This is a better way of expressing a thought that I've had for
| a couple years now. Indulge me in this thought experiment.
|
| Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the
| universe was created. Religious explanations often posit that
| some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to
| provide the story prior to that. The same is true of science
| with its big bang. I argue that these stories perhaps tell us
| about the early universe, but not how it was created.
|
| Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at
| all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any
| linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our
| universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a
| reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect?
|
| I believe that human language has not yet reached a point where
| it could describe anything like that. If that has true we have
| debated for centuries about a question that even if an
| individual knew the answer they would be unable to express it
| to anyone else.
| salawat wrote:
| 404. The requested multiversal namespace was not found.
|
| Do you wish to create it? Y/N
| idoubtit wrote:
| > Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the
| universe was created.
|
| I haven't seen much arguments about this. In most civilized
| countries, religions have stopped to make factual claims
| about the "antediluvian times", because all their previous
| claims were proven false. For many decades, scientists have
| almost stopped arguing with religious figures. The tendency
| is that scientific people are less permeable to religious
| beliefs, and religions are almost powerless in scientific
| domains. Lastly, religions don't argue, internally or with
| each other, over the origin of the world.
|
| > Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher
| power created the universe but fail to provide the story
| prior to that.
|
| The religious explanations failed _to satisfy you_ , but at
| least some of them provide a consistent explanation. For
| instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all
| eternity, then at one point he created the world. You may
| dislike this "story before that", but it is clear and
| consistent.
|
| > The same is true of science with its big bang.
|
| It's not true. There are several theories about the origins
| before the big-bang, or at the big-bang. Science does provide
| the stories you long for, but at the same time science
| asserts that these are just hypotheses, and that it's highly
| probable that models in this domains are won't ever be
| proved.
| schoen wrote:
| > For instance, Genesis states that their god was there
| from all eternity, then at one point he created the world.
|
| Hmmm? It doesn't state anything about what happened before
| the creation, or where God came from.
|
| It starts with "in the beginning, God created the heaven
| and the earth" (or "when God began to create heaven and
| earth") and nothing in Genesis mentions any moment or
| occasion prior to that.
|
| Are you thinking of other aspects of Jewish or Christian
| tradition that aren't derived from the text of Genesis?
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| They don't lack the language, they lack knowledge beyond
| that. As anything beyond that is down the rabbit's hole of
| "everything is possible" and thus the story is as boring as
| the 10 season of your sci-go show when they have reached
| beyond unifinity of galaxies and you just can't make a proper
| narrative about something that no longer has any reference to
| the viewers
| positus wrote:
| Consider:
|
| There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable.
| He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself
| fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He
| doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is
| underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him.
| There has never been a time when he has not been, because he
| is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He
| has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God.
| This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his
| eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of
| Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham
| and Isaac were, I AM."
| Banana699 wrote:
| >He doesn't "exist", he just _is_
|
| This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be',
| i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and
| yet 'be'?
|
| This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family
| of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most
| familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and
| proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is
| not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to
| apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or
| try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason
| about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants
| me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like,
| invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ?
|
| If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain
| why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-
| capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he
| wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey
| any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself
| told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work.
| Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you
| think God really means what he says, you just assumed he
| works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe
| God just made himself known to us and requested that we
| worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God
| unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again,
| this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc
| etc etc.
| positus wrote:
| The distinction is that unlike everything in creation,
| God does not derive His being from an outside source. You
| and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things
| outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We
| are, _out of_ , something else.
|
| Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions
| of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because
| we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc.
|
| God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on
| something else to be or continue being. He has always
| been. He isn't _out of_ anything but is self-existent; He
| doesn 't exist but rather _is_. And because He _is_ ,
| everything else (all of which depends on Him to be)
| continues to be.
|
| I hope I've worded that clearly.
| feoren wrote:
| > describe where our universe came from ... that obeys the
| laws of cause and effect
|
| All you've done is ask a trick question, like "prove Fermat's
| Last Theorem without using any math". The problem is you used
| the words "where", which means "a place in the universe", and
| "cause and effect", which means "tracing the causes of
| something backward in time", with "time" again existing only
| within this universe. It's a little like Zeno's Paradox of
| Achilles and the tortoise. All we've found is that this
| particular way of asking the question or describing the
| question is insufficient.
|
| Obviously in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you need
| to use math. Obviously to talk about anything "external" to
| the universe, you need to use something that is not a "where"
| within this universe and does not follow the cause and effect
| defined within this universe. The question is: is it,
| therefore, useful to ask the question, given that we are
| stuck in this universe?
|
| No. It's not.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _that obeys the laws of cause and effect_
|
| Why would it need to obey those laws? What made them "laws"?
| psyc wrote:
| I could say, for example, that _our_ universe was created
| when a 5th dimensional alien named Parkus Mersson ran
| universe.jar. But that only expands the notion of universe. I
| don't think I can make the kind of statement you mean without
| regressing to something else that needs explaining.
|
| IOW, why is there something rather than nothing.
| ganzuul wrote:
| "To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one
| without faith, no explanation is possible." - Thomas Aquinas
| simias wrote:
| It's going to be a predictably nerdy reply but I feel like the
| issue of smoke signals is not complexity, it's bandwidth.
|
| Now maybe if you could put a dozen or so smoke signals in
| parallel and add error correction codes...
| thelittlenag wrote:
| The clacks would like to have a word with you...
| addaon wrote:
| I have an image now of someone sky-writing Euclid's axioms.
| a_shovel wrote:
| I fail to see the problem. What content does the form of a
| sequence of tweets exclude? Run-on sentences? Does that
| sentence _really_ need to be a hundred words long?
| mirconoft wrote:
| whatever
| atombender wrote:
| Isn't it _objectively_ primitive technology? As for the
| blankets, it comes from the stereotypical image of person
| covering a smoldering fire with a blanket to release
| individual puffs of smoke, as in this [1] sketch.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZXugeBGCfk
| cosmojg wrote:
| Off-topic, but "Native American" is _not_ the most widely
| preferred term[1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > Why does he need to mention that smoke signals are
| primitive? Why blankets?
|
| For the same reason he mentions other things: to convey his
| thought in a precise manner. I don't understand the
| criticism.
| pxmpxm wrote:
| That is brilliant.
|
| My immediate response in this context is the back button - if
| you haven't given much thought to the medium, you likely
| haven't given much thought to the content itself.
| hobs wrote:
| Why? I must be missing something because Native Americans
| definitely had philosophy, oral traditions, and the like -
| smoke didn't change that and a vaguely racist comment about
| how they wouldn't be able to form thoughts because they
| didn't have some special medium for doing so just comes off
| as that.
|
| Socrates didn't really write stuff down...
| pxmpxm wrote:
| The point has to do with Twitter, sir.
|
| Nice Rorschach there with your quip about racism, however.
| You may want to think about that a bit.
| [deleted]
| hobs wrote:
| 137 characters - too small to be considered as thoughts
| as your message would fit in a tweet.
| arcbyte wrote:
| It's an analogy.
| twomoonsbysurf wrote:
| Chris2048 wrote:
| It doesn't say anything about "wouldn't be able to form
| thoughts", in fact it explicitly refers to smoke as a
| _medium_ being insufficient.
| batch12 wrote:
| The comment had nothing to do with forming thoughts, but
| instead how thoughts can be meaningfully conveyed. If the
| mention of a minority or Native American technique in the
| analogy makes you close your mind before being able to
| understand:
|
| Telegrams are insufficiently complex to express ideas on
| the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a
| frontier philosopher would run short of either money or
| time long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot
| use telegrams to do philosophy. Its form excludes the
| content.
| salawat wrote:
| You should keep in mind your medium, sir. All of human
| philosophy is encoded at your fingertips in 0's and 1's.
|
| Literally smoke signals implemented in rocks so dumb we
| tricked them into thinking.
|
| ..-. .- .. .-.. ..- .-. . / - --- / --. .-. .- ... .--. /
| - .... .. ... / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / --. . - / -.-- --- ..-
| / -.. .- -... -... . -.. / --- -. / -... -.-- / . ...- .
| .-. -.-- / -- --- .-. ... . / ..- ... . .-. / . ...- .
| .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- .-. --. ..- .- -... .-.. -.--
| --..-- / . ...- . .-. -.-- / -.-. --- -- .--. ..- - . .-.
| / ... -.-. .. . -. - .. ... - / .-- .. - .... / . ...- .
| -. / .- -. / .. --- - .- / --- ..-. / .--. .... .. .-..
| --- ... --- .--. .... .. -.-. .- .-.. / ..- -. -.. . .-.
| .--. .. -. -. .. -. --. .-.-.- / --- ..-. / .-- .... ..
| -.-. .... / .. / .- -- / .- - / .-.. . .- ... - / .- /
| -.. .- -... -... .-.. . .-. / --- ..-. / - .... . / ..-.
| --- .-. -- . .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- / -- . -- -... .
| .-. / --- ..-. / - .... . / .-.. .- - - . .-. .-.-.-
| ummwhat wrote:
| .. / ..-. --- .-. / --- -. . / -... . --. / - --- / -..
| .. ..-. ..-. . .-. .-.-.- / .-- .... .- - . ...- . .-. /
| .--. .... .. .-.. --- ... --- .--. .... . .-. / ... .- ..
| -.. / - .... .. ... / .--. .-. --- ..-. --- ..- -. -..
| .-.. -.-- / ..- -. -.. . .-. . ... - .. -- .- - . ... / -
| .... . / -... .- -. -.. .-- .. -.. - .... / --- ..-. / --
| --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . .-.-.-
| airstrike wrote:
| .-. -- / -....- .-. ..-. / -..-.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| To add to this - . .-.. . --. .-. .- -- ... / .-- . .-. .
| / --- -. .-.. -.-- / ... .... --- .-. - / -... . -.-. .-
| ..- ... . / .. - / -.-. --- ... - / - --- --- / -- ..-
| -.-. .... / - --- / ... . -. -.. / .- -. / . -. - .. .-.
| . / . ... ... .- -.-- / .- ..-. - . .-. / .- .-.. .-..
| --..-- / -. --- - / -... . -.-. .- ..- ... . / -- --- .-.
| ... . / .. - ... . .-.. ..-. / .. ... / .-.. .- -.-. -.-
| .. -. --. / .. -. / . -..- .--. .-. . ... ... .. ...- ..
| - -.-- .-.-.- / -- --- .-. ... . / .. ... / .--- ..- ...
| - / .- / ... -.-- ... - . -- / - --- / . -. -.-. --- -..
| . / .... ..- -- .- -. / .-.. .- -. --. ..- .- --. .
| .-.-.- / .. - / .. ... / - .... . / .... ..- -- .- -. /
| .-.. .- -. --. ..- .- --. . / - .... .- - / -.. --- . ...
| / - .... . / .-. . .- .-.. / .-- --- .-. -.- --..-- / -.
| --- - / .. - ... / . -. -.-. --- -.. .. -. --. .-.-.-
| ummwhat wrote:
| .. -. ..-. --- .-. -- .- - .. --- -. / .. ... / .--. ....
| -.-- ... .. -.-. .- .-.. / ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. / ... - ---
| .--.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| .-.. .- -. --. ..- .- --. . / . -..- .. ... - ... / ..-.
| --- .-. / - .... . / .--. ..- .-. .--. --- ... . / ---
| ..-. / . -..- .--. .-. . ... ... .. --- -. --..-- / -...
| ..- - / . -..- .--. .-. . ... ... .. --- -. / -. . . -..
| / -. --- - / -... . / -- .- -.. . / - .... .-. --- ..-
| --. .... / .-.. .- -. --. ..- .- --. . .-.-.- / . ...- .
| -. / .-- .... . -. / ... -- --- -.- . / .. ... -. .----.
| - / -... . .. -. --. / ..- ... . -.. / ..-. --- .-. / ...
| .. --. -. .- .-.. ... --..-- / .. - / ... - .. .-.. .-..
| / -.-. --- -- -- ..- -. .. -.-. .- - . ... / ... --- -- .
| - .... .. -. --. ---... / .-..-. .... . -.-- --..-- / -
| .... . .-. . .----. ... / .- / ..-. .. .-. . / --- ...- .
| .-. / .... . .-. . -.-.-- .-..-. / .. ..-. / .- .-. - /
| .. ... / .- / ..-. --- .-. -- / --- ..-. / . -..- .--.
| .-. . ... ... .. --- -. / - .... .- - / - .-. .- -. ...
| -.-. . -. -.. ... / .-.. .- -. --. ..- .- --. . --..-- /
| .- -. -.. / --- -. . / -.-. .- -. / ..- ... . / ... --
| --- -.- . / .- ... / .- -. / .- .-. - .. ... - .. -.-. /
| -- . -.. .. ..- -- --..-- / - .... . -. / ... -- --- -.-
| . / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. / -... . / ..- ... . -.. / -
| --- / . -..- .--. .-. . ... ... / - .... .. -. --. ... /
| . ...- . -. / .-- .. - .... --- ..- - / .- / .-.. .. -.
| --. ..- .. ... - .. -.-. / ..- -. -.. . .-. .--. .. -. -.
| .. -. --. .-.-.-
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Additionally, .. / .... --- .--. . / -.-- --- ..- .----.
| .-. . / .... .- ...- .. -. --. / .- / -. .. -.-. . / -..
| .- -.-- / ---... -.--.-
| tokai wrote:
| >You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy
|
| Tell that to Wittgenstein. Tractatus would have been a
| twitter thread nowadays.
| hobs wrote:
| "I think therefore I am" doesn't take a lot of bits to
| say. A guy once said "brevity is the soul of wit."
|
| It doesn't take that many leaves to make smoke.
| psyc wrote:
| You're inserting intent that isn't in the text - a sign of
| our times. It only says such thoughts can't be transmitted
| via smoke signal. Here it's used to say, "Fuck Tweet
| threads."
| hobs wrote:
| And yet, they can be used to transmit such thoughts and
| the Native's communication is used as a frame - so what
| was that about me inserting things again?
| lupire wrote:
| The problem here is you assuming that someone thinks that
| Natives only communicate via smoke signals.
| psyc wrote:
| So can Twitter threads. The bit about wood and blankets
| alludes to impracticality. It's not about information
| theory. Why shouldn't smoke signals be the frame? It's an
| analogy. Why do you feel smoke signals are taboo for that
| purpose?
| simias wrote:
| These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a
| current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading
| informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types
| of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes
| or references that only make sense from a certain cultural
| standpoint.
|
| I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the
| very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a
| sentence, understand every single word but you still have
| absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're
| missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of
| the words.
|
| For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying
| English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except
| that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so
| while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains
| completely opaque and meaningless to you.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This Finnish comedian trying to makes sense of the word "shit"
| illustrates this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXH3HDE9Czo
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sounds like a foreigner's take on George Carlin's old skit
| salamanderman wrote:
| That was a fun set! Thank you for posting that.
| vmception wrote:
| One of my biggest epiphanies was realizing how much dumb hit
| music was actually partially catering to English as a second
| language speakers for broader appeal.
| m463 wrote:
| sort of like the opposite of hip-hop/rap (think of all the
| new words meaning "the police" for example)
| lou1306 wrote:
| Most of the replies here kind of miss the point and talk about
| _idioms_ (hatching eggs, dropping shoes, etc.). Idioms are
| indeed hard, but every languages has their own. So, when you
| meet eggs, shoes or whatever in a discussion that was not about
| chickens or fashion, you can at least suspect it 's figurative.
|
| Meanwhile, "To fall for someone" is not an idiom but a phrasal
| verb, and these are (imho) much harder than idioms because they
| do not "signal" their exceptionality as strongly. How am I
| supposed to know that "falling for someone" does not involve
| any actual falling, or that when you "make up with someone" you
| are not really making anything?
| Giorgi wrote:
| now imagine reading something from genz slang language: Big
| Yikes fam, Glow up! Periodt
| dragontamer wrote:
| Almost all foreign language studies I know of include a
| collection of stories / literature where a number of common
| sayings are from.
|
| Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables.
| Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common
| phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".
|
| Chinese studies includes Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A
| Chinese Friend of mine explained the meaning of the phrase
| "Pour the oil", based on some Sima-Yi / Zhuge Liang story from
| RotTK. (Which IIRC, means something along the lines of "I'm not
| going to be a sore loser about this")
|
| Japanese studies include something about an impenetrable shield
| and the all-penetrating spear, which apparently is the root
| word for contradict. Using "Google Translate" on this one, "Mao
| Dun " translates into "Contradict". But "Mao " means Spear, and
| "Dun " means shield.
|
| So a dumb translation would translate "Mao Dun " into
| "SpearShield", which is nonsense. But the meaning is "To
| Contradict".
| morsch wrote:
| _Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop
| Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can
| understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes"._
|
| Most of the vocabulary you pick up from context; idioms
| aren't fundamentally different from other parts of the
| language in that regard. You don't need to know an idiom's
| source material to understand its meaning, no more than you
| need to be aware of a word's etymology to use it. Though it
| doesn't hurt and it's often fascinating.
| teachrdan wrote:
| From a practical perspective, I believe the whole point is
| that an idiom _is_ fundamentally different. If you are a
| non-native speaker, you can look up a word you don 't know.
| But if it's an idiomatic phrase, like "waiting for the
| other shoe to drop," looking up each word in the phrase
| does you no good. Studying fables etc. is a great way to
| learn them.
| jquery wrote:
| You can look up the entire phrase or just ask someone.
| There's no need to know where it came from, although it
| might make retention easier, or comprehension better.
| Nothing beats time spent immersed in the language and
| just asking questions or looking at context when
| something seems odd. Living languages aren't static
| targets either, you'll sound formal or just plain strange
| if you elevate dictionary definitions over experience and
| practice with common usage.
| int_19h wrote:
| In some cases, there's an equivalent idiom in the native
| language, and while the scenario may be very different,
| the underlying similarity is readily apparent.
| morsch wrote:
| These days, you can easily look them up. To viz:
| https://dict.leo.org/german-
| english/waiting%20for%20the%20ot...
|
| Interestingly, the first given translation is itself an
| idiom (lit. "to wait for the thick/fat end"). An idiom I
| understand, even though I had no idea where it's from; I
| looked it up, it relates to corporal punishment. The
| second translation is a more generic one.
| faitswulff wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker and I actually have no idea
| where "waiting for the other shoe to drop" comes from,
| but I know its idiomatic meaning.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Same here, and another one that irritates me is "being
| left high and dry", which is a bad thing. But I envision
| high and dry as a good thing, isn't that where you would
| want to be in a storm or at sea?
|
| Truth be told I never actually looked up where a lot of
| these idioms come from. I just heard other people using
| them and then I started to use them too.
| martyvis wrote:
| But not if you tied your boat up in a harbour, and then
| when the tide went out, you can't sail it because it is
| high and dry sitting on it's hull instead of floating.
| dragontamer wrote:
| A good example of this, in English, is the meaning of the
| phrase "O.K.", which is "oll komplete", a funny 1700s-era
| meme when newspapers (at the time) would misspell words on
| purpose.
|
| Most of those misspellings have been forgotten, but the
| most common: Oll Komplete (All Complete) was so common, it
| became ingrained in our language. Today, everyone knows
| things are Okay, despite not remembering the original
| story.
|
| -------
|
| Still, learning some degree of stories helps remind us that
| not all words are to be taken literally in a language. That
| meanings are assigned based off of shared experiencnes.
| robocat wrote:
| > which is "oll komplete"
|
| There is no definitive answer for the etymology of OK -
| your declaration certainly isn't a fact. And it wasn't in
| the 1700's.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologie
| s_o...
| ddalex wrote:
| Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
| Tade0 wrote:
| This quote sums up my Italian experience. The language is
| so full of phrases which - like everything - are regional,
| that Google Translate often just gives up.
|
| My favourite is "in bocca al lupo", which roughly
| translates to "break a leg" - note the lack of verb.
|
| Also that's the current meaning, which changed over the
| last century.
|
| On top of that I remember three commonly used gestures two
| of which look the same to the uninitiated eye on photos.
|
| Overall: his eyes red!
| RangerScience wrote:
| Was just going to say, reminds me of the classic Trek HFY
| sequence: https://imgur.com/gallery/qSmHy
|
| "what is the work 'fuck' for", the innocent young vulcans
| want to know. "surely there are more logical intensity
| modifiers."
|
| "yeah, you'd think so," say the weary, jaded vulcan
| professors, " _you 'd really fucking think so._"
| porphyra wrote:
| Mao Dun is Chinese.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Mao Dun is used the same in Japanese - 'onyomi' words use
| Chinese readings of hanzi, as opposed to 'kunyomi', which
| uses the Japanese reading.
|
| Though, as someone who speaks a little Ri Ben Yu (though
| nowhere near fluent), I don't quite understand the
| significance being ascribed here. There are huge numbers of
| Jukugo ("compound kanji") [which are frequently, but not
| exclusively, onyomi words] where trying to understand the
| word as a compound of the kanji/hanzi components would be
| equally nonsensical, and aren't anything that requires
| special mention in language learning. Having multiple
| readings of even a single kanji is also pretty normal, and
| sometimes those are not all readily apparent from
| understanding one definition, either. Also plenty of
| kunyomi words where the reading would end up with a word
| totally different from the initial kanji/hanzi.
|
| To my knowledge, this is no more due to idioms from
| culturally significant literature than the word 'novel'
| being used to describe books and new ideas is.
|
| Edit: Looks like a fable is the origin for the word in
| Chinese, but no mention of the fable when I learned it in
| Japanese, or indication that it was any different than any
| other word where the component hanzi/kanji (or radicals
| therein) would not make sense as the definition.
| porphyra wrote:
| The term comes from the ancient text Han Feizi from 3rd
| century AD China.
|
| It was absorbed into Sino-Japanese vocabulary along with
| many other Chinese words.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > but no mention of the fable when I learned it in
| Japanese
|
| I personally learned of it from the Japanese game "Ace
| Attorney".
|
| There's a spear/shield ornament somewhere as evidence, so
| the game spends a decent amount of time introducing the
| myth to the audience. The myth is seen again in Trigun
| (impenetrable shield was one of the enemies that Vash
| took down), and again in "Rising of the Shield Hero"
| where Shield-guy's biggest rival is the Spear-guy.
|
| A lot of Japanese media talk about this spear-vs-shield
| story. If it was a myth borrowed from China, that still
| makes sense. (Aesop is Greek after all, but still
| influenced English).
|
| --------
|
| My overall point is that some words reference stories
| rather than the actual meaning of the word. Learning the
| underlying stories can help when learning those
| languages.
| cthalupa wrote:
| To me, it's interesting in the "Huh, neat" kind of way in
| the same way knowing the etymology of "sour grapes" is.
| At least personally, I don't find it particularly useful
| for actually learning the language - there's just too
| many words like this for it to provide me any real
| advantage, and I'd likely end up confusing myself more
| when running into the words where there isn't any similar
| significance. For example, irresponsible/sloppy is 'iiJia
| Jian ', and Jia means increase while Jian means
| decrease - I could see myself going 'hmm I know the word
| contradiction is one where the two kanji actually
| contradict each other... increase and decrease contradict
| each other, I bet this is it!"
| lupire wrote:
| That's either a dog's breakfast or the cat's pajamas, but I'm
| not sure which, or which story holds the explanation.
|
| A lot of slang was invented less than 1000 years ago.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I can easily imagine a hypothetical version of English that
| does not borrow words from Latin and in which 'spearshield'
| would be a verb.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| kkndve English speaker checking in, I did not know that the
| phrase "sour grapes" comes from Aesop.
|
| Honestly I only vaguely recall reading a few stories from
| Aesop when I was in second grade or something. Maybe a story
| about a wolf and another animal and a river? None of it
| really stuck.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| This is one of the arguments against machine translation: one
| would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and
| understanding the living cultural context that language is
| being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having
| to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by
| example.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Machine translation can take the context statistically really
| well.
| jdmichal wrote:
| It's not really a great argument. Languages are always
| evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by
| ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka
| us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and
| perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend
| or maybe urbandictionary.
|
| EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to
| explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at
| least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good
| luck...
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I believe machine translation will coevolve with human
| languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even
| when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced
| to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak
| their own language to have a better chance for machine
| translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a
| valid strategy to use MT today.
| irrational wrote:
| I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and
| who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way
| that will happen. People are never going to stop using
| cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings,
| puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine
| translation work better.
| lupire wrote:
| SEO'd websites use "Google English".
| yorwba wrote:
| Maybe not stop completely, but certainly in some
| contexts, e.g. when using machine translation to produce
| text in a language you can passively understand but don't
| have a large active vocabulary in.
|
| Which I did just yesterday by putting the text I wanted
| to convey into Google Translate and then tweaking it
| until the translation looked reasonable. In the end, I
| still had to postprocess the output a bit, but I ended up
| with something which I couldn't have written if starting
| from scratch, which was entirely worth the small pain of
| using slightly less colorful language.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I say this both as someone with a degree in
| linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for
| decades, there is no way that will happen. People are
| never going to stop using cultural references, shortened
| forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc.
| just to make machine translation work better._
|
| In general you are correct, but there is the special case
| of a person _using machine translation as a tool_ to try
| and communicate with someone they don 't share a language
| with.
|
| Of course, the first approximation is the person
| performing all the stereotypical monolingual behaviors of
| speaking extra slowly and loudly, using pseudo-simplified
| language, accompanied with exaggerated hand gestures that
| don't really help.
|
| BTW, I've seen people struggling with voice assistants in
| almost exactly the same way (absent the hand gestures).
|
| But the point is that people modify their language to try
| and compensate for communication barriers all the time,
| and it is just a skill, whether it is speaking to
| children, or foreigners, or code switching to speak to
| someone in a different class or subculture. Machine
| translation adds a new wrinkle to the mix, but it isn't
| all that different.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Of course this is all speculative and I never said
| intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human
| is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had
| been cases where different languages are used for
| different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar
| dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable
| to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).
| runnerup wrote:
| I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of
| my business where English may not be spoken at all. I
| also don't know any Chinese.
|
| I will generally run my English emails through machine
| translation back and forth multiple times until I find
| phrasing and word choices which are "bistable" (I get
| back the original English). I'll also usually double
| check specific critical or unstable words using a variety
| of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure
| any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct.
|
| We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and
| every time I've had her check the Chinese she says it's
| correct for our technical domain.
|
| So we really are already at the point where we can
| communicate across languages with surprisingly low error
| rates.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Isn't Chinese actually a best case scenario for machine
| translation, with huge amounts of text available, and
| little if any variance (no tenses, no persons, no plural,
| no declinations)?
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| The (very old) machine translation joke: The computer was
| asked to translate the phrase: "The spirit is strong but
| the flesh is weak" into Russian. The output was: "The vodka
| is great but the meat is rotten".
| andai wrote:
| GPT-3 handles idioms just fine. Here I tested it on "I fell
| for her." https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg
| jchmrt wrote:
| You're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can
| understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in
| which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new
| idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be
| able to handle it if it can not understand it from the
| context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI
| needs to be continuously updated.
| kbelder wrote:
| Is that any different than a human? They can be pwnded by
| new idioms.
| ufmace wrote:
| I think Humans are pretty good at at least recognizing
| that a particular phrasing doesn't make sense as a
| literal statement and so must be a reference to
| something. Often you can get an idea of what it's meant
| to mean just by context. Sometimes if you see a dozen or
| so usages, you get the idea of what it means without ever
| having it explicitly explained.
| TillE wrote:
| Good luck accurately machine translating the infinitely
| growing idiom of jokey Twitter conversation, which most
| native speakers can pick up pretty quickly.
| lupire wrote:
| One of the main differences between humans and ML is that
| humans learn in far fewer examples than machines.
|
| "Poverty of the stimulus"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus
| andai wrote:
| Until the models become more sophisticated than human
| brains. Then humans will need more examples than a
| machine would to learn the same thing.
| jchmrt wrote:
| No it isn't of course, but that speaks for the argument
| that AGI is necessary for human-level translation :)
| andai wrote:
| Or just an up-to-date GPT?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Like, for example, "to be pwned", which I believe is not
| going to be understood by majority of English speakers.
| mcguire wrote:
| And even fewer ML proggies.
| andai wrote:
| Ackshually... :)
|
| https://files.catbox.moe/yvhqwd.jpeg
| biztos wrote:
| "The speaker became attracted to the person they are
| talking about" is definitely not the way I (native US
| English speaker) would explain falling for someone, and any
| person or robot using it that way is likely to sow
| confusion.
|
| How does it do with "I fell for it?"
| MauranKilom wrote:
| "Falling for someone" can mean both "falling in love with
| someone" and "to be trapped/tricked by someone" according
| to both my experience and my go-to dictionary [1] [2].
| "Falling for something" is clearly in the realm of "being
| tricked" according to [3] (but that source also puts
| "falling for somebody" squarely on the "love" side of
| things [4]).
|
| So I would say that, while you may have never heard it
| used that way, it certainly has that meaning in practice
| to many people. Don't judge the robot so harshly.
|
| [1]: https://dict.leo.org/pages/addinfo/addInfo.php?aiid=
| En842ho0...
|
| [2]: https://dict.leo.org/pages/addinfo/addInfo.php?aiid=
| EKHR2Car...
|
| [3]:
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fall-
| for...
|
| [4]:
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fall-
| for...
| andai wrote:
| Passed the test: https://files.catbox.moe/f1b7ar.jpeg
| Victerius wrote:
| The day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the
| singularity.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Welcome, to the World of Tomorrow!
|
| https://imgflip.com/ai-meme
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| It sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt
| mabub24 wrote:
| "If a lion could speak, we could not understand ( _verstehen_
| )[0] him."
|
| - Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations
|
| [0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best
| translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some
| conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general
| idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all
| encompassing sense that is only possible when
| someone/something is no longer alien.
| coldtea wrote:
| "We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get
| into different perspectives, and we have been close to
| animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years,
| plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and
| what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding
| us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea
| Mawr wrote:
| Yeah, I think we'd be just fine:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky
|
| > Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give
| orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat
| orange give me you."
| mwattsun wrote:
| How would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus?
|
| Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses
| and other cephalopods
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-
| in...
| jdmichal wrote:
| It's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use
| math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one,
| and see if it gives us 11?
|
| (The above is meant in jest, of course.)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > (The above is meant in jest, of course.)
|
| Sounds like a good idea to me. But of course one needs to
| be open minded, there are other functions that satisfy
| the same rules. :-)
| runnerup wrote:
| More seriously, I think humans and other mammals
| generally can learn to share an "animal" language which
| uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to
| human, human to animal).
|
| Elements used for prediction include: - Predictable
| timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial
| events - body language - sound patterns - touch patterns
| - performative actions with environmental objects
|
| It's not so much a "universal" language, but rather that
| mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to
| train each other in these cues and learn them. They can
| be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication
| and over time both parties move a lot of the inference
| and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even
| taking active brain power to decipher intent and
| meanings.
|
| I've also done this when I was working very closely with
| just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke
| the others language but we had to get the job done for
| 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of
| different grunts and cues that we used first for several
| weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate
| everything that we needed to, we started
| replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own
| language words and that's how we taught eachother the
| others' language. At least for the domain of our work.
|
| I have no idea if any of these would be possible with
| cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby
| octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust
| ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the
| ability to create novel games to play with eachother.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >learn to share an "animal" language
|
| Aren't there a few primates that have learned sign
| language?
| wincy wrote:
| It's hard to say as the further you get away from a
| common ancestor the more the behavior of different
| species diverges (maybe a bit tautological, but still
| worth pointing out).
|
| I played with my pet rat and we were good friends. We'd
| play little games and I'd tickle her Rats and humans
| diverged maybe 80 million years ago. Interestingly,
| humans and dogs diverged perhaps 100 million years ago,
| and we know we can communicate with dogs.
|
| However an octopus is ~600 million years away from a
| mutual common ancestor, which is way back in the
| Precambrian. It's an order of magnitude more time.
| msla wrote:
| Humans created dogs out of the wolves best able to
| communicate with humans.
|
| It's been a consistent artificial selection pressure.
| labster wrote:
| Dogs created civilization out of humans by consistently
| helping the most cooperative ones. Even today, dog
| "owners" live longer and attract more mates. It's
| consistent selection pressure.
| Kye wrote:
| Dogs even developed facial muscles to communicate with
| human expressions.
| pavlov wrote:
| We could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that
| means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually
| it actually would.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-'
| has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.
| avisser wrote:
| > The general idea is, though, of understanding in a
| greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible
| when someone/something is no longer alien.
|
| I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of
| "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I've read that English is one of the most idiomatic languages.
| I believe it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Or imagine being autistic and taking things way too literally.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I used to work with a lot of Swedes. I learned literal English
| translations of several Swedish idioms. I don't think any
| relied on wordplay, so they worked fine as standalone idioms,
| with some having similar versions in English (holding thumbs
| vs. crossing fingers).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying
| English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her",
| except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to
| fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the
| sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.
|
| This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there
| are _three_ words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I",
| "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words
| "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because
| two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all
| the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the
| sentence; nothing tricky is going on.
|
| (The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an
| unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive
| construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".)
|
| [1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by
| trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard
| sense of the preposition "for". (
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them
| work.
| Kye wrote:
| That YouTube person who learns languages and surprises native
| speakers discovered this when he had Chinese teachers rate him:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxfTGbSfqA
|
| It turns out there are a lot of poems, stories, etc a native
| speaker would learn in school and apply to their speech that a
| foreign learner might not even know about. One of the teachers
| compared this to learning Shakespeare, but I don't think it's
| nearly as involved in day-to-day speech the way it seems to be
| for native speakers of Chinese languages. I certainly don't
| know anything about Shakespeare other than what I picked up
| from Star Trek even though I'm sure I use things that came from
| his works all the time without knowing.
| pid-1 wrote:
| I'm 30+ and I can't understand teenagers texting on my own
| mother language.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Bruh
| xdennis wrote:
| I don't know if this is a reference to the recent South
| Park episode, but do teenagers really say "bruh" so much? I
| thought that was something people said a decade ago,
| although they used to ironically spell it "bra" sometimes.
| mkaic wrote:
| yeah, 'bruh' has been a thing for the past... 7-8 years
| now? hit its peak around 2016 but is still going strong.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The spelling change seems to be indicative of the
| generation shift (and a slightly different
| pronunciation). From what (little) exposure I've had to
| teenagers in recent years "bruh" is "correct" (and "bra"
| is "ancient" and "bro" is "boring"). Slang usage shifts
| in weird ways.
| scheme271 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's brah, coming from Hawaiian pidgin.
| It's a shortening of braddah (i.e. brother).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I'm sure both still exist. Slang always is prone to
| regionalisms and in-group markings. What I've heard (on
| Xbox voice chat primarily) as commonly used today is
| "bruh" like much closer to how most people pronounce
| "duh". I don't know where it originates dialectally other
| than "often heard in Fortnite and Minecraft".
|
| (Definitely the one closer to my youth came closer to
| "bra"/"brah", and while some of that was assumed to be
| surfer-originated, I can't tell you how much it was
| related to Hawaiian pigdin or just convergent
| evolutionary vowel shifts.)
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I can confirm that "bruh" is very popular with at least
| the teens I interact with through online games, yes.
| ta8903 wrote:
| no cap frfr
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| No cap, there was a translation of Beowulf a few years ago
| that deadass translated the first word of the saga,
| "Hwaet", as "Bro!" (like how a drunk storyteller sitting
| next to you at the bar might say "Bro, listen to this shit"
| instead of the more staid/traditional openers like
| "Harken!")
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Fr fr no cap that shit bussin dawg, gotta relate to the
| chilluns mang
| SilasX wrote:
| >I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with
| the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read
| a sentence, understand every single word but you still have
| absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're
| missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of
| the words.
|
| I know someone who _won 't_ sympathize with this difficulty, as
| he insisted on an obscure abortion joke in the man page for
| abort(), which will come off as super confusing to anyone who
| doesn't know the reference.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644
| lupire wrote:
| RMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice)
| where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority
| over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he
| unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.
| SilasX wrote:
| If the documentation is intended to be used as a technical
| reference by people who won't get the reference, that is,
| by its nature, unsympathetic to the people who will be
| using it, no matter what he claims -- and I don't think he
| has ever _actually_ shown how he's weighed such concerns.
| ajuc wrote:
| > I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with
| the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read
| a sentence, understand every single word but you still have
| absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're
| missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of
| the words.
|
| It's actually pretty rare, at least for me when I was learning
| English. Usually I would understand from the context what the
| idiom must mean, but not necessarily what each word means.
|
| For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched"
| was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this
| meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from
| eggs".
|
| I think there's 2 styles of learning - breadth-first and depth-
| first. My wife is a depth-first learner. She would look up
| every definition as many levels down as needed before going to
| the next part. It drove me crazy when I studied with her
| because my stack would overflow.
|
| I try to understand the general idea, look how it works, and
| only then go down into details. She was very frustrated with
| this because she couldn't deal with "details we ignore for
| now".
|
| In language learning I think depth-first is a bad idea, because
| meaning of the details change with context. So when I learn a
| language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still
| guess the general meaning. After encountering a word many times
| in different contexts you get intuition on what it means and
| how it's used much better than if you looked it up and took the
| first meaning as gospel.
| _kst_ wrote:
| > For example: "don't count your chickens before they're
| hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for
| me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not
| "hatching from eggs".
|
| Nearly monolingual English speaker here.
|
| I'm very familiar with the noun "hatch" meaning a kind of
| door, and the verb "hatch" meaning to emerge from an egg. But
| until just now I had never noticed that they're spelled and
| pronounced the same way. (And apparently they're
| etymologically unrelated.)
| [deleted]
| ben_w wrote:
| Also native English speaker.
|
| One thing I learned recently is the etymologies of the
| words for "Orange".
|
| The Orange Order is a fraternal order in Northern Ireland
| named in honour of the (Dutch) William of Orange, whose
| title is from the Principality of Orange (in what is now
| southern France), named after the city of Orange, whose
| name reached that after a few rounds of minor corruption
| from the Gaulish "Arausio" meaning cheek or temple.
|
| The Orange Order likes the colour orange. I don't know
| where on that etymological chain the connection stops, but
| the word for the colour is derived from the fruit, the
| fruit has the name "an orange" as a corruption of "a
| norange" (except the language this happened in varies from
| English, French, Spanish and Italian depending who I ask,
| so might have been "une norenge" but all the stories agree
| the "n" shifted), that from the Arabic naranj, and that is
| apparently fairly close to the Dravidian root word.
|
| Returning to William of Orange, the Dutch word for the
| fruit is "Sinaasappel" - Chinese Apple. And of course,
| "Mandarin" is the English words for both a type of orange
| and a branch of the Chinese language.
| d13 wrote:
| Interesting... in Bangalore fruit vendors call loose-
| skinned oranges "Nar Oranges" and apparently the first
| plantation of these was in Narpur, introduced from China.
| In South Africa these same kinds of oranges are called
| nartjies.
| simias wrote:
| I remember that reading bash.org 15 or so years ago was
| pretty hard for me, because many puns and slang was confusing
| or ambiguous for me. I wish I remembered specific examples.
|
| Well actually I do have one from that time, but not from
| bash.org: when I started playing nethack I remember being
| confused because the game would describe foul foodstuffs as
| "tasting terrible", but in colloquial French (my native
| language) "terrible" is often used as a positive adjective
| (much like "awesome" shifted from meaning "inspiring terror"
| to "excellent" in the English vernacular).
|
| So, when the game says that something "tastes terrible", does
| it mean that it tastes awful or awesome? I now know the
| answer, but back then it wasn't so obvious.
| myrion wrote:
| This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Pterry
| and the Discworld:
|
| Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
|
| Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
|
| Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
|
| Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
|
| Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
|
| Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
|
| The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like
| a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them
| behind words that have changed their meaning.
| scubbo wrote:
| GNU Terry Pratchett.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Perhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base
| and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a
| silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out
| but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out
| the first.
| ajuc wrote:
| Idioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like
| that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius
| businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a
| home run." I would know what it means no problem.
|
| That's what I meant by guessing from context.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The latter is easy to figure out
|
| That misquote would confuse even somebody who knows
| baseball. The actual quote is, "There are many people who
| don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on
| third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple."
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-
| xpm-1986-12-14-860403...
| jfengel wrote:
| True, though "thinking they hit a home run" is a nice
| extension of the same concept: not only do they think
| that they deserve what they got for no effort, but are
| actually angry that they didn't get more.
|
| (Coincidentally, I used exactly that expression,
| precisely that way, earlier today. Unless somehow the OP
| read what I wrote, which isn't impossible.)
| spoonjim wrote:
| Haha of course.
| aldebran wrote:
| Sokath, his eyes open!
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Idioms are a part of a regular curriculum as much as just plain
| meanings of works.
|
| Another example would by Troy, which was a mythological city
| until it's location was discovered.
| rappatic wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've also seen someone interpret this joke
| as related to prostitutes and windows (as Sumerian bars were
| apparently also brothels). I think this just goes to show how
| much one needs to understand about a society's culture to fully
| understand its jokes.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| For the reference, a reply to this thread [1] discusses that
| particular explanation.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/15058362781090611...
| avsteele wrote:
| Translation _is_ hard, for mostly-dead languages too. I recall
| this essay by Tolkien on translating Beowulf
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Translating_Beowulf
| neaden wrote:
| For refference, here is the opening of Beowulf written in
| English about a thousand years ago: "Hwaet. We Gardena in
| geardagum, theodcyninga, thrym gefrunon, hu da aethelingas
| ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceathena threatum, monegum
| maegthum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syddan aerest weard
| feasceaft funden, he thaes frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum,
| weordmyndum thah, odthaet him aeghwylc thara ymbsittendra ofer
| hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. thaet waes god cyning.
| daem eafera waes aefter cenned, geong in geardum, thone god
| sende folce to frofre; fyrendearfe ongeat the hie aer drugon
| aldorlease lange hwile." While you can kind of guess at some of
| the words and sounds, it's basically unreadable to a modern
| speaker.
|
| Now here is the beginning of Canterbury Tales, written about
| 600 years ago: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The
| droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every
| veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
| Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every
| holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in
| the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken
| melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem
| Nature in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on
| pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To
| ferne halwes, owthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every
| shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly
| blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they
| were seeke." Still very difficult, but you can probably
| understand the gist of it.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This isn't just a problem for ancient languages and modern
| foreign languages. It's a problem for languages you speak
| fluently. And the implications are a lot bigger than
| understanding a joke.
|
| Consdier a sentence like "Tim just squealed like a pig low key,
| actual" [1]. Throw in a few more choice phrases like "L plus
| ratio", "copium" and "dead ass" and someone from a few yers ago
| will have issues decoding all that. Many current people will be
| lost.
|
| Words also disappear (eg [2]). Old English is essentially a
| different language. Middle English can be hars to parse.
|
| ~230 years ago the Bill of Rights became part of the US
| Constitution. The Firs Amendment [3] includes this text:
|
| > Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
| religion ...
|
| "Establish" here at that time had a very specific meaning that
| differs from the current vernacular. This sprung from Britain
| where the Anglican Church was the Established church. That means
| it was responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages.
| Catholics, for example, would often get married twice: once in a
| Catholic church and a second time in an Anglican ceremony so it
| was official.
|
| The framers here wanted to guard against there being an
| "official" religion in the nascent United States. All such
| official institutions were to be civil not religious.
|
| Knowing this history makes this language more understandable yet
| an established religion is not something we in the West have
| dealt with in some time so the meaning has changed to the more
| general sense.
|
| You can also have this discussion about the phrase "well-
| regulated militia" with respect to the Second Amendment too but
| that's a whole other topic.
|
| The point remains: language drift has and will affect legal
| meanings and interpretations.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DrDisrespectLive/comments/sy26j7/ti...
|
| [2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-30-lost-
| english-...
|
| [3]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
| Namari wrote:
| The "pun" in Sumerian is centred on the fact that the verb "to
| see" also literally means "open (one's) eye".
| godDLL wrote:
| Kinda similar to "look out" in English.
| enw wrote:
| Can someone share the tweet here?
|
| Unable to see it.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Even live languages have words, that are often used in normal
| speech, but cannot optimally be translated to other languages,
| and carry no real meaning on their own, except in some cases set
| the tone.
|
| eg. "bre" in serbian is one of those words, where "nemoj da jedes
| to" i "nemoj bre da jedes to" mean basically the same thing
| ("don't eat that").
| daptaq wrote:
| I always thought of it as a kind of more abstract "bro"?
| tomerv wrote:
| Another example: !Vamos! It's kind of like "let's go", but
| carries more weight than its English translation. Some other
| languages have similar idioms for hurrying people up, but some
| languages simply don't.
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| Including the indispensable https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/
| %D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A7%D9%84%D9...
| contravariant wrote:
| Even English has words with similar properties, compare for
| instance "don't eat that" and "don't fucking eat that".
| bradrn wrote:
| I don't know Serbo-Croatian at all, but Wiktionary suggests
| colloquial English interjections like 'man', 'the hell' as
| adequate translations: 'don't eat that, man!'.
| OJFord wrote:
| It sounds like what's called an 'emphatic particle', in Hindi
| at least (to, 'to') which marks the topic or shifts emphasis
| in a sentence.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > "bre"
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bre#Serbo-Croatian
| tatrajim wrote:
| One of my favorites in East Asia, well-known to everyone in China
| and Korea
|
| Si Mian Chu Ge = samyeoncoga
|
| "Four sides, Chu songs"
|
| Refers to the conclusion of a bitter campaign in the 3rd century
| BCE for dominion in China. The famed general Xiang Yu (Xiang Yu )
| heard the singing of enemy soldiers of the enemy state of Chu and
| instantly grasped that he was doomed.
|
| The phrase, used with cheerful irony, is very useful in many
| contemporary situations!
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| It pisses me off people write long things like as a Tweet rather
| than a blog. I have to scroll over a dozen tweets before being
| hit by the "you need to login" popup.
|
| Serious question: Is there a reason for something like this to be
| on Twitter? This looks like the textbook definition of something
| that should be in a blog.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter?
|
| Easy to catch audience. Yes, you can make a blog post and tweet
| a link. But tweets without links get more engagement and reach.
| (Something that can be attributed to users or/and site's
| algorithm.)
| neaden wrote:
| People don't owe you free stuff in your preferred format. It's
| on Twitter presumably because the author likes to put stuff on
| Twitter.
| throwntoday wrote:
| I think a blog would be held to more scrutiny than a series of
| tweets. The latter seems to give authors a way to rant about a
| topic without providing much in the way of exposition.
| civilized wrote:
| Turn off cookies for *.twitter.com and it'll stop bothering
| you.
|
| (You shouldn't have to, but take a minute to do this and
| Twitter links will be tolerable going forward.)
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