[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.) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-21 23:00 UTC)