On language: on controlling and being controlled

Gendanken

Take it away, gendanken.
I'm still with you.

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and2000x

Just two questions, and try to keep the answers short.

1)What the hell does any of you governmental ramblings have to do with this thread?

2)Did you mistakenly think was the politics forum, or did they already run you out of there like a dog with your tale between your legs?

Its quite obvious by now that you have the comprehension of a 13 year old. However, I must congratulate you. You are the first person ever to annoy me enough in such a short period of time through pure stupidity for me to even consider using the ignore list. In your case, I'm doing more than considering it, I'm doing it.

 

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Minimalism: LMAO.

And in case you want to think: Think of the unknown and let's see if you do not think of the "unknown". Everything known is expressive in speech or mind.


The end. Out and done with this crap.

 

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i was going to "chime in" here with some "profound" thoughts (in my mind) but it occurs to me that a discussion beyond what i know (linguistically) is in the making. so, for now, i leave it to you.

As an outsider it just seems to me that the best arguments (on both sides of the discussion) are being tossed away, the focus has become semantics. I think all concerned would do better if the precise point were argued instead of grammar or politics.

look at the previous postings, is it really necessary (in such a civilized conversation) to condescend to or mock one's opponent? perhaps "opponent" is not the best term but you get my point. In my opinion, the interesting stuff is being overshadowed.

 

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Fountainboy: another peep out of you and I'll tear you to ribbons.
buffy: if you read Gendanken's disclaimer on the bottom of page three, you'd know where you stand



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Says Mephura:
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All right, so we left off on a bit of a disagreement, which is wonderful because it gave me something to think about. Kiddies and grammar. You may be right- its easy to see how this "feel" for language can be ascribed to exposure. Children most certainly do fumble with grammar- past for present tense, loose participles and all that. I’m far from being an expert on language theory, but what I’d meant was this:

Concerning children, I was mostly geared towards pointing out how easily they take to putting subject, verb, noun and pronouns together in a sentence so early in life. It’s not so much that they take to it perfectly because they don’t. Its more about how "liquid" this invention of ours becomes in their hands so early. There’s a kind of plasticicity or flexibility that shows soon after they grab a hold of language that’s striking even if the grammar is a bit fucked.

I’m not fascinated in that they can learn and build sentences. I’m fascinated that they can make language a part of their body, almost. And so early in life despite how complex language theories are. Is it just exposure? Is it just a case of no longer having to think about how to play a certain chord after learning an instrument? Is it the same as me no longer having to look down at these keys while I’m typing? Could be. I don’t know.
You cornered me with that one, Oh Mephurio.

There's still much to be said about music, and I would if I knew what I was talking about so I won't. Only know that given a piece of music a sour note and only knowing why its sour implicitly is key to what I might very well get into later.

But now to us grown folk. You can certainly "feel" the ‘wrongness’ in your own language. You can’t make heads or tails about Spanish so its certainly absurd to think you could ‘feel’ whether a Spanish sentence is grammatically correct or not. You only feel the jolt when your own language goes wrong (like English or any other tounge you're just as comfortable with) and you may be right to think that its only from having been exposed to ‘correct’ sentences oh so many times before.

But I don’t really think so.

Consider that there is a “rightness” that you feel with language also. “A Clockwork Orange” comes to mind. If you read that book, you’ll find that it’s written with mush and made up words that stand for things you don’t know about. You have absolutely no idea what the words mean because the author gives no glossary to go by. But if you read the book in the style that its written in, the flow of the author's prose unravels what those words mean even though it looks like utter nonsense.

There’s something that ‘feels right’ in those sentences that your brain is in sync with and decodes as you go. You come out knowing exactly what “grazhny bratchies” and “groodies” and “white mestoes” are even though you had nothing to go by.
The same with Shakespeare. He rips grammar apart but it ‘feels’ right.
Now, as far as 'wrongness' goes and what eluded me that kept me from posting in this lovely little thread I've found it. It has somehting to do with binary code.

But I'm going to stop here becuase a hanful of you know how I am about long wind.

I'm going to rub out that cheating feeling you have about raising your post count unscrupoulously. Your next post is one me. Folks have a problem with that, fuck 'em.

Still with me?

 

Alright, so you have me by the throat. Let's just say I'd been mighty angered by all the liberal anti-power, anti-authority jumble around here and it's driving me mad. I READ the ENTIRE thread and to me it came off as people afraid of power, people who spent hour upon hour obsessing over how language is an 'evil control device'. That is my error and I apologize for such an outburst.

Not you in particular, but the youth generation as a whole. As I stated: pseudo-rebellion, meaning 'false rebellion'. MTV and other youth-oriented media in general endorses a 'rebellious, rock-star image'. Thus they get their little herd together and buy into the scam under the assumption that they are being 'rebels'.

Because I attacked the point that means I don't understand? No. But I misinterpreted the message coming out of it. Apparently, I am a case of 'language as control' not working

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1) Language can assist in government and direction of it. That's easy enough to understand.

2) No, actually most of the people there took my side.

QUOTE]You said yourself they both are trying to give power to the weak and pathetic. If they are both trying so damn hard, who is it that is stopping them? Surely not the weak and pathetic themselves. Why one would think that they would be, dare I say it, too weak and pathetic to stop those horribly evil conservatives and liberals who seek to empower them.[/QUOTE]

They are not working towards the same goal on a conscious level, they do it by feeding off eachother unintentionally. The most powerful conservatives in the USA right now are mostly Judeo-Christian who beleive in preserving the most hideous and pathetic human beings to delay any progress in the face of social self-destruct. There is NOTHING that is stopping them. The only reason it seems like a struggle is because liberals create problems where problems don't exist. They will find a cause to support if none exists. What conservatives deemed unacceptable and decadent 50 years ago seems perfectly natural today (television for example). For some reason people are complaining about how horrible criminals have it in jail, when they should be enforcing stronger rules upon them. What happened: sensitivity took over. One cannot even spank a child without being labelled an abuser. Conservatives sank into liberal pressure and reverted their own thoughts: we must protect the right of the child against being spanked because it is sinful! Conservatives took up the role of liberals essentially.

 

And200x:

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.
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There's a claw on my right hand with your name on it.
Its seems somehow you chose to have the red line land on your blindspot. Mind you, I caught you editing your post.

As for your two cents on this topic, thank you oh so much for your valid points. But, good sir, I trust you're going to be leaving politics either out of this thread or in a nice little pm between you and Mephura or you're going to be crying soon.

 

Buffys, whether this is beyond what you know is unimportant to me right now as you have just made the truest statement i've heard in a while. All I want is for this damn thing to get back to where it was. To be honest, there wasn't really an argument to begin with, just discussion. Now look where we are. I've just gotten fed up with people pulling us off toppic and I know the gendanken has too. Say what everyou want and ask what you need, as long as you feel it is relevant. Because you have been so, i don't know, innocently sweet, i will try not to bite your head off if you do go off a bit.

Thanks.

AND2000X
ok, I have bothered to read what you wrote, and I am going to take you off ignore now, as it seems you have cooled off and realized the error of you ways here. But, please, do head gendankens advice and drop the politics. If you want, start a thread on it and pm me. I'll be glad to step up and go at it there.

Gendanken
I'm still with you. I'm letting what you have said bubble in the back. But, until I have anything more to offer, I give you this.

http://www.reversespeech.com/intro.shtml

While still in the early stages of development, it is rather interesting. Only time will tell if it is reguarded as "true science" of just another crackpot idea, but the concept certainly sounds conceivable to me. Could also be used in your theory, perhaps.

 

I watched a documentary a few years ago about speech reversal, and no matter how much 'evidence' is thrown at us, it's never really held up for most scientists. For example, there was that old Queen song that everyone was in an outrage about. When played backwards it said 'I decided to smoke marijuana'. It seemed like a stretch, as the language was vague and the fact that there were other messages like 'I like the backwards dog house' 'climb flag 15 crumble face' and other nonsense. The samples on the wesbite are hilarious, as they can virtually be taken to mean anything if your imagination is good enough. It may indeed be true, but most speech reversal is hilarious gibberish.

 

This was quoted on the website FAQ:

I think that right here shows the absurdity of the theory. If the thoughts are essentially unconscious and direct, then why would the message sound different the second time around?

 

I think the idea is that two people can say the same thing, but because their thoughts are different, you will get different reversals. Samething for teh same person at different times.

 

Oh how this thread does coil in the dust. Such a shame to have it end so soon. There was something quite nice here but interest has waned.


Why? Life maybe? Bills? Car troubles? Some other fucking doodat that has no right to eat away at the amount of time an attempt to explain religion away through language would take? Heathens.

 

If anything has eaten away at anything, its this thread at my perception of the word. It comes to mind constantly and I just keep seeing how everything is interconnected. I will read other threads and Find myself wanting to tie them into this one for some strange point or antoher..This beast is everwhere. Coiling in the dust is merely so it can strike us when we least expect it.

 

Mephurio:

Well..... If you put it that way........


Guess who's back? For refreshments, since its questionable that we can delete those posts by swine that brutally seguewayed......lets pretend that no one else had ever posted here except you and I. Sevi?

Now, where were we..........ah!

I had unraveled my theory up to the point of the human "feel" for grammar. You disagreed me some points which was grand because it made me think. So I came back and gave evidence for such and such as to why language most *certainly* had a feel- not only in that there's a wrongness that one feels but considering that there's a rightness felt also.

Also, remember that I'm mainly focused on trying to explain the grandest mishief of all since Man become a thinking mammal- RELIGION

I await to hear that you're still with me, Mephurio. If the wait is too long I'll either punch out your eyeballs or go ahead and post the next part anyway. 20 minutes and counting.

Sevi?

 

Lucky for me I got on when I did. I am with you still. So, please, do continue.

 

GOOD! On with the show....

(But first, Willy you know always had a knack for saying things beautifully:

"present fears are less than horrible imaginings"
Uttered by Macbeth who was haunted by the ghost of Banquo. His own superstitions.)

Now! where were we........here's what I meant by binary code as possible explanation

I'm sure we all know that space images are transmitted with computer code.

In order to cooridnate the jumble sent back between the enormous distances between Earth and Mars or Jupiter, incredibly complex math is used because the signal beamed back arrives embedded in mounds of background noise or static. This means there are always tons of errors that scientists have to comb through and correct so that the signal becomes a clear image.

The same problem or type of errors occurs in ATM transactions or singals sent over telephone wire.
One method of decoding the signals is to tag on "check digits" at the end of blocks of code:

Say the rule is that for every 8 digits you insert a 9th digit whose value depends on the number of 1's in the bloc.

With me?

If there are an even number of 1's , the check digit is 0
If there are an odd number or 1's, the check digit is 1.
This means that if a single digit is wrong, any digit, the computer registers a mistake. And on looking neither you nor the computer can tell where it is exactly that something is wrong becuase the extra 'check digit' is the only thing to go by. That's key.
The computer is blowing horns insisting that the code does not jive for some implicit reason. And that reason is that check bit, not the error. Without that bit the code would go on flawed and you wouldn't know it.

Its this method in programming that I'm trying to parallel with the mechanics of our brain. That something akin to these check bits is genetically enmeshed in the brain- the reason behind the 'jolt' you feel implicitly. You have no idea how much that intrigues me. And nothing would thrill me more than to find that maybe one day research finds this very thing and lo and behold the little beast is on the the left side of the brain, of all places.

That side of the human brain is almost like a magic carpet of tissue to me on account of its fantastic knack for pattern, structure, and sequence- all the things rampant in language and on a larger curious scale, civilization.

There's more that can back this up and it deals with the nature of programming languages (especially Java) but I'll hold on to that for now, unless you want it right away and pronto for which I'll be more than willing to indulge.

But my concern has always been religion. How to tie the the thing in with something as simple as language if possible.Hopefully having settled discrepancies we can take this back up again into religion becuase that's a cute little side to man I'd love to see explained one day.

And again, this is a bit long and I can't be there to choke you in case you've dozed. But follow? Any insight would be lovely, but of course I'd prefer that you shut up.
Kidding.

Sevi?

 

Ok, I was wondering how exactly you were going to tie programming into this. The pot is the back is close to boiling over, so please, do continue.

 

And so you see now that the reasons for the jolt would be becuase of that check bit and not the error itself that's giving the brain this feeling of 'wrongness' when something in the language falls out sync?

 

Yes, I see what your saying. Concider this though:
Even in the binary, another piece of code has instructed the computer to check for those check bits. The computer will not just do so by itself. I would say the saem goes for language. The only way that this sense of rightness and wrongness is developed is exposure to the language and the constant lessons we get at a very wong age. A common grammer error, for example, is dangling participles. IE: Where are my keys at? Where did he go to?
Alot of people say things of that nature but, it is incorrect grammer. The other issue is that for this inherent sense of right and wrong to exist, grammer rules would have to be static. They have changed and will continue to do so as the language changes. Other languages that have been around longer than ours and have had less of a "bastard childhood" are more stable and less prone to change.

Might I ask that, for the sake of the getting to the religous thrust of your idea, we drop this line for now and, perhaps, pick it up at a latter date. I am interested to see how you will tie religion into all of this. You have given us a tidbit. I would like to see the rest.

 

Yes, please do

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