There are 5 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: USAGE: Do foreign names sound like phrases in Chinese?
From: Adnan Majid
1b. Re: USAGE: Do foreign names sound like phrases in Chinese?
From: George Corley
1c. Re: USAGE: Do foreign names sound like phrases in Chinese?
From: H. S. Teoh
2.1. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
From: Logan Kearsley
3.1. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
From: Logan Kearsley
Messages
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1a. Re: USAGE: Do foreign names sound like phrases in Chinese?
Posted by: "Adnan Majid" [email protected]
Date: Fri Mar 1, 2013 2:41 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 8:17 AM, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Which boils down to: when transliterating a foreigner's name, or rather,
> when *choosing* a suitable series of characters to represent a
> foreigner's name, one has to consider not only the closeness in
> pronunciation to the original and how well the chosen characters fit
> into overall Chinese phonotactics, but also the meaning, express and
> implied, of the chosen characters. The conventional way is to pick
> something that has some kind of positive implication, or jives with that
> person's perceived character, etc..
>
Choosing a "Chinese written name" with meaningful characters can be very
fun. I settled on 安南 (an1 nan4), made up of the characters for
"tranquility" and "south" - in part because I'm from the (American) South.
However, my Chinese-speaking friend said the name reminded him,
surprisingly to me, of a military general since it could also be
interpreted as "pacifying or subduing the south." No worries - it seems to
be the same combination used to transcribe Kofi Anan's name, so it can't be
all that bad.
Take care!
Adnan
安南
Messages in this topic (9)
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1b. Re: USAGE: Do foreign names sound like phrases in Chinese?
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Fri Mar 1, 2013 2:54 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 10:17 AM, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
> First of all, due to the fact that Chinese has tone distinction but most
> other languages (like English) don't, means that when transliterating
> names we get a lot of leeway in what characters can be used. Second of
> all, due to the vast difference in syllabic structure from, say,
> English, some degree of mangling is possible or even necessary, which
> gives even more leeway in how a name can be translated.
>
For clarity, according to WALS, tone languages are actually more common
than non-tone languages:
http://wals.info/feature/13A?tg_format=map&v1=cfff&v2=cf6f&v3=cd00, though
complex tone systems like Chinese (with many contours) are less common, and
will differ significantly in their tone inventories.
Also, there are standards for transliterating English (and other foreign
language) names into Chinese:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_characters#Transcription_table
And
some names already have standard transliterations (like my first name,
George, which is pretty much universally transliterated as 銋�瘝� -- one reason
I have always asked Chinese friends to help me find a unique name, as
continuing to use the transliteration seems boring to me). Tones come from
whichever characters you choose for transliteration, and even words
borrowed in speech rather than writing will gain tone -- probably based on
the speaker's perception of other prosodic features as tone, though I don't
know much about it, to be honest.
Messages in this topic (9)
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1c. Re: USAGE: Do foreign names sound like phrases in Chinese?
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Fri Mar 1, 2013 4:05 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 04:54:16PM -0600, George Corley wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 10:17 AM, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > First of all, due to the fact that Chinese has tone distinction but
> > most other languages (like English) don't, means that when
> > transliterating names we get a lot of leeway in what characters can
> > be used. Second of all, due to the vast difference in syllabic
> > structure from, say, English, some degree of mangling is possible or
> > even necessary, which gives even more leeway in how a name can be
> > translated.
> >
>
> For clarity, according to WALS, tone languages are actually more common
> than non-tone languages:
> http://wals.info/feature/13A?tg_format=map&v1=cfff&v2=cf6f&v3=cd00,
> though complex tone systems like Chinese (with many contours) are less
> common, and will differ significantly in their tone inventories.
Huh, that's new to me. :) I stand corrected.
> Also, there are standards for transliterating English (and other
> foreign language) names into Chinese:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_into_Chinese_characters#Transcription_table
Yes, but the section immediately preceding that table speaks of the
variety of different transcription schemes that are not mutually
compatible. :)
> And some names already have standard transliterations (like my first
> name, George, which is pretty much universally transliterated as 銋�瘝�
> -- one reason I have always asked Chinese friends to help me find a
> unique name, as continuing to use the transliteration seems boring to
> me). Tones come from whichever characters you choose for
> transliteration, and even words borrowed in speech rather than writing
> will gain tone -- probably based on the speaker's perception of other
> prosodic features as tone, though I don't know much about it, to be
> honest.
For an extreme example of borrowed words acquiring tone, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGRcMGRQKb0
:)
T
--
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I understand. --
Benjamin Franklin
Messages in this topic (9)
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2.1. Re: Related to the recent discussion about counting the number of po
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Fri Mar 1, 2013 2:43 pm ((PST))
On 26 February 2013 16:25, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Logan Kearsley <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> On 26 February 2013 13:55, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Logan Kearsley <[email protected]
>> >wrote:
>> >
>> >> I would argue that there is really no such thing as "fake"
>> >> information; concepts may be very close together, and maybe the author
>> >> of a particular tweet wouldn't care about the distinction between
>> >> them, but true perfect synonyms are incredibly rare, and there's
>> >> always *some* reason why one word or one structure was picked over
>> >> another one.
>> >
>> > I would think that there is _usually_ a reason that one construction is
>> > chosen over another, or at least that linguists should consider whether
>> > there is a reason. But the claim that such a reason _always_ exists
>> might
>> > be overbroad. As an empirical claim, you'd essentially have to defend
>> > yourself every time someone comes up with two sentences with the same
>> > meaning.
>>
>> No, you don't. You just have to defend it if someone finds two
>> different sentences that they believe to have the same meaning.
>> Natural production of two sentences that turn out to be genuinely
>> identical in meaning is entirely different from intentionally
>> producing two different sentences that could both be interpreted with
>> the same pre-decided meaning.
>
> There are technical frameworks for determining whether two sentences mean
> the same thing, stating that if they have the same truth conditions they
> are therefore equivalent. Of course, that often ignores extra pragmatic
> phenomena, which leads to a whole other argument on whether pragmatic
> considerations are part of the language system or not (I think that some of
> them may be, contrary to what my semantics professor is teaching me, but
> not all).
>
> Also, am I correct in guessing that you assume that "in the wild" data is
> the only valid data, or at least superior to linguist-presented sentences
> that native speakers judge to be grammatical/ semantically identical? I
> think "in the wild" data is more important than some modern linguistics
> seems to want, but there are advantages to making up sentences and asking
> native speakers if they are correct.
Not in all cases; I agree there are many situations in which it is
totally valid to invent a sentence and ask someone to make judgments
about it. But in this case, people's conscious judgments are subject
to strong cognitive biases, so you need to collect data in a way that
avoids giving people the chance to exercise those biases.
>> There is a cutoff for significance below which a reasonable person
>> probably wouldn't care, and different sentences could be considered to
>> have identical practical meanings in any given situation, but at the
>> very least the choice of one form over another provides some
>> information about the speaker/writer's neurological state.
>
> There are certainly differences. But how is information about the writer's
> neurological state relevant to the meaning of the sentence, at least
> insofar as it causes a minor difference in the structure that we can't find
> any other meaning for?
It's relevant because meaning, being composed on concepts, exists only
in the mind. What any sentence means is potentially slightly different
for different people in different contexts, and it is entirely
conceivable that the meaning a particular person constructs could
depend on *any* inference that could be made from *any* piece of
information encoded in the sentence. How it might be relevant in any
particular discourse context is something that only the participants
in that discourse could tell you.
Thus, if we want to make measurements based solely on the text of
possible sentences, without taking into account any specific discourse
context, the only thing that makes sense is to strictly compare
information content in the information-theoretic sense. And that means
we have to account for *all* of the information in a sentence, not
just some of it that we think might be relevant in an unknown context.
> I would want to see how wildly people's "significance thresholds" differ
> before I accept that we can only judge this on the basis of a single
> individual's idiolect. It's not terribly often, as far as I know, that I
> say something and am so wholly misunderstood by another native English
> speaker that I must conclude that our meanings for a given sentence are
> fundamentally out of sync. Artists and authors often accuse critics of
> misunderstanding their work or not getting their actual meaning, but those
> are people engaged in deliberately expressing meaning through indirect
> means, with subjective judgments about what should have been "obvious" to
> the reader.
This has been the precise topic of discussion in my semantics class
for the last couple of weeks. Misunderstandings or non-understandings
turn out to be surprisingly common, and people even use them on
purpose (witness the phenomenon of the Ambiguous Facebook status,
which acts as a filter to identify your friends' memberships in
different social groups based on how they interpret small bits of
language differently).
On 27 February 2013 10:43, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
[...]
> RM I can't see any real difference between "buy" and "purchase"--
A quick search of the Corpus of Contemporary American English for BUY
and PURCHASE as verbs confirms my initial suspicions: "buy" is used
primarily in informal contexts (including speech and fiction) and to
refer to the actions of individual people, while "purchase" is more
frequently used in formal (such as legalese) or academic contexts and
to refer to the actions of groups or institutions.
-l.
Messages in this topic (38)
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3.1. Re: CHAT: the Ithkuil of programming languages?
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Fri Mar 1, 2013 2:58 pm ((PST))
On 27 February 2013 19:45, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 5:56 PM, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> In my understanding, it's not even an "experiment", it's a joke language
>> deliberately made to as minimal as possible (and therefore, very hard to
>> program in). The joke is that even such a horribly badly-designed
>> language is "Turing-complete" -- that is, it is capable of performing
>> exactly the same computations as any other serious programming language
>> can (given, of course, enough time and memory -- which may be vastly
>> greater than that needed by a more traditional programming language).
>> The name comes from the language being deliberately made to mess with
>> the programmer's head.
>
> Interesting. I had not thought of a longer instruction set requiring more
> memory. I guess I just presumed that the program's code was converted into
> some deeper language like machine code or whatnot when the program was
> compiled. But now that I think of it, if that were the case there would
> probably no point in the Java Runtime Environment or other such things.
Longer source code generally isn't the problem, for exactly the reason
you guess- length of source has very little relation to the size of
compiled machine code. The point of the JRE isn't that conversion to
machine code isn't done (in fact, the JRE generates machine code
internally), it's to provide an intermediate step in translation so
that only one program (the JRE) has to be written multiple times to
run on different machines, and everything else can just be written to
be compatible with the JRE.
The problem is the presence of information about intent, which can be
used to produce optimizations. For example (because it's relevant to a
project I'm working on right now), if I'm working in a purely
functional language and I want to specify that some stuff should
happen in a strictly sequential order, that's not very hard to do, but
doing so introduces a ton of incidental overhead that has absolutely
nothing to do with my actual goal- the compiler will end up allocating
and recycling stack frames, grabbing memory for intermediate results,
etc., just to throw it all away again later. If, on the other hand,
the language includes built-in mechanism for specifying sequential
execution, the compiler will know that that's all I want, and
sequential execution is something that physical microprocessors do
really, really well, so it will be able to skip all of the incidental
junk and just do the minimum required for the result I actually want.
That principle generalizes to an enormously wide variety of features.
If an instruction for a particular feature is present in the language,
the compiler can recognize your intent and do the Just the Right
Thing, and nothing else. If it's not, and you have to compose other
smaller instructions to get what you want, the compiler may not be
able to recognize your intent, and will thus frequently be required to
do a lot of extra useless things- taking more time and more memory-
because it can't prove that you *didn't* want them to happen.
-l.
Messages in this topic (34)
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