Charles 3781

1 hour ago, Strange said:

This is an interesting but, ultimately, fairly meaningless question. (Also, it isn't obviously related to the original point about English being "most rational, and sophisticated")

The problem is, mainly, how do you define a word. Do you count inflections as separate words: e.g are "dog" and "dogs" one word or two. What about different meanings: "dog" the animal versus the verb "to dog"; and what about all the different meanings of that verb. And then the conjugations of the verb (dog, dogs, dogged, dogging, etc). Is a hyphenated term one word or two (or more).

If you decide that the forms of a verb are separate words, then what about languages that have more complex verbs forms, or those that gave none.

Then, English uses a sequence of separate words to express a concept while Japanese, for example, uses a single word with multiple suffixes (e.g. "I did not want to eat" vs. "tabetakunakatta"). Does that make English or Japanese more "sophisticated? 

Then again, English has lots of irregular verbs (it sometimes like they are all irregular) whereas Japanese has only two common ones. So which is more "rational"?

https://blog.ititranslates.com/2018/03/07/which-language-is-richest-in-words/

 

p.s. I put this in "Other sciences" because I think linguistics counts as a science

The thing is this.

If you truly consider that all languages are equal, that must mean you think that the Japanese language is just as good as the English language.

Therefore, why don't you suggest that we  conduct future discourse on this forum in Japanese?

Hai?

Sinclair Basic is very good.

Do you think the "photograph" of the "Black Hole " is real?  

Honey, you found that the English language has more words than any other language in the known Universe.  

Admit it!

Personally, I haven't reproduced a single off-spring, as I preferred other pursuits

4 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Define weak in this regard. Especially among younger folks death has been associated with a too strong immune response.

You might be thinking of social Darwinism, which is not a biological concept. It is not about strength, it is about reproductive success. Leopards are at risk of extinction. Rabbits not so much.

Well that's me done then. I haven't produced any off-spring. No reproductive success whatsoever.

How have you done?  

ran away

Do you think that, in the end, we'll have to let the virus run its course. 

Despite all our attempts to fend it off with our hand-sanitizers, masks, and social distancing.

The virus will kill off the weak people. The strong people will survive.

Isn't that how it works, in a Darwinian world?

So what language is it?

Strange, your post is sophistry!

Yeah - you couldn't come up with an answer!  

25 minutes ago, Alloverthemap said:

This was exactly what I was thinking. When I was young I was under the impression that when you dream you dream in black and white. Then I had a dream in color and it was a major surprise. I remember that well. I'm of a generation that didn't get a color TV until I was 7 years old. Of course, movies were in color, but I hadn't seen many of those in the theaters at that age. I do wonder if we could examine dream studies from the pre-color media era if we would find that everyone dreamt in monochrome. And if that's the case, then have we only learned to dream as elaborately as we now can because of the advent of the moving picture?

 

Allover, you're making some interesting points.

About the black and white dreams.  These are not the natural way that we dream.  

Our eyes are adapted for colour vision.  This colour vision is supplied to our brain.  Which records the vision in memory. In full colour.  And we see that vision  in our dreams

To prove this,  think of something  you've seen in the past.  Perhaps a person, or a place.  See it - now - in your mind's eye. 

Whatever you see in your mind's eye - I bet  it's in colour.  Not in black and white!   Your memory records the colours.

Seeing things in black and white has been a temporary thing caused by past lack of technicolor on screens.

What would happen, do you think, if a black hole came into close contact with a white hole. 

Would they mutually annihilate, without any outward release of energy.  Each hole internally cancelling the other one out.

Or would there be a stupendous outward burst of of energy.  Perhaps released in the form of "dark matter"?

1 minute ago, Strange said:

 

It is precisely no more and no less rational or sophisticated than another language.

Has the English language got a larger vocabulary than any other language?

Please cite another language  with a larger vocabulary.

On 8/18/2020 at 12:12 AM, Strange said:

Someone else mentioned it on the forum a while ago. I had never heard it before. Maybe some dream in colour and others don’t?

Dreaming in black and and white is probably  a temporary phenomenon .

Caused by the  black and white televisions that we used to be continually exposed to, when of a certain age.

I mean, our human eyes perceive colours. Therefore our perceptions in dreams should also be in colours.

To confirm this, please try remembering any colours in a dream, on waking up.

Thanks Studiot for your courteous reply.  Or are you taking the pass?  It doesn't matter. I have read loads and loads of books about Quantum Theory , Spacetime curvature, and all the rest. 

As a result, I have come to this conclusion:

Nobody really knows what the heck it's all about.

20 minutes ago, Strange said:

And more than that, "the curvature of spacetime" is shorthand for "the curvature of the geometry of our measurements of space and time" (or something like that)

I've no idea what "the curvature of spacetime" means.  Nor, I suspect does anyone.  But - Einstein said it.  So will you "bow the knee"?

29 minutes ago, studiot said:

I assume you are familiar with the English language.

Nouns can be abstract.

This ability is one of the strengths of English as a language as it provides for more than one type of noun, and all that entails.

It is also a rational language, which means that there are things (trains of deductive thought) you can say in English that cannot be said in maths, ie mathematically.

You're absolutely right.  The English language is the most rational, and sophisticated, medium of linguistic communication ever devised.

I mean, can you imagine this forum being conducted in French.  What would that be like!

Is it any any wonder that almost all major scientific advances have been achieved by speakers of English.

1 minute ago, Strange said:

I would say someone capable of critical thinking, who asks probing questions, who thinks about the meaning of the words used, etc.

They don't have to have any big ideas, just able to analyse ideas.

Well perhaps. But  we've had 2,000 years of philosophers.  Like Plato and Aristotle.  Aristotle analysed ideas.   He came up with the conclusion that everything below the Moon is made of four elements:

1. Earth

2. Air

3. Fire

4.Water

And everything above the Moon is made of a luminous 5th element.

This was so ridiculous, that it got protested against even by contemporary Ancient Greek scholars.  Unfortunately, their voices were drowned by Aristotle's philosophical followers, who established a reign of scientific terror that lasted 1,500 years.

Isn't that what philosophers are.  They can't do maths, don't know anything useful.  They just waffle and bluff.  Or have they any redeeming features.

How would you define someone who claims to be a "Philosopher?

Is it someone who has big ideas, and would really like to be a Physicist.

But can't do the maths.

On 8/10/2020 at 11:02 AM, Markus Hanke said:

The difference is that Aristotle didn't do science in the modern sense of the word, his assertion was just a philosophical speculation. There was no evidence, and no way for him to really test the hypothesis. The theory of relativity is a completely different story - it is based upon the shortcomings of earlier models, and it is directly amenable to the scientific method, i.e. it can be tested and falsified. To date, it has been in full accord with every single experiment that has ever been thrown at it; no violations of relativistic principles have ever been observed anywhere, despite it having been extensively tested over the last 100+ years.

Thanks Markus.  I think you're a bit hard on Aristotle.  He did the best he could.  But he lived in an Ancient Greek world without telescopes.

So he can't really be blamed for espousing "circular" orbits.  Even Copernicus and Galileo, 1500 years later, concurred in the assumption of circularity in planetary orbits.  One can see why - the circle is symmetrically neater than Kepler's unexplained lop-sided ellipses.  Aristotle's biggest bloomer was claiming that the Earth and the Heavens were made of different stuff.

As for Relativity Theory,  has there been any practical test of it?  I don't mean measuring the masses of particles  in the LHC. In that machine, particle masses are calculated by employing  Relativity theory. So the results are bound to agree with the theory.

What I mean is, have any experiments been conducted with a rocket-ship accelerating away at near light-speed from the Earth, looping round Alpha Centauri, then coming back. And the crew getting out years younger than they should be.

Well obviously not.  In the present state of our technology we can't do it.  So isn't the idea just theory.  Where's the experimental verification?

On 8/9/2020 at 10:42 PM, swansont said:

All space is expanding, and the limitation of c doesn’t apply to space.

 Thanks swansont. You are always pithy.   But can "space" really "expand".   What does the word  "space" actually mean?

Is "space" an actual physical  "thing"  -  in the same sense that stars and planets are physical "things" .

The nouns "star" and "planet"  denote actual, solid, physical 3-dimensional objects.  Which have definite, measurable, and constant dimensions and mass.  So they are clearly "things".

But the noun "space"  just seems to be an abstract  word.  A kind of shorthand for: "the separation between objects".

Thus we can say: " Object A is separated from Object B by 1 metre" .  Or we can say:  "There's a space of 1 metre between Object A and Object B".

But  does this replacement of "is separated from"  by  "a space between",  make "Space" into a thing?

20 minutes ago, Winterlong said:

Not for the pilot, the ship will be as ok as always for him... but he will see the rest of the universe doing so. If he has a certain sense of humor, he could call it the Big Bang 

It's a joke 🙂  I don't think that will happen, and if something, the Big Bang looks much more similar to what happens when the pilot decelerates and the 1 meter universe turns into a many billions light-year universe, expanding space-time and galaxies far faster than c, as the Lorentz-contraction losses effect 

Very perceptive post.

Do you consider Einstein to be correct?  He claimed that the speed of light is invariable.  Where's the evidence for that?  Don't our telescopes show show galaxies flying apart at many times the speed of light?

The thing is, you shouldn't get too fixated on an "authority figure" like Einstein. These "authority figures" have held up the progress of science in the past.

Like Aristotle.  He said that the planets must revolve in perfect circles.  They don't - they revolve in ellipses. But because Aristotle was an authority figure, he delayed the progress of astronomy for a thousand years.

Einstein looks like another authority figure - he says nothing can exceed the speed of light.  How does he know?   

Most people  don't commit crimes.  The criminals who do it, have bad genes.  These genes could be eliminated by executing the criminals before they can reproduce.

In that way, we could arrive at a law-abiding society. Isn't that a sensible idea?

If the ship underwent contraction as it approached light-speed, wouldn't the hydrogen atoms inside the ship get so squeezed together, that they underwent nuclear fusion, and blew the ship apart in a gigantic nuclear explosion?

Thanks Enthalpy.  You show very clearly, the scientific principles which ought to influence the design of musical instruments, so that they work most effectively.

Isn't it a pity that traditional instruments haven't been designed along these scientific lines.  Rather, the instruments seem to have evolved in a kind of haphazard way.

For example, we  have, nowadays, all kinds of "wind" instruments, such as the trumpet , bugle, flute, clarinet and recorder.  And stringed instruments like the banjo, violin, cello, and double bass.  Do we need all these different instruments?  Couldn't they be scientifically reduced to a single all -purpose instrument .

Just as past  key-board instruments like the clavichord and harpsichord, have been perfected into the modern piano?