Posts by Pole

14

Does the Memorial generate BIG $ for the WTS?

by Scully in

i'd never before thought of this angle for the memorial.

it makes sense though: they get people who have become inactive making an extra effort to show up and maybe donating some "guilt money" to make up for having missed a few months' worth of meetings.

they invite worldly people who perhaps take it for granted that when you go to "church" you drop something in the collection plate, and just automatically drop an offering in the contribution box.

Pole

Even if the Memorial does generate more income for the WTS, so what? Are you saying it's one of the reasons why they organize it?

36

YHWH - Ya'Wa' - revealed (Not Jehovah or Yahweh)

by hallelujah in

both the catholic and jehovah's witness anthropomorphisize yhwh, but in reality the word should be pronounced as yawa - or ya'wa'.. in ancient sanskrit, a short "a" is the default vowel.

this is not limited to sanskrit but is a universal and generic default vowel and the most common vowel sound in most languages.

the "h" simply means that the short vowel "a" is forcefully aspirated.

Pole

Can ya alaborate an tha notian af tha "default vowal"?

Ya mean samathing that warks like this:

NBC - Nah Bah Cah

KGB - Kah Gah Bah

?

49

i just thought it would be interesting to give a bit of background on philology (the study of ancient linguistic texts) historico-linguistics (the study of the history and development of languages) and etymology (the history of individual words).

by analysing different languages, linguists were able to work out that many languages had a common root.

for instance, it was obvious that english, dutch, german, danish and swedish for example, are from a common root, because certain words closely resemble each other.. english drink.

Pole

greendawn,

:Pole if I understood well your opinion is that Ukrainian is nearer to Polish than Russian is to Polish though overall Ukrainian itself is nearer to Russian.

Yes, I guess you could put it that way. Plus I was making a distinction between diachronic (genetic) similarities and synchronic ones (that is the similarities between languages as they are today if we largely disregard their history), e.g. Ukrainian sounds way more similar to me as a speaker of Polish than Czech, although the latter is a West Slavic language genetically. On the other hand Slovak sounds strikingly similar, although it is really only marginally different from Czech.

Speaking of Slavic languages. There is this cool project named "Slovio" (http://www.slovio.com/), where some folks took a core set of Slavic vocabulary which gets repeated across all the Slavic languages (or at least they try to maximize this factor). The point is to make an artificial language that would be understandable for all speakers of Slavic languages without having to learn much of it. I must say it works pretty well, although the grammar and morphology have been extremely simplified, compared with what we have in most Slavic languages.

Leolaia,

:LOL, indeed....if you follow lexical-functional grammar, that is indeed where you find much of the grammatical info for the syntax (right in the lexical entries of the morphemes)...

That one I'm much more fond of ;-). Basically because many lexical-functional models are computationally applicable and that's somthing I'm really interested in.

Pole

49

Historical Linguistics

by dorayakii in

jw
friends

i just thought it would be interesting to give a bit of background on philology (the study of ancient linguistic texts) historico-linguistics (the study of the history and development of languages) and etymology (the history of individual words).

by analysing different languages, linguists were able to work out that many languages had a common root.

for instance, it was obvious that english, dutch, german, danish and swedish for example, are from a common root, because certain words closely resemble each other.. english drink.

Pole

greendawn,
:Pole as I said I am not a linguist and if what you are saying is right then all the books I read about the classification of the Slavic languages have to be rewritten on this point because they all class Russian-Ukrainian-Byelorussian as East Slavic and Polish-Czech-Slovak as West Slavic. Your contention is that Ukrainian should be in the West Slavic sub branch.
No books have to be re-written ;-). Here is what I said actually:

:In any case there is no good reason to lump together Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian as different dialects of the same language.
Of course I'm not re-classifying Ukrainian as a West Slavic language from a historical perspective. My only point is that - taking a purely synchronic perspective - I object to your notion of "the Russian languages". That's why I emphasized the fact that there are striking similarities between Polish and Ukrainian.
Leolaia,
I guess my little point about Ukrainian-Polish-Russian boils down to putting the diachronic classification in a synchronic perspective. Again, I'm not questioning any diachronic dogmas. I accept most of them, but I also point out that their explanatory power is limited and sometimes they lead to misconceptions.
:A genetic classification like the one given for Polish as West Slavic is perfectly valid, because the earliest strata in the lexicon has a set of sound correspondences that group it with other West Slavic languages.
Sure. Diachronically correct. But, as an example, it may be interesting to notice that the set of Polish phonemes is more similar to that of Italian than it is to that of Russian. This is purely coincidental, but it serves to illustrate my point.
One more unimportant comment on what you wrote: I guess there is a subtle difference between the influence of, say, Norman French on English and the influence of genetically close languages like Polish and Ukrainian on each other. The latter are much more likely to interfere with each other not only at the level of the lexicon, but also at the level of grammar (if we maintain the classical division between the lexicon and grammar which I'm not such a big fan of, but that's a totally different story).

---
BTW, this is a good thread and all I'm trying to do is introduce some synchronic controversy ;-).
Pole

49

Historical Linguistics

by dorayakii in

jw
friends

i just thought it would be interesting to give a bit of background on philology (the study of ancient linguistic texts) historico-linguistics (the study of the history and development of languages) and etymology (the history of individual words).

by analysing different languages, linguists were able to work out that many languages had a common root.

for instance, it was obvious that english, dutch, german, danish and swedish for example, are from a common root, because certain words closely resemble each other.. english drink.

Pole

greendawn,

Sorry about this late reply, but I missed yours.

:I an not a linguist, my only basis for saying that these two languages are marginally m.i. is what several Ukrainians told me, but as you say there are many dialects in each language and perhaps official Russian and official Ukrainian are not m.i. (based on Moscow and Kiev?) but the dialects spoken near the geographical border on the two sides are.

That's not exactly what I was trying to say. What I meant was that many Ukrainians perceive Russian as "only marginally different" from Ukrainian largely bacause:

1) It's true that both are Slavic languages after all but also...:
2) The great majority of Ukrainians were brought up in a bilingual environment. In fact there are areas in Ukraine where Russian is the dominating language.

Now, what I proposed to verify whether factor 1 or be is more important was to ask a Russian who has never had any contact with Ukrainian if s/he thinks these two languages are really only "marginally" different. The interesting thing is that while many Ukrainians would say Russian is so naturally similar to Ukrainian, you wouldn't be able to find many Russians agreeing with them. I hope I've made it clear in my crippled English ;-)

:I would guestimate that Ukrainian being an East Slavic language is nearer to Russian than Polish which is West Slavic.

Actually, this is a fallacy committed by some historically-oriented linguist ;-). Neat genetic classifications don't always conform to reality, e.g. ukrainian was heavily influenced by Polish due to our common history.

In any case there is no good reason to lump together Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian as different dialects of the same language.

Pole

20

Sweden to be 100% oil free for energy production by 2020

by greendawn in

jw
friends

they have some politicians with good foresight in sweden and they are on course to becoming totally oil free in 15 years, even vehicles will not use gasoline, and given the tripling of oil prices in 10 years that is a wise decision, after all oil will run out sooner or later.

already only a third of its energy comes from oil.

if only more countries were as environmentally sensitive, instead of bush just saying that the usa is addicted to oil he should do something about it.

Pole

:These smaller (and smarter) countries will have a much easier time doing these things! That's not to say I'm not all for it I am! I wish someone would come up with a good renewable resource that would work here where SIZE does matter!

Nonsense. The area of Sweeden is 449,000 km^2. That's more than the UK, Italy, or Germany. Plus, it's a very sparsely populated country (9,000,000). Distances do matter there. What's your point again?

20

Sweden to be 100% oil free for energy production by 2020

by greendawn in

jw
friends

they have some politicians with good foresight in sweden and they are on course to becoming totally oil free in 15 years, even vehicles will not use gasoline, and given the tripling of oil prices in 10 years that is a wise decision, after all oil will run out sooner or later.

already only a third of its energy comes from oil.

if only more countries were as environmentally sensitive, instead of bush just saying that the usa is addicted to oil he should do something about it.

Pole

:Yeah but can't you walk across sweden in about 13 minutes? It's almost 50 miles from one end of jacksonville to the other....

:How wide?

Give me a break...

24

Has Noah's Ark been found? New satellite images of anomaly on Mt. Ararat

by truthseeker in

jw
friends

if this turns out to be the ark, it will be huge!.

http://www.space.com/news/060309_ark_update.html.

exclusive: satellite sleuth closes in on noah's ark mystery .

Pole

I liked the Mars water canals better.

P

31

BODY...SOUL...SPIRIT.....THE MESSIANIC HOPE............the source

by Terry in

body: what we use to become conscious of the the world around us.. soul: what we use to become conscious of our self as an identity, ego and will.. spirit: what we use to become conscious of the divine: god.. the above largely comes to us by way of greek philosophy.. and, thanks to the conquests of alexander the great (pupil of aristotle) that philosophy soaked into every nation, tribe, tongue and religion it encountered.. so what, then, is all this leading to?

two points:.

1. we today are influenced by greek philosophy (but are probably not aware of it) just as the conquered world was back then.. 2. greek science, philosophy and especially vocabulary caused a mutation in cultures, religions and thinking.. the middle east (and judaism) was shattered by the impact of greek conquest.

Pole

Terry,

I appreciate your posts on this thread and I'm being stubbornly provocative/a pain in the ass just to get as much feedback as possible. I recently got very interested and involved in this project launched by one friend of mine who is a sociologist and specializes in "memetics". Basically, "memetics" is a buzzword for Dawkins' 'meme' theory. Here's a short introductory link if you haven't heard of it:

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html

The general conceptual patterns of body, soul or spirit are memes too according to this paradigm. The problem is, and I guess we both agree, that memes evolve in a highly distributed environment. Abstract ideas are shared synchronically in the minds of millions and passed on diachronically over thousands of years. So any model accounting for the evolution of a single ideological meme from ancient Greece to modern Texas cannot be as linear as a model accounting for highly codified scientific knowledge. In other words you can't draw a straight line from Plato to a modern evangelical Christian. Rather, a "distributed" model would amke sense, where there are thousands of more or less obscure threads in the memetic network leading to specific output nodes. To make thing even more complicated, apart from the behaviourist factors governing the memetic evolution, there are cognitive ones too. It looks like we are pre-wired to buy one type of crap in favour of the other. Hence, you've got a situation where some of the beliefs of American Indians coincide with those of ancient Greeks. Behaviouristically it makes no sense. Cognitively, it does make perfect sense.
Anyway, I was trying to elicit as much input from you as possible, because this thread is essentially about memetics (that is if you accept this terminology). What we are planning to do in our project is to use text data mining methods to trace the history of ideological "memes" found in political discourse.
Thanks for an interesting thread.
Pole

49

Historical Linguistics

by dorayakii in

jw
friends

i just thought it would be interesting to give a bit of background on philology (the study of ancient linguistic texts) historico-linguistics (the study of the history and development of languages) and etymology (the history of individual words).

by analysing different languages, linguists were able to work out that many languages had a common root.

for instance, it was obvious that english, dutch, german, danish and swedish for example, are from a common root, because certain words closely resemble each other.. english drink.

Pole

::Pole, as the speaker of a slavic language (Polish) you should know that Russian Byelorussian and Ukrainian are much closer to each other than English is to Dutch. They may be only marginally mutually intelligible but this is not the case with English and Dutch.
Interesting. You speak with a tone of authority, or maybe I'm just oversensitive, so maybe I can learn something ;-). Let's stick with Ukrainian vs. Russian, since I've never had much experience with Belorussian, and never made a point about it.
Methinks, you are confusing the fact that most Ukrainians know Russian with the supposed similarity between them. The easiest way to see my point is by asking a Russian living in St Peterburg if he/she understands much Ukrainian. In any case, there is nothing like the "Russian" languages in any serious synchronic classification that I'm aware of. Ukrainian by my subjective standards (and there are no conventions of comparing language similarity, especially between many language pairs) is much more similar to Polish (a West-Slavic laguage) than to Russian. If you know the languages I can give you some specific examples.
Pole