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transparency in translation
- Thread starter Joel Stewart
- Start date
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On "varietal," the only reason for this error is because to the ear of snotty wine geeks who think that wine appreciation is some form of elevated intellectual achievement instead of an interesting indulgence, "varietal" sounds more elevated than variety (ungrammatical words having the advantage of being unusual and thus appearing to be elevated words). As I said on another board, this creates the toxic combination of a false elitism combined with real ignorance.
The other common example of this is people saying 'gourmand' when they really mean 'gourmet'. It happens to a shocking degree among food writers and people who should know better.
I've never seen this, but it is shocking, worse than "varietal" really, which is finally a grammatical invention and not a malapropism like the one you describe. It reminds me of the time Howard Cosell, meaning to praise O.J. Simpson when he was a running back, describe his record at the end of a season as "meretricious." In retrospect, I'm surprised Simpson didn't slug him.
Chris Coad
Chris Coad
Yes, many people seem to think gourmand means SUPER-GOURMET.
Doesn't sound quite as dopey to me as varietal for variety, though, at least to my ears.
Doesn't sound quite as dopey to me as varietal for variety, though, at least to my ears.
U
Unknown
Guest
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On translatability, assuming that human beings are capable of communicating anything they think, then it will follow that any concept expressed in one language can be communicated in another. In that very limited sense, Otto is right that all ideas will be translatable. This is a far cry from saying that any given text will be translatable into a text in another language that does what the original text does.
uh, i see. on your word, your authority.
if i want to know if a "text" has been translated, i should ask a comp lit professor, right? why? did god and plato give you access to the only copy of "jane's book of fighting concepts"? cool. what is a "concept" anyway? is it in the book?
there's only two routes out of here jonathan. and the other one makes you look like a chump:
even words [such] as carburetor and bureaucrat, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it... however surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the childs task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities (chomsky).
it's why "varietal" is so fucking annoying. unless you want to descend into bullshits and mysticisms, the way words are used in systems matters.
fb.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by fatboy:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On translatability, assuming that human beings are capable of communicating anything they think, then it will follow that any concept expressed in one language can be communicated in another. In that very limited sense, Otto is right that all ideas will be translatable. This is a far cry from saying that any given text will be translatable into a text in another language that does what the original text does.
uh, i see. on your word, your authority.
if i want to know if a "text" has been translated, i should ask a comp lit professor, right? why? did god and plato give you access to the only copy of "jane's book of fighting concepts"? cool. what is a "concept" anyway? is it in the book?
there's only two routes out of here jonathan. and the other one makes you look like a chump:
even words [such] as carburetor and bureaucrat, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it... however surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the childs task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities (chomsky).
it's why "varietal" is so fucking annoying. unless you want to descend into bullshits and mysticisms, the way words are used in systems matters.
fb.
Sorry, but I don't understand your objection. As far as I can tell, my first sentence says what Chomsky says. that ideas can be translated from one language to another, without his more controversial claim that ideas are innate. The second part of my claim, to which you seem to object, merely claims that translating a set of words into another set of words. when the choices in the original language depend on accidents of homonyms, idioms, accidental connotations, etc. that the target language doesn't share is a different proposition. Is this a surprise? Is it really a controversial claim? Surely noting that translations of Mallarm are always too some extent unsatisfactory and are frequently supplemented with footnoted explanations is not the same as claiming that languages are completely opaque and we never understand each other.
Joel Stewart
Joel Stewart
chomsky notwithstanding, i am feeling very varietal tonight.....syrah/mourvedre at 16.4 abv to be exact. needless to say i am treating this one like a poultice...or rather a port
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
I do not believe that all human beings perceive the same set of concepts. Thus, the languages that they have invented are not isomorphic, no matter how many words of each you press into service.
Scott Kraft
Scott Kraft
So maybe there isn't an actual amp analogy in winemaking, but perhaps the entire concept isn't about the conduit of transmission and production, but in our heads.
Perhaps, but one thing is as true in wine as in music: source first. You can turn crap into beauty no matter what amplification.
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I do not believe that all human beings perceive the same set of concepts. Thus, the languages that they have invented are not isomorphic, no matter how many words of each you press into service.
In defense of Prof. Loesberg, I don't believe that he ever claimed isomorphic relationships between languages. Rather, he's claiming that one can get from one to the other with some degree of accuracy that will rarely approach 100%. In this sense, I see it like the notion of Turning completeness among programming languages: given a basic subset of concepts one can formulate almost any task, though the details may be laborious or even ridiculous. I remember getting involved in an argument a few decades ago about whether MIT TECO was a Turing complete language, which I tried to settle by invoking the existence of a text adventure game written in TECO (sewer).
Mark Lipton
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
I certainly don't believe that languages are isomorphic and I assume saying that was what got me in trouble with fatboy, though I would have thought that anyone who speaks more than one language has experienced the ways they don't match up pretty regularly. And I think it's pretty empirically observable that different languages produce different concepts so that a speaker of one language might not in as easy a way have available to him or her the concepts generated by another language. Think of the famous--and for all I know mythical--example of the 21 (or whatever number) Inuit words for snow. I also think that human languages are impressively malleable and can be made to capture any concept that has arisen for a human being. I have no doubt that if an Eskimo sat me down with samples, he could make me perceive the 21 differences the words corresponded to (skiers after all seem to have 5 or 6 different words and I can understand them). If, however, I had to translate a sentence that contained one of those words, I surely couldn't do so with an appropriate English word or probably fewer than a number of English words. And if the word then had other connotations that were at play and the sentence were in a poem, in some sense, I couldn't translate the poem at all. I'm sorry not to have an extreme position about translateability and my punishment is no doubt to be accused by one side of thinking that language is opaque and by the other side that it is entirely transparent. But alas, I can only see through it as through a glass darkly and describe my state.
Steve Guattery
Steve Guattery
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I do not believe that all human beings perceive the same set of concepts. Thus, the languages that they have invented are not isomorphic, no matter how many words of each you press into service.
In defense of Prof. Loesberg, I don't believe that he ever claimed isomorphic relationships between languages. Rather, he's claiming that one can get from one to the other with some degree of accuracy that will rarely approach 100%. In this sense, I see it like the notion of Turning completeness among programming languages: given a basic subset of concepts one can formulate almost any task, though the details may be laborious or even ridiculous. I remember getting involved in an argument a few decades ago about whether MIT TECO was a Turing complete language, which I tried to settle by invoking the existence of a text adventure game written in TECO (sewer).
Mark Lipton
I'd be careful about invoking the concepts of Turing equivalence or completeness in this context. A Turing-equivalent model of computation computes exactly those functions that Turing machines do. The ways in which the computations in the two models proceed may be different, but the results have to be the same.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
A most perfect study of the many words for snow.
If that's all the Eskimo example comes down to, then it has been overrated and overused. But there are numerous other examples from Sapir and Whorf that will get you to the same conclusions. The Hopi language has no nouns, only verbs and adverbs (or something like that, or maybe not, but you get the picture). As a result, one can argue that they construe reality. And probably, to an extent they do. But Whorf also learned to understand Hopi and to explain how they saw things as a result of how their language worked. Thus 1)languages are not isomorphic and direct translation can be impossible and 2)with effort we can still translate thought to thought.
originally posted by Steve Guattery:
I'd be careful about invoking the concepts of Turing equivalence or completeness in this context. A Turing-equivalent model of computation computes exactly those functions that Turing machines do. The ways in which the computations in the two models proceed may be different, but the results have to be the same.
Yes, it was a tortured analogy, but one that makes sense to my twisted thinking.
Mark Lipton
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
The Hopi language has no nouns, only verbs and adverbs (or something like that, or maybe not, but you get the picture).
Woo hoo! The linguistic equivalent of Unlambda! (That's for you, Steve)
Mark Lipton
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
I was with you up to here. My certainty stops here. Is it really true that I can take a foreign concept and explain it to you? Rosch's work with colors and Fitz Poole's work with ancestor-worship-heavy cultures speak otherwise to me. (And not to mention grue and bleen, for what they're worth.)originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
...and 2)with effort we can still translate thought to thought.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
What a torture. Reminds me of a programming language I once saw that used emoticons.originally posted by MLipton:
Woo hoo! The linguistic equivalent of Unlambda!
(NB. When I was in grad school, we used a variant of Scheme called T.)
Steve Guattery
Steve Guattery
originally posted by MLipton:
Unlambda! (That's for you, Steve)
Wow, thanks, that's a great link. The outgoing links from that page led me to Brainfuck, which is pretty damn cool, too. Time to propose a new programming languages elective...
By the way, I enjoyed the bit in your earlier post about the argument for why MIT TECO is Turing equivalent.
Jonathan Loesberg
Jonathan Loesberg
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I was with you up to here. My certainty stops here. Is it really true that I can take a foreign concept and explain it to you? Rosch's work with colors and Fitz Poole's work with ancestor-worship-heavy cultures speak otherwise to me. (And not to mention grue and bleen, for what they're worth.)originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
...and 2)with effort we can still translate thought to thought.
I don't know the work about ancestor worship. I remember some research on color spectrum vocabulary from when I was an undergraduate. But in the end, for the research even to work, someone from one language group had to be able to understand the color distinctions someone in the other group was making and then, in the research, could describe and ulimately designate it. I take that to mean that anyone could be taught to see the distinction with sufficient work and that teaching would be the groundwork for translation from one thought to another. But I'm not a scientist. Are you arguing that the distinctions made by one language can't even be taught to a native speaker of another. If that were the case, there would obviously be at least some meaningful limits on translateability of any kind. I'm unprepared to dispute hard research, but I admit, in the face of it, I would have residual, unbuttressed skepticism.