From: "David C. Oshel" Date: 2003-06-03T06:50:06+09:00 Subject: Re: OT On Fri, 30 May 2003 03:22:02 +0900, Hal E. Fulton wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "David C. Oshel" > To: "ruby-talk ML" > Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 10:49 AM > > >> Sorry if this is old hat to most of you, but I just discovered these >> side-by-side ruby and perl scripts from the new Japanese-language _Ruby >> for Perl Users_ book mentioned by maki at ruby-lang.org/ja/ a couple of >> weeks ago (5/14). > > That's fascinating! I wish we had an English translation > of this book... I'd love to do it, but my technical vocabulary is too pathetic for public consumption. I'm working on it... > ... ... heh ... see below :) > >> "Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think >> about." -- Benjamin Lee Whorf [N.B.: The opinion expressed belongs to >> its source, and is not at all that of the management. The management >> is a devotee of Noam Chomsky's Universal Base Hypothesis, which states >> that language evolved in the brains and vocal accoutrements of apes, >> who possessed advanced skills of perception, perhaps driven by leopard >> predation and territorial songfests, long before the advent of >> language. Whorf is merely indulging in magical thinking.] > > Ha... tagline with a disclaimer. Cool. > > OT: Perhaps Whorf and Chomsky could both be right. Perhaps there > is a kind of feedback loop in the evolution of language and of > human thought. Whorf has his flaws; I'll be the first to admit > that. But I always liked him for his highly analytical thinking, > his original ideas, his creativity, his enthusiasm, and his way > with words. And I liked him because of the novelty of a chemical > engineer who is a dilettante in linguistics, to the point that > he is almost remembered as a real linguist. > > Even more OT: Whorf in a sense played a joke on the world. People > in the humanities and such are always trying to bring physics (etc.) > into their own fields of literature and social studies and such, > drawing wild conclusions and meaningless generalizations from > Goedel's theorem, ... Oops. Guilty as charged. I've always thought the first meaningful corollary to Goedel's Theorm is the observation that no system of thought is immune from parody. > ... relativity, and quantum mechanics. Whorf in a real > sense did it backwards. He dragged real physics into the more > subjective field of linguistics (in his comments on the Hopi language) > and almost got away with it. At least he was more credible than my > literature professor who tried to apply the Uncertainty Principle to > 20th century literature. Usually, it's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ( http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html et al.), and because I was forced to encounter this notion at a Land Grant University in 1968, it caused me no end of pointless pink difficulties ontologizing somnolently... I tend to lump it with Carlos Castaneda's lesser works and Jack Kerouac's longer Tijuana paper rolls. > > And as for magical thinking: Ha. You say that like it's a bad thing. ;) Not a "bad" thing. Just indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia (or pretraumatic hyperaesthesia, at least) in my experience.... Urrk. B.T.D.T. > > [Those who respond, if any, to the OT part should do it offlist. I have > been criticized once or twice for my rambling.] You'd think us ruby hackers could come up with a good syntax, so when it comes time to compile this compendium onto CD's the stuff between (say) "" and "" would disappear into the alt.fan.hegelian.philosophy bucket or sumpthin. -- David C. Oshel mailto:dcoshel@mac.com Cedar Rapids, Iowa http://homepage.mac.com/dcoshel/ "Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun!" - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_