2nd languages

[merjet]

Michael, those are computer languages, so obviously you can't speak them.

Phil,

I meant--are you serious that you actually are familiar enough with these programming languages to use them?

Your level of computer ignorance is way to high for that to be true.

As a quit, OK. (Cute... )

If you were being serious, I was going to call you on it.

Michael

I guess he was familiar enough with them to use them, even if he has forgotten a lot by now.

I got a Bachelor's in Math with a minor in Physics, then I got a Master's in Math with a minor in Philosophy. I became a computer programmer/systems analyst/systems engineer/business as a first career.

Then I "turned to the Dark Side" and went into the humanities, teaching mostly History, Literature, and Composition as a second career.

Edited February 25, 2011 by Merlin Jetton

[Philip Coates]

Subject: Michael Does It Again

> are you serious that you actually are familiar enough with these programming languages to use them? Your level of computer ignorance is way to high for that to be true...I was going to call you on it. [MSK]

You don't get to 'call me' on anything, pal.

My level of computer knowledge is probably an order of magnitude greater than yours. I was a highly paid software professional for much of my life with an understanding of a wide range of systems and applications.

My web knowledge is certainly -less- than my knowledge of other hardware and software, but as usual (1) you take my requests for information in a limited area as the basis for an attack and (2) widely - and sloppily - over-generalize and condemn.

This is why your sweeping attacks and smug shows of disdain irritate and alienate so many in the Objectivist world.

You need to grow up, Michael.

The above statement on [my]"level of computer ignorance" is an unprovoked, generalized attack out of left field which you should apologize for.

(But of course, you will not.)

Edited February 25, 2011 by Philip Coates

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

That's ridiculous and, frankly, insulting.

Ted,

Only to you. And maybe to Phil. As for me, no, my comment isn't ridiculous or insulting.

I can only judge by Phil's comments. From what he's shown, he's an Internet ignoramus trying to fool people into thinking he knows something about it.

Frankly I find that ridiculous and insulting, but Phil's Phil and I like him. When he wants to lay BS on people, I call it BS. At least I asked this time. (What did you just do?)

Sorry, but a Google search is just too easy to make before you start lecturing folks on what the Interet and computers are. And when I see BS and vanity games being paraded before others as facts, I speak up, as I always will.

Look at it this way. I use Maslow's 4 stages of mastery as a standard:

1. Unconscious incompetence.

2. Conscious incompetence.

3. Conscious competence.

4. Unconscious competence.

Phil is often in Stage One (say, not knowing the difference between Google and Google Decktop), trying to lecture people who are in Stage 3 and 4. He just did it. I've seen this many times, and not just with him.

He says he used to be a programmer. That's what he says. I don't know. I'm up against something that doesn't line up. Everything he says about computers shows total lack of familiarity with informatics in general, except on the rare times he drops a name. I don't look just at what a person says about himself. I also look at what he does. And I hold another standard for evaluating: Name-dropping is not knowledge.

Hell, I took 3 years of French when I was in school and didn't learn a damn thing. But you won't find me prancing about lecturing others on French grammar. I don't need approval at all costs from others to maintain a false self-image. I know who I am--the good, the bad and the ugly.

I find it demeaning when I see someone I like doing that crap. I believe he is better than that. If I found no value at all in Phil, I would not say anything.

Michael

EDIT: My post crossed with Phil's. Once again, he claims things about himself. But what he does doesn't reflect that level of knowledge. Sorry. I go with what a person does over what he says--especially when he is tooting his own horn.

[Philip Coates]

> Once again, he claims things about himself. But what he does doesn't reflect that level of knowledge.

Michael, you are not competent to judge.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael, you are not competent to judge.

Phil,

Of course I am.

Your posts are up and I can read English. I do a lot of computer and Internet stuff. And I study my ass off.

I wonder, how long is this quest for unearned reputation going to continue with you?

I seem to remember reading that this is not a very Objectivish attitude.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Is all this only because Phil doesn't use the quote function? I thought he didn't use it because he didn't want to, not because he didn't know how or, at worst, couldn't be bothered with learning it. Anyway, Internet capable is not the same thing as computer software internals capable.

--Brant

dubious about dubious about dubious

[Brant Gaede]

I got a Bachelor's in Math with a minor in Physics, then I got a Master's in Math with a minor in Philosophy. I became a computer programmer/systems analyst/systems engineer/business as a first career.

Then I "turned to the Dark Side" and went into the humanities, teaching mostly History, Literature, and Composition as a second career.

Phil on that thread was at his condescending best.

--Brant

[Xray]

My native language is German. I learned English, Latin, French and Spanish in school.

I have always been interested in language, and as for foreign languages - in my teens nd twenties, I had a veritable 'foreign language quirk', attending additional courses in Italian, Russian, Swedish and Finnish. I even took a few lessons in Chinese but found the different tone heights very difficult to learn (although I'm mostly an 'auditive' language learner).

But of the languages not learned in school, I have virtually forgotten everything because I did not have enough time to practice.

Of those language learned in school, except English, they too have become quite rusty.

But of all the languages I have learned, English has always been my favorite language. I fell in love with English ever since my first lesson in school, and it is a love which has lasted to this day.

I am a native speaker of English, and have, on occasion, been mistaken by Spanish speakers for a native speaker of Spanish, which I speak, read and write with mastery.

What I really like about Spanish are the clear pronunciation rules correlated to its orthography.

With very few exceptions (ge/je, gi/ji), when hearing a Spanish word pronounced, one will know how it is written. The rules are that clear.

I can read and understand Italian and Catalan and written Portuguese, but find Portuguese can be impossible to understand when spoken.

Spoken and written Portuguese are two different worlds indeed.

I recall a Portuguese native telling me that while they can understand the Spanish when they speak, the Spanish cannot understand the Portuguese speakers.

As for learning languages which are similar - it bothered me that I tended to mix up Italian with Spanish. It is an interference phenomenon. It would interest me whether you have made the same experience, like e. g. mixing up Spanish and Catalan.

one occasion I overheard a Japanese businessman mumbling "Puh-rinse-uh-ton-uh" in NY Penn Station

The phenomenon of additionally inserted vowels (due to the phonetic system of the foreign speaker's native language) is called "Sprossvokale" ('sprouting vowels') in linguistics.

Edited February 26, 2011 by Xray

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Phil on that thread was at his condescending best.

Brant,

This is the real problem.

You should only be condescending when you don't repeatedly make primary mistakes in the topic you use to dump on people with. Otherwise, it looks terrible.

You shouldn't be condescending with your corner eye on an audience, anyway. That's second-hand self-respect at best. Certainly nothing good for an Objectivist hero--especially one who is intrinsically better than others. (Heh. )

I wonder who the bad guys for real are for these folks? I'm talking deed, not just lip service. I bet you, for these poor souls, the bad guys for them inhabit Objectivist forums and not bloody dictatorships.

Michael

[william.scherk]

But of all the languages I have learned, English has always been my favorite language. I fell in love with English ever since my first lesson in school, and it is a love which has lasted to this day.

I love English for its huge vocabulary and varied registers and accents. French I love for the feel of it in the mouth, its diction. Spanish I love for its simple orthography written and for the sensous variability in its accents and dialects.

Why do you think you fell in love with English?

[Brant Gaede]

Phil on that thread was at his condescending best.

Brant,

This is the real problem.

You should only be condescending when you don't repeatedly make primary mistakes in the topic you use to dump on people with. Otherwise, it looks terrible.

You shouldn't be condescending with your corner eye on an audience, anyway. That's second-hand self-respect at best. Certainly nothing good for an Objectivist hero--especially one who is intrinsically better than others. (Heh. )

I wonder who the bad guys for real are for these folks? I'm talking deed, not just lip service. I bet you, for these poor souls, they inhabit Objectivist forums and not bloody dictatorships.

Michael

That thread isn't this thread.

--Brant

[Xray]

How about you?

I also know some basic conversational Objectivese.

You say you "know" some basic Objectivese. Define Know. Are we to infer that you understand it, that you grasp it firmly, that you promise not to misunderstand, wilfully misunderstand, or misrepresent it? Hmm?

And, WSS: are you also in a state of fully conscious awareness to fully consciously grasp that the ultimate value is Objectivism's survival?

--Xray

serious as always ;)

That thread isn't this thread.

--Brant

A thread is a thread. A is A. Surely you won't dare to violate the law of identity here by claiming that A is non-A?

--Xray

truly shocked

Edited February 26, 2011 by Xray

[william.scherk]

How about you?

I also know some basic conversational Objectivese.

You say you "know" some basic Objectivese. Define Know. Are we to infer that you understand it, that you grasp it firmly, that you promise not to misunderstand, wilfully misunderstand, or misrepresent it? Hmm?

And, WSS: are you also in a state of fully conscious awareness to fully consciously grasp that the ultimate value is Objectivism's survival?

I'd like to take the epistemogical snarl of whether or not I "know" basic conversational Objectivese to chat, when Carol gets time. As for fully conscious awareness grasp of ultimate, well, no. Basic conversational Objectivish is "you make a pre-moral choice to live when you choose to suckle," or "even cabbages have morality," or "it's earlier than you think. Let's watch Charley's Angels."

[caroljane]

XRay, re firm graspings, a certain Hibernian Fowl with a well-feathered nestis said to have a "piece" of Atlas Shrugged the Movie! What if he loses all his money and we have start being nice to other possibilities?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

That thread isn't this thread.

Brant,

You're right. A lot of stuff from other threads is mixed in this one.

At least the people are the same.

Wouldn't it be something if a person totally changed his/her personality because he/she was posting on a different thread?

(Man, do I wish that were possible...)

Michael

[kiaer.ts]

Spoken and written Portuguese are two different worlds indeed.

I recall a Portuguese native telling me that while they can understand the Spanish when they speak, the Spanish cannot understand the Portuguese speakers.

As for learning languages which are similar - it bothered me that I tended to mix up Italian with Spanish. It is an interference phenomenon. It would interest me whether you have made the same experience, like e. g. mixing up Spanish and Catalan.

The phenomenon of additionally inserted vowels (due to the phonetic system of the foreign speaker's native language) is called "Sprossvokale" ('sprouting vowels') in linguistics.

Languages can and do evolve at different rates. Spanish and Portuguese are very closely related, and developed from a common form that was very much like Spanish. Spanish underwent little change, the most significant being the change of j and x from /zh/ and sh/ to an h-like sound (In German, the initial sounds of Genie and Schade to the final sound of Bach.) But Portuguese, which was spoken by a smaller number of speakers, was subject to a greater rate of change, and faced a greater rate of mutation in its consonant clusters and its vowels. To me, spoken Portuguese is quite beautiful, but if I pay attention for the meaning, rather than the sound, it resembles a drunken Frenchman with a heavy accent mumbling in Spanish.

I have on occasion had French interfere with my production of Spanish, but having used Spanish almost daily for over twenty years it's not too much of a problem. When learning Spanish (mostly on the street) I had to thgink how one would say something in French and then translate it into Spanish. That lead to some weird things, like going from the French fontaine to a made up Spanish word fontana for the English fountain. The real spanish word, fuente, comes directly from the Latin fons/fontis, while fontaine has an added derivational -ana suffix which does actually produce fontana in Italian.

As for Catalan, I never studied it formally, just bought a grammar, and have read various texts and watched Dune dubbed in Catalan. Catalan lies almost equidistant between French to the north, Spanish to the west, and Latin to the past. It's only real surprise is that it uses a present form of the verb to go to make its perfect tense, like saying Ich gehe geschlafen to mean Ich habe geschalffen. Very odd. But other than that it sounds like a Romance language with mostly Spanish vowels and French consonants.

Here are the Lord's Prayer in Spanish, Catalan, French and Latin from http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/ to compare:

[caroljane]

How about you?

I also know some basic conversational Objectivese.

You say you "know" some basic Objectivese. Define Know. Are we to infer that you understand it, that you grasp it firmly, that you promise not to misunderstand, wilfully misunderstand, or misrepresent it? Hmm?

And, WSS: are you also in a state of fully conscious awareness to fully consciously grasp that the ultimate value is Objectivism's survival?

I'd like to take the epistemogical snarl of whether or not I "know" basic conversational Objectivese to chat, when Carol gets time. As for fully conscious awareness grasp of ultimate, well, no. Basic conversational Objectivish is "you make a pre-moral choice to live when you choose to suckle," or "even cabbages have morality," or "it's earlier than you think. Let's watch Charley's Angels."

Slightly offtopic, I just read an interesting article on men-only book clubs originally in the Telegraph. it mentioned a study (no, it only said "one study" so I don't know which one) that found one in four Americans have never read a book. I think that is encouraging, it means that three in four have read at least one.

I'd like to chat but when I daringly pushed the button it told me that my Cookies are disabled, although at the bottom of the screen it invites me to delete them. I now know my browser is the internet explorer (I think)but I do not want to mess with the cookies whatever they are and I do not know about chat, do you have to make an appointment for it? I am not being disingenuous, I really don't know this stuff.

Edited February 26, 2011 by daunce lynam

[caroljane]

Now that I think of it, "men-only book club" is not a bad partial description of OL. What do you think XRay? Gentlemen, I said PARTIAL.

[caroljane]

But of all the languages I have learned, English has always been my favorite language. I fell in love with English ever since my first lesson in school, and it is a love which has lasted to this day.

I love English for its huge vocabulary and varied registers and accents. French I love for the feel of it in the mouth, its diction. Spanish I love for its simple orthography written and for the sensous variability in its accents and dialects.

Why do you think you fell in love with English?

I fell in love with my own language in my preschool years at church. The Anglican liturgy - the good, the bad and the funny. My dad was always tickled by the Benedicite Omnia Opera (even the name) and would solemnly intone around the house,

"O Ananias, Azarias and Misael, bless ye the Lord."

And the splendid Victorian vocab of the hymns!

"Crown him the Lord of Years

the Potentate of Time

Creator of the rolling spheres

Ineffably sublime"

And of course at Christmas the songs were all about ME.

[kiaer.ts]

The phenomenon of additionally inserted vowels (due to the phonetic system of the foreign speaker's native language) is called "Sprossvokale" ('sprouting vowels') in linguistics.

I forgot to mention, this is called epenthesis in English and other languages. It happens not only when a word is borrowed but also sometimes to native words due to a language's own internal phonological rules. It involves vowels as well as consonants. For example, the English endings -le (and -er) added to a verb marks repeated or action. Thus:

beat > batter

scribe > scribble

wrest > wrestle

drip > dribble

game > gamble

spin > spindle

The last two show an epenthetic /b/ and /d/ since the sequences /ml/ and /nl/ are not natural in English.

[kiaer.ts]

Those who have enjoyed at least parts of this thread may wish to read the longer and more in depth and more civil one on linguistics, here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7355&view=findpost&p=74922

[syrakusos]

> Is that a quip, or are you being serious?

Michael, those are computer languages, so obviously you can't speak them.

Well... actually... In 1977 (I think it was), I overheard two of my classmates who were reading greenbar printout. Clearly, one guy had a bug and the other was helping him, and they were doing a pretty good turn speaking Fortran.

Just as human languages have families, so do computer languages. FORTRAN (the Formula Translator) and BASIC (the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) are algorithmic languages that enabled rapid coding of scientific formulae. Cobol (Common Business Oriented Language) was procedural. Then we got into Object-Oriented beginning with Pascal, which was invented by Niklaus Wirth who once said, "My name is Wirth. I pronounce it Virt. It means Worth. You can call me by name or call me by value.") Kerningham and Richie wrote C from which derived C+ and C++. C+ led to the joke about the programmer who couldn't get a job and rewrote his resume and the interview went well until the headhunter said, "What's this under Computer Languages where it says 'Add 1 to Cobol'?"

Somewhere here I have my FORTUNE COOKIE program in 22 bytes of hex.

(Ted and I share a few background attributes, but more on that later. To answer the question, my second language is German. In the seventh grade I took a university summer school class and entered high school with German 3 and as a freshman in college started as a junior. Much later, I had two classes in Japanese for Business and worked for two years at Kawasaki. I also had classes in Arabic and Italian. I taught myself enough Tibetan to translate the coinage on my own. Languages come easily to me. Final point: working as a security guard I had to open and close for a "Persian Poetry Club." I greeted and cleared them in Farsi. One guy asked if I was Turkish. No, why? "You speak with a Turkish acccent.")

Edited February 27, 2011 by Michael E. Marotta

[Reidy]

À repondre a la question originelle: je parle francais assez bien. En ailleurs, je peux lire la grecque (ancienne) avec l'assitance d'une traduction, commentaire, guide de grammaire, etc. J'ai étudié et oublié le latin.

[caroljane]

À repondre a la question originelle: je parle francais assez bien. En ailleurs, je peux lire la grecque (ancienne) avec l'assitance d'une traduction, commentaire, guide de grammaire, etc. J'ai étudié et oublié le latin.

Where did you get the accents? I bought my computer right here in Canada and it doesn't even have the slightest aigu let alone a circonflexe. I am going to complain to the Human Rights Commission about it.

[Reidy]

Open Word, open Help and search on "international characters". Most of the characters are there to be pasted into a mailnote. Otherwise, use the keyboard shortcuts described there to type them into Word, then paste them into a mailnote.