The Occupy Movement

[Phytotron]

But that's not what you said. You didn't say that Spengler's philosophy of the rise and fall, etc., can describe the phenomenon of Occupy. You explicitly said that the motives of Occupy echo Spengler. Those are two completely different things. Whether the phenomenon of Occupy can be described or explained by Spengler's philosophy (I would still argue not), the motives certainly cannot.


EDIT: Bang! Been on a roll with page breaks the last few days, ha!

[Word]

OK, that was what I meant. Sorry that it's badly worded :s

[Phytotron]

I was recently reading a little bit about analytic languages (like English) versus fusional languages (like German), specifically in relation to the intuitive understanding of figures of speech such as garden path sentences and paraprosdokians. That they're not easily understandable by fusional languages, and may lead to misunderstanding or go entirely unrecognized.

Have you encountered this as you learn English and consume American culture (be it literature, journalism, or pop like movies and music)? I would be curious to read a comment by Z-Man as well, since his English is so good.

[Word]

the first one: I tend to read such sentences twice or more.

I think the problem I have more frequently is that many English nouns can be verbs as well, but it somehow is solved automatically when the sentence structure is similar to some typical syntax figure I know from Latin, and the more texts I read the more I get used to this subject/verb/object system. When I write in German I need far more time to make it sound not too dumb and not too sophisticated, to modulate - in English I tend to use the vocabulary I'm capable of and sometimes look things up when I don't know the right word. I think one reason for that is that we have 4 different cases (while English only knows 'of' and the s-genitive). Latin has 6.

example:

"because he’s (B) always..(insert verb)..although the people (A) around him (B) and his friend (C) ..(insert verb).. are still at each other’s throat"

In German you can translate this sentence word by word and everyone knows that the people (A) "are still at each other's throat" and the two persons they surround are friends (B and C).
In English however, I'm not really sure whether C doesn't belong to A. This example looks perhaps a bit artificial and badly worded but I've come across many sentences of that kind. Cases would make it a lot easier for me, I can only rule out that B and C can't stand one another. Only context helps here. German has such sentences as well but they're far more complicated and rare, because they aren't very elegant and we can easily avoid them.

concerning the second one:
it's not as common in our language but I think Loriot (who died last year) has played with this quite often because it can be quite irritating at the first glance.
"The spelling reform was great for everyone - who can neither read nor write".
"I'd like two tickets for Mozart's Zauberflöte, first or second row, middle, four seats . Three adults and a giant schnauzer."
"Regarding the technology and production there's no real difference between our armoured personnel carrier MS0872 and a marzipan potato. After all that's just a matter of taste."
"Did you know....that the Alps look terrible if you imagine them without the mountains?"
"Did you know....that the whale could be the smallest animal in the world if he wasn't so big?"
"Did you know....that all golden hamsters of Germany strung together would reach from Earth to Moon, if they weren't too stupid?"





I can't think of a good example for that, but another thing I sometimes find problematic is that many english verbs are nouns at the same time, e.g. "win", "care" (especially when they follow a real verb in a long sentence), or our different use of prepositions. and we have lots of words for incredibly simple things whereas the English language has only two or three simple, "general" ones that can mean some completely different things, for example: failure.

up/down:
auf, hinauf, herauf, runter, hinunter, herunter, herab, ab, hinab herab

upwards/downwards
aufwärts/abwärts

in/into
in, entgegen

against
entgegen

for
für

forward
vorwärts
vor

backward
rückwärts, nach hinten

back
zurück

on
an, auf

by
bei, bis, von ( = "of" ), durch

through
durch

since/for
seit

until
bis

to
um zu, zu, nach

and the most confusing one:
at
an, zu, bei, in, um, auf

[Word]

At the moment I'm listening to this guy.


(wrong thread perhaps, but it's somehow related)

[Phytotron]

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

[Z-Man]

specifically in relation to the intuitive understanding of figures of speech such as garden path sentences and paraprosdokians.

The 'Time flies' thing is one of my favourite plays of words; other than that, no, I don't think I encountered garden path sentences a lot. Yeah, they're easier to construct in English than in German for the reason you mention, I don't think I ever encountered one in German. The other thing a lot, of course, they're all over the place in humour; but they're mostly language independent, I'd say.

Odd, was my spell checker always on BE?

[Phytotron]

Sorry, by 'encountered' I meant encountered difficulty in understanding it or getting a joke. That is, do you think there are times you've misunderstood or completely missed not only humor but even regular turns of phrase due to the differences between analytic and fusional organization?

But specifically in humor, for example, how would/do the acts of Steven Wright or Emo Phillips go over with Germans? And I suppose that would apply to both senses: Listening to it in English (trying to understand it on its own terms), as well as having it translated to German (can that even be done in a sensible way?).

[þsy]

So the London camp is currently appealing the eviction, but it looks like they'll most likely be forced to move

What is the future for the movement? In Sheffield, the camp seems to be thriving despite the horrible weather. We're also the first camp in the UK to be formally recognised and supported by the local council which is pretty cool

The camp itself seems to function more as a community square for workshops, music, poetry, discussions etc. On a sunny day, it's a really nice place to be. Billy Bragg came and played a few songs before Christmas which was great!

Another trend of thought: is this truly a 'global' movement? This short piece written by one of my lecturers raises some interesting points - http://societyandspace.com/2011/12/09/p ... py-africa/

[Z-Man]

But specifically in humor, for example, how would/do the acts of Steven Wright or Emo Phillips go over with Germans? And I suppose that would apply to both senses: Listening to it in English (trying to understand it on its own terms), as well as having it translated to German (can that even be done in a sensible way?).

Biggest problem for me is hearing what they're saying. That's not exclusive to humor, of course; I also tend to activate English subtitles on English movies just for the case something is too mumbled to understand (which sometimes is the point, of course, see 'Snatch' where the subtitles sometimes just give up on Brad Pitt). Funny, I listen to some English podcast (both American and British) and never have trouble there.

The second biggest obstacle when hearing English humor in English is culture, not the language; when it's spoken or written, I don't think I have any special difficulties getting language specific jokes. But for example one of the first jokes by Wright I came across right now was based on parking being prohibited in front of a fire hydrant; we don't have those any more here (they're all buried in the ground).

Translated humor is a whole different beast. Stand up comedy in particular is practically untranslatable because... well, how are you going to present the translation? Subtitles? That would destroy the timing. Dubbing? Horrible enough with movies, unthinkable if the act is really just one guy talking. Having a different actor repeat the performance? That was actually tried with a couple of Sitcoms back in the late eighties and failed miserably. It's an approach that sometimes works with sketch comedy, though, because there material that just doesn't work can simply be thrown out and replaced with something different. But again, I don't think the language difference itself is to blame, it's the mere fact that you notice one way or another you're getting served a derivative work.

TV comedy series and movies of various flavors are translated relatively successfully if enough effort is make, though. Jokes that just don't work are mostly just left out and you hardly notice a thing; just occasionally there are thinks that only make sense the way they are if they're jokes, and then you notice something is off. Horrible, horrible example I encountered at the supermarket: a movie called "Santa Pfotes" here. Apparently about a dog saving Christmas. "Pfote" is German for "paw". "Pfotes" doesn't mean anything at all. *cringe*

[sinewav]

I'm going to drop this here since I don't want to make a new thread, and it's related to language. MIT researchers have found a preference for ambiguity in language and our tendency to reuse words by creating different meanings for them, thus making context more important (somewhat related to humor, right?). This creates problems for computer scientists modeling natural language processing. It seems our preference for attaching new meaning to words is based on efficiency, where reusing short syllable words is desired over inventing new ones since our brains already have excellent decoding structures. Does this finding validate the younger generation's out of control manipulation of language into heavily abbreviated, multi-meaning expressions? Probably not, but I have noticed that Chinese language does this intentionally, where the phonetic variance is quite small and meaning is almost entirely contextual. You see it in modern published works when they use Arabic numbers instead of Chinese since the Arabic are easier to write (though this is a case of introducing simplicity rather than reusing existing expressions).

[Phytotron]

As it happens I watched two subtitled films last night. One was Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria." The differences in inflection really stand out with Italian, between how something is spoken in the film and how I read it (that is, hear myself saying it in my head). Dunno what, if any, meanings were lost in translation.

Horrible, horrible example I encountered at the supermarket: a movie called "Santa Pfotes" here. Apparently about a dog saving Christmas. "Pfote" is German for "paw". "Pfotes" doesn't mean anything at all. *cringe*

Heh, the other I watched was "Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages," which is a silent film, but retains the original intertitles. I'm not entirely clear whether they're in Swedish or Danish, I think the former.

A couple things I noticed: The word for "witch" ({Br/Am}E) is apparently "troll?" One wonders about conceptual implications there with the modern internetz usage of "troll."

Then, the 'The End' card is presented: "Slut." As one little note I found on the web put it: "I had seen about two dozen Swedish films before I saw one where the American distributor left in the original Swedish "end" title, and then I understood why an American distributor would remove the original title. ... (A beautiful close-up of Ingrid Bergman in one of her 1930s Swedish productions gingerly fades out in luminous glory, then those four letters appear in bold lettering upon a plain background. It almost seems like a statement....)" And if you're Swedish, the first time you hear someone described as a slut, do you think they're being called "the end?"

EDIT: OK, what's wrong with my URL?

Does this finding validate the younger generation's out of control manipulation of language into heavily abbreviated, multi-meaning expressions? Probably not....

They've done plenty of it in web and gaming culture, though, including this game: newer generations reusing and redefining terms that already had a different meaning in the game. Doubleplus ungood.

[sinewav]

......aaaaaaand related to reuse/overuse:

[Phytotron]

LOL Epic FAIL pwned!!!

Lake Superior State University 2012 List of Banished Words
- note the previous lists in the left-hand column; the list hasn't been anything near as successful as one might hope

Not to mention Junk English and Evasion-English.

[Mecca]

High quality link.

Thank you for posting that. It was a good read.

Does this finding validate the younger generation's out of control manipulation of language into heavily abbreviated, multi-meaning expressions? Probably not....

Heavily abbreviated - Fair enough...
Multi-meaning - ??? Can you give some examples?

They've done plenty of it in web and gaming culture, though, including this game: newer generations reusing and redefining terms that already had a different meaning in the game. Doubleplus ungood.

In this game, which terms have people redefined?