Profile for Najosz Thjsza Kjras
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Displayed name | Najosz Thjsza Kjras |
| Member number | 6388 |
| Title | Lifecrafter |
| Postcount | 794 |
| Homepage | |
| Registered | Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
Recent posts
Pages
| Author | Recent posts |
|---|---|
| Hypothetical Greek Weapons of Mass Destruction Suck in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Thursday, March 1 2007 18:34
Profile
Part of what made the Iraq War so dishonest is that the weapons inspectors were working in Iraq until we decided they weren't moving fast enough. You've never heard so many distasteful jokes at a weapons inspector's expense as at Hans Blix's. Iraq bullied the inspectors around when it had an active program in 1991, but it had nothing to hide in 2002 and 2003. re. Chilean history: I'm not saying that the investment was a bad thing, just that it's kind of unfair to credit Pinochet with it. And if anything, the US keeping a tight rein on weapons was a good thing for Chile's economy - it prevented Pinochet from trying to create a lopsided military like a lot of other dictators do. The junta in Argentina killed a lot more people, true, but Argentina has a lot more people. Part of the problem is that Argentina's caudillismo doesn't have a single visible face like Pinochet. There's no one monster to blame for all that went wrong there. Even though there isn't ever just one monster in any situation, there wasn't even a single face to put on the disappearings under the Argentine junta. Argentina is a really nasty country historically. They all but tacitly backed the Axis in WW2 and still have a political party devoted to Peron, who was a jackass. But that's even farther off-topic. :P re. Garrison: You're creating a false dichotomy. Who is the US deterring attack from with its huge stockpile? It has enough weapons to destroy humanity several times over and maintaining each of them costs enough to put up a school in a third world country. Even if the stockpile weren't so huge, again: who's it deterring? Nuking the US would almost guarantee disasater for the nuker: we're the economic center of the Earth and hurting us would destroy a major market for manufactured goods and services, along with a lot of financial resources. Same goes for any kind of invasion. Based on our current situation, in fact, the US could pretty safely get by without a military at all - let alone such a gigantic one with such bloated funding. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical Greek Weapons of Mass Destruction Suck in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Thursday, March 1 2007 15:06
Profile
quote:Trujillo wasn't enough for you? :P re. Chile: It's always refreshing to have a good, broad sampling of reactionaries. While Allende didn't have the support of the majority as occurs in executive democracies, the way democracy works in Chile (more parliamentarian) he won that sucker. And Pinochet's programs produced a second US in the south: disproportionately prosperous, but with an exceptional (and an exceptionable) amount of poverty for a first-world country. Part of that is also that once Pinochet got a free hand to marketize the Chilean economy, American finance, which loves a good market dictator, POURED MONEY INTO CHILE LIKE NOBODY'S BUSINESS. Chile immediately became a good investment because its free market policies would produce growth, and then the investments produced growth, which proved the free market policies were good so they continued. Part of why Chile has an unusual amount of wealth (it's at the wrong end of the 'sweet spot' - it's neither got 8 families owning 99% of the land nor has anything like a fair distribution of wealth) is because American hyper-capitalists (who were just getting big in the Pinochet era - look up Milton Friedman and Pinochet) will never pass up a good chance to make the free market look good and state ownership look bad. Whenever 'laboratory conditions' come up, they'll rig 'em like a big pharmaceutical company with a FDA trial. Chile was a splendid example of that kind of rigging. To be fair, that rigging worked OK for the people of Chile - the ones who lived through Pinochet's bloody rule, anyhow. quote:Infernal is technically right, which is as right as she can get. To steer this into on-topic territory (shock!), two things: a) Ethanol is, as we've gone over before, both a non-starter and basically an excuse to subsidize American corn. Nuclear power is a good alternative for it, but proliferation of nuclear plants threatens to increase the abilities of small, diplomatically independent states to manufacture nuclear weapons. (Iran swears up and down its nuclear program is mostly the development of nuclear plants, and I'm at least somewhat inclined to believe them - it's in the best interests of a Middle Eastern state to consume as little gas as possible.) Is the tradeoff worth it? b) This is specifically directed at Infernal, and for once I'm going to try and have a conversation with you without it turning into ideology-based abuse: what good was the policy of deliberate ambiguity really doing? That Israel had nuclear weapons was probably the biggest open secret in international diplomacy, and it seems to me that being intentionally vague on whether or not you have nuclear weapons gives you the worst of both world: opprobrium from anti-nuclear folks and your enemies for being atomic hawks, and lack of the bargaining power possessed by nuclear states and a complete inability to resort to nuclear blackmail. What benefit does deliberate ambiguity (well, did deliberate ambiguity) have? Or, at the very least, what benefit did its proponents claim it had? Not being an Israeli, I know next to nothing about the specifics of the policy and the arguments for and against it; the rest of the world mostly thinks the policy is/was either an example of Israeli silliness or a legal fiction. [ Thursday, March 01, 2007 15:30: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Wednesday, February 28 2007 12:16
Profile
quote:So Jesus does rot your brain. :P Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| [Insert Dumb Joke Here] in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Wednesday, February 28 2007 02:11
Profile
quote:I don't know exactly what to make of this. A duck walks into a bar. The bartender looks at him strangely for a moment, but he's seen weirder, so he waits for the duck to order something. A minute passes, then three. "What can I get for you?", says the barman impatiently. The duck thinks on it, and thinks - ducks are not known for coming to quick or decisive solutions, but let us imagine for a moment at the very least they are known for more than quacking and owning feathers. "Well, I do have one thing in mind," the duck says, and because this is a strange world indeed nobody considers all of this miraculous, a talking duck in a bar and all that. "Yes?" "Do you have any grapes?" The bartender, not realizing he is part of a joke any more than you would were you in his shoes, takes the duck at face value. "No, I'm afraid not." (If you think that is the punchline, you are thinking of the wrong joke.) The duck curses horribly - ducks are not known for their aptitude at swearing - and leaves. After a brisk trade in liquor and spirits, the bartender closes shop for the night, arriving bright and early the next morning to tend bar. Around the same time of day, the same duck comes in. While normally bartenders understand who is a flake and who is not, this is a mediocre bartender and he immediately extends the customary hospitality to this lame duck. "Pleasure seeing you again. What can I get you?" The duck surprises the bartender by, once again, asking "Do you have any grapes?" The bartender doesn't exactly know what to make of this. Wine he has - is the duck asking for that? But serving someone something he didn't ask for is rude, so he simply responds: "No, still don't have any grapes. Anything else I can -" but by now, the duck has already started with his pathetic swearing and the bartender feigns respect as the sad bird leaves the bar again. The next day the bartender comes in late, dreading all day the prospect of running into this damn animal again, because he feels like less of a bartender all of a sudden because he has no grapes - but he has no reason to have grapes, and for all he knows tomorrow it could be some other lesser animal with an exorbitant demand, like a hippopotamus asking for pizza or Rush Limbaugh asking for painkillers. It is a crisis of faith for this so-so bartender. In walks that duck in at the same time of day as usual, and almost immediately the bartender takes it out on him. The duck sidles with more confidence than ever before up to the bar and the bartender, instead of extending him courtesy, waits only for the duck to introduce himself before saying "Listen, bird, this is the third time you've come in here and if you ask me for grapes again, so help me God, I will nail your damn bill to the wall. Do you understand me?" The duck sheepishly complies and quickly scoots out of the bar. The middling bartender realizes all-too-late that he has made an idiotic spectacle of himself with his pre-emptive threatening of a waterfowl, and even then the realization that his future as a bartender has just become short and miserable has settled in. The next day the duck is only his third patron even though he enters halfway through the day, and by the time he arrives the bartender is drowning his own sorrows in terror of the sudden loss of business and the duck sits down almost unnoticed, in spite of being very nearly alone. "I think I know what I want today," says the duck. "Oh yeah?" "Yeah. I don't know if you have it, though." The bartender's teeth grind against each other a little in anticipation. "What might it be?" "Do you have a hammer?" The bartender is momentarily taken aback. "Hold on - let me check." He checks the bar as thoroughly as his drunken stupor allows him to. "No, I don't have a hammer." "Then I'll have some grapes." The bartender, at last remembering his threat from the previous afternoon, slowly unzips his fly. [ Wednesday, February 28, 2007 02:13: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Bots? in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Wednesday, February 28 2007 00:28
Profile
quote:  Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 23:44
Profile
Or perhaps the next time you completely and absolutely fail to comprehend anything anyone is talking about in a topic you could avoid it and spare your betters the trouble of dealing with your squalor. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| This Topic Will Enlarge Your Genitals in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 23:35
Profile
quote:Some of us prefer to deal with double-posted topics gracefully, and others of us prefer the intimate company of tortoises. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Galapagos's most wanted. [ Tuesday, February 27, 2007 23:36: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 23:32
Profile
quote:No amount of hand-waving will obscure the two facts at issue here: 1) you thought George Lucas, whose anti-Bush pabulum in Episode III was so facile and transparent as to be embarassing, was a nazi; and 2) you lack the brains God gives the average swine. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical Greek Weapons of Mass Destruction Suck in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 23:18
Profile
Nuclear proliferation is an extremely tricky subject. Countries such as Iran view the oligarchic association of nuclear-armed countries as hypocritical; the United States, the world's single largest nuclear power, has made a military and diplomatic doctrine of preempting nuclear programs of small rivals. Even as peculiar an example as Japan has talked seriously about starting a nuclear weapons program - in response to Kim Jong-Il's nuclear tests and with prodding from the Japanese neoconservatives, who take a staunchly revisionist stance on Japanese military history and grunt and posture towards Korea as much as the pre-2003 American version grunted and postured towards Iraq. Japan is a paranuclear state, which means that, given the state of nuclear power in the country, the Japanese could build a nuclear weapon within half a year without making a great deal of fuss over it. Shortly after Afghanistan, the US withdrew to extreme controversy and outright loathing in Russia from the anti-ballistic-missile treaty. 'Big' nuclear powers include the US, Russia, China, the UK, and France. Three smaller countries are known to have had nuclear weapons by the end of the Cold War: Israel, India, and South Africa. (South Africa no longer does.) Since the Cold War, two countries have developed nuclear weapons: North Korea and Pakistan. Two countries are widely believed to be in the process of developing nuclear weapons: Saudi Arabia and Iran. Even though the Cold War is over, nuclear weapons are back in a big way; there's no pretending proliferation isn't gonna happen. Is it a bad thing or a good thing? If it's a bad thing, what can be done about it? If it's a good thing, can it work better than the apparent chaotic disorder it works in now? Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| This Topic Will Enlarge Your Genitals in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 23:17
Profile
No it won't. Kill it before it spreads! [ Tuesday, February 27, 2007 23:20: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 22:46
Profile
quote:A Nixon-era Democrat, actually. As per usual, your failure to do even the most rudimentary of homework makes you look like even more of a buffoon than usual. Keep up the good work!  Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 21:45
Profile
quote:Fiction is fiction, but the way it is framed isn't fictional. (You can't just make up anything you like and say 'Ha! Fiction!', otherwise it's bad fiction.) Fiction requires internal consistency, and internal consistency relies on one's take on the real world. In LotR, old weapons and powers and individuals are inscrutable and powerful - an ancient elite above the grimy, grubby lesser world. Industry debases the immortal and sublime craftsmanship known to the ancients; elves are possessed of an untouchable air of supremacy and even the evil powers are generally immortal and beyond the meager ken of the savage hobbits - so far beyond, in fact, that they don't even relate to the Ring - the intercession of some supreme dark power - in the same way. Even the conlangs were manufactured with heavy influence from Anglo-Saxon - the 'original language' of England - and Finnish, which was considered a holdover from the Europe of old. No doubt he would have found using French or German or Italian or even Latin or Ancient Greek somewhat vulgar. I think it's taking it far too far to say that any of this is some kind of conscious analogy to the real world in Tolkien's lifetime. (Tolkien specifically disclaimed the idea of LotR as some kind of roman a clef.) But it was definitely and recognizably formed by a man who had a high regard for the traditional aristocracy of a country in dramatic social flux, and extreme disregard for novelty. Tolkien was a reactionary in the truest sense of the word: he viewed with summary distrust and contempt anything without roots in the ancient. Just because he's a reactionary doesn't make him any less than a magnificent novelist and mythologer. But he's still pretty profoundly and fundamentally against everything I hold dear, which makes inviting him into my head pretty harrowing for me. quote:Well, all right. I suppose you have me here. I still think it's a little silly to talk about reviving a dead language in a world where half of the human population doesn't have the standard of life necessary to get a telephone call in their lifetime, but eh. :P Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 16:40
Profile
quote:Zionist culture, which is to say the people that went to the trouble of reviving Hebrew, is pretty vile. While its current native speakers have by and large overcome that, the angle on revival was either intransigent, separatist religious fundamentalism or (joy of joys) yet even more 19th-century European racialism. Point me to one effort at linguistic revival that didn't (a) owe its existence to villains and (b) failed to further segregate a trod-upon minority from the world, and I'll concede. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Bots? in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 16:32
Profile
quote:Am I insane? Possibly.... :D :D :D I AM the Psychopathic Orcman after all...[/QB][/quote]Everyone hates a gimmick. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 16:29
Profile
quote:Disagree, and I think this is where we differ. At the very least, you can't dismoor that story entirely from its social context. I can't enjoy Lord of the Rings, or at least find if very difficult to, because Tolkien was a colonial English tory and his colonial English toryism shows up everywhere in what he does. You don't have to like the characters, but you have to like the author, in some sense, because you're inviting him or her into your head. And maybe you're not gonna have a problem with reinstituting slavery, because you've been raised with a corpus of literature holding it in repugnance. The problem would be for those who speak only Latin, and if we'd get off the ad hominem for a minute (you calling me an idiot, me inferring you're myopic to the point of villainy) We're not just talking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights existing only in translation; we're talking about everything more recent than Virgil being translations from something or other. However great the aesthetic appeal of the language might be to you, I find the idea of a living language which doesn't have a native corpus of philosophy on anything more advanced than the plutocratic republic to be somewhat disturbing. It's a decent enough excuse that it stopped being spoken at home a millennium and a half ago, but bring it back and excuses alone won't quite cut it. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 14:14
Profile
Kel, I think the biggest problem here is that you're churlishly clinging to a regressive aesthetic (linguistic revival is one of the more deeply reactionary ideas ever concieved) in spite of adherence to modern values. In other words, what you consider cool and what you consider right are working at cross-purposes. Unless, I don't know, you've become a Metterniechian conservative in the time between our last exchange of words on politics. I find that silly, but then again I find your efforts to directly calque Etruscan myths into SW games silly too. I think we're at an impasse. And to be entirely fair, this is partially my way of getting out of a fist-fight about Latin with a man educated in linguistics and endowed with a boner for Latin, which can by no account end well. I acknowledge your superiority in the field and submit the only reason I've been able to hang on to my admittedly tenacious position at all is that you are using your superior knowledge for perfidy. :P While I admit I do not know a damn thing about Latin, what I do know a damn thing about is that what you want to do is evil in a number of subtle and mostly invisible ways. Latin is, above all else, the language of a dead culture which sucked ass in enough ways to occupy a lifetime of intense study, and as a humanist I have to disagree with your linguist's enthusiasm for resurrecting it. :P [ Tuesday, February 27, 2007 14:15: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 03:41
Profile
quote:For those who didn't get as much US history in school and for whom Wikipedia is altogether too brief... could you elaborate? What were the grounds, and what did the scientists argue?[/QB][/QUOTE] The grounds for the abolitionists were generally 'God says so', or more cynically 'my interpretation of the word of God found in the Bible says so'. As for science? Anthropology was in its infancy before and during the American Civil War, and what little understanding whites had of non-whites was driven by a desire to catalogue and legitimize preconcieved non-white deficiencies. The observations of the science- and philosophy-minded towards Africa, which had a fraction of the West's technological, industrial, and political power at the time, concluded wholly unfairly that Africans were some kind of subhuman race, or at the very least too indolent and barbaric to be worthy of anything like equality. The argument was seriously made that slavery was a 'positive good' not just to slaveowners and society but for slaves - because if it weren't for slavery, the theory went, the slaves would be left to their own devices, wherein they would ruin themselves. Not good science, but at least based on observation of the world. (Better observation of the world would have taken into account contemporary Africa's disadvantage, but not everyone was gifted with the skill at observation that behooves great thinkers.) The abolitionist position (white abolitionists, anyway - black abolitionists are another story!) was mostly based on observation of the Bible. Big difference. That big difference can be readily understood by a quick look at those who used that same Bible to justify slavery (blackness being the curse of Ham, various Biblical laws and codes about slavery) and those who would later use the Bible to support segregation (by that time, unfortunately, the neanderthals were in the majority among those using the Bible to support any social cause). The moral of the story is that whether or not it's right now, rational observation will eventually prove right. While that's a slippery and Wikipedian approach to truth, it's unfortunately the best we can do a lot of the time. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| The Ancient Greeks in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 01:06
Profile
Experimentation is when magic became science. If Gallieo did not invent it, he certainly coined the process. He's a pretty good candidate to separate natural philosophy and science, although a lot of good sciences started out as natural philosophies while awaiting better understanding that would allow experiments (at the very least thought experiments, which are the ugly cousin of the real thing but will do in a pinch, such as when one just does not happen to have a planet-sized superaccelerator handy). A good example of that is the ever-revisited evolution, which evolved (if you'll pardon that) from general speculation about heritability of traits and general speculation about the nature of traits to specific, hard-evidence-based understanding of genetics, evolution, and what the two have to do with each other. There are a number of sciences that await that sort of development and synthesis. If something like Asimov's psychohistory would ever exist, it'd certainly be more comprehensive than neurology and more scientific than sociology, but there's more holes than cheese in the real-life equivalent of it right now. Once you get down to it, the real and horrible temptation is to mislabel accuracy as science and inaccuracy as superstition - because we are all fans of science and we like what it does. But it's perfectly possible to be entirely correct wholly by accident; look at the American abolitionists, who had ridiculously unreliable grounds on which to consider blacks worthy of human dignity and who came to blows with a great many scientific minds of their day. Science is an ability to balance on the razor's edge of confidence in what one sees as real and understanding the way one sees it might be utterly false. The foundation of science is not reproducability but falsifiability. I dunno how open Gallileo or any other early scientist was to the idea of falsifiability - I'd have to look that up, and it is too late at night for serious scholarship. But I'd wager it's a later development than experimentation (it would be a wonder beyond belief were the scientific method to spring into the world fully-formed), and the merits according that probably belong to some largely forgotten figure in the annals of the late Renaissance. It's one thing to put forward a theory, demonstrate that it is right, and say 'Ha! Told you so.' It's another thing, and this is where it becomes science, to put forward a theory, demonstrate why it is right, and then strut like a champion gamecock in your momentary triumph. The latter gives someone else the tools to address you on your own terms - even if you aren't around to defend yourself. Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Tuesday, February 27 2007 00:30
Profile
quote:Yeah, but try teaching women's studies in Latin. Or the liberal arts in general. quote:But 'basic language' itself has changed astoundingly since Latin flourished. My reference to women's studies exemplifies that: what a Latin-speaker would mean by 'domestic' and what we mean by 'domestic' are so wholly unrelated that it almost seems inappropriate to use the same word for both. I'll admit that specific example is a little dodgy, but in general the humanities have outstripped the ability of Latin to follow. (The last humanists to write primarily in Latin were Renaissance thinkers; the last humanists to write in Latin much at all were from the Enlightenment. We've come a long, long way since both.) My objection isn't to the ability to cover science, but in Latin's basic robustness as a language for the modern era. The Latin of a scientist in 2007 has kept up with the development of science since 1807, but neither scientist would be speaking in Latin were she to go home and be beaten by her husband - even though the use of language would be much different for the two scientists in question. There aren't facile pop-puns about history versus herstory in Latin. And try constructing 'head shop' in Latin - not just translating it, but constructing it so that it makes sense in Latin - you'd have to translate about the entire freaking counterculture, 30s through 60s, first. Pick up any book devoted to obscene, vulgar, or otherwise modernized slangy Latin and you'll pretty quickly see what the biggest problem with this entire deal is: Latin has been dead so long that even a fluent expert in the language can't sound like anything except a stuffy, giggly geek when swearing in it. You can science it all you like, but you can't profane in it ('Hercule!' doesn't count; cartoons and TV series to the contrary, he's been dead longer than Latin), you can't paint protest signs with it ('Who watches the watchmen?' is a fine enough saying, except it was originally in reference to the watchman getting it on with your woman) and you can't make love in it (there's copious documentation seemingly to the contrary, but all of that ignores the fact that nothing native speakers of Latin did would qualify as anything better than screwing now - the idea of equanamity and respect between the sexes would have been viewed as risible). quote:Easy there, Seabiscuit. I'm just saying that if Latin had any business surviving into the modern era there'd be people speaking it now. And every romance language out there has some weirdoes who claim that every other branch is just a perversion, but none of them are exactly right (well, except for the Romanians, but try getting the filthy western curs to agree to that). People have spoken it continuously since it disappeared, but that's a case of affection - the Church, scientists, and so on. Nobody has grown up speaking Latin for centuries precisely because nobody has thought of it as a particularly good idea to speak Latin exclusively at home in centuries. I'm not qualified to say why, because I'm no linguist, but it doesn't at all strike you that a language whose vulgar dialect has split a hundred different ways (or a thousand or more, depending on how generous you want to be with your definition of 'language' here) has reasons for doing that? The sole reason isn't the vulgar, vulgar barbarians; the speakers of Latin were complicit in the language disappearing from the face of the Earth. quote:[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin]Medieval Latin was characterized by an enlarged vocabulary, which freely borrowed from other sources. Prominent among those sources was Greek, from which much of the technical vocabulary of Christianity came. The various Germanic languages spoken by the Germanic tribes, who invaded western Europe, were also major sources of new words. Germanic leaders became the rulers of western Europe, and as such words from their languages were freely imported into the vocabulary of law. Other more ordinary words were replaced by coinages from Vulgar Latin or Germanic sources because the classical words had fallen into disuse. Latin was also spread to areas such as Ireland and Germany, where Romance languages were not spoken and which had never known Roman rule. Works written in these lands where Latin was a learned language with no relation to the local vernacular also influenced medieval Latin's vocabulary and syntax. Since abstract subjects like science and philosophy were communicated in Latin, the Latin vocabulary developed for them is the source of a great many technical words in modern languages. English words like "abstract", "subject", "communicate", "matter", "probable" and their cognates in other European languages generally have the meanings given to them in medieval Latin.[/url] Unless I wholly misunderstand the meaning of that, or it is inaccurate - possibilities to which I am open - you pine for a language that did not have a specific word for abstract. [ Tuesday, February 27, 2007 00:32: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Bots? in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Monday, February 26 2007 21:53
Profile
quote:Just because you only know of one cabal doesn't mean there isn't more than one. :P Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Bots? in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Monday, February 26 2007 20:13
Profile
quote:Who's appeasing anyone? I am part of the cabal. Putting smileys at the end is what I do. :P [ Monday, February 26, 2007 20:14: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Bots? in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Monday, February 26 2007 15:18
Profile
quote:Who's being uncivil? It's not like she has a deformity or something. She wasn't born a bloody-minded fascist, she chose to be one. :P The one thing I can say in Tully's defense is that at least he's a gimmick. :P [ Monday, February 26, 2007 15:24: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Hypothetical thoughts in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Monday, February 26 2007 14:38
Profile
Well, yes, but what of the poor souls who have to have Latin as a native language? Nothing has been written by native Latin speakers since the consensus was that slavery was A-OK, the Earth was the center of the universe, and women were inferior to men. The same argument can be made for Hebrew, but Latin isn't an emblem for an oppressed culture (although to be fair, the motives behind reestablishing Hebrew were even more suspect than yours for reestablishing Latin; the early Zionists were less concerned with alleviating oppression than they were with wonk-ass mysticism and racialist theories). There's a lot more you could do for the world as a linguist and grammarian than reviving a language time subsumed into other, more complete tongues. (If people wanted to speak Latin, they would have maintained it as it was, wouldn't they? Each romance language in existence in fact originated with a form of simple, fast-and-loose Latin, and evolved separate vocabulary and pronunciation in isolation from one another.) As for the superiority of later languages to Latin: Latin's glaring insufficiency for modern life was enough that, in the Middle Ages, the language needed to be seriously reformed to be at all relevant to the time. The biggest innovations between the Middle Ages and the fall of Rome were the moldboard plow and feudalism. What are you gonna do with Latin - classical Latin, no less! - to relate to a world replete with quarks and skyscrapers? [ Monday, February 26, 2007 14:39: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Bots? in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Monday, February 26 2007 14:28
Profile
quote:You're a flagrant authoritarian who believes in a thesis of history prominently featuring a narrative of betrayal and revenge and a thesis of political science obsessed with national self-interest - with 'national' subsumed into 'racial' more often than not. And whenever anything goes wrong with the world, you think one specific group is always to blame. Sick? I absolutely concur. But that's not my fault, now is it? Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |
| Favourite games music in General | |
|
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
|
written Monday, February 26 2007 12:37
Profile
quote:  quote: [ Monday, February 26, 2007 13:09: Message edited by: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ] Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00 |