EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

What about languages where people don't say "I" or conjugate verbs in first person?

we wouldn't know of these issues because they wouldn't be able to convey them to us

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

What about languages where people don't say "I" or conjugate verbs in first person?

from what i can tell they mostly shoot web and touch themselves at night. thats not an expert lingustic opinion tho.

Lessons posted:

libelous_slander posted:

Goethestein posted:
lol http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3549252&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post415427180

for those who haven't subscribed:

damn, thats some coolass unreadably small shit

topic: IRS Offices in Cincinnati, Washington D.C., and California target Political Groups



Last winter when I was being handcuffed and manhandled and thrown into a paddywagon with a face full of tear gas, my only solace was that at least some offices of the IRS were not giving an allied protest organization undue attention on their application for tax-exempt status.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Goethestein posted:

every single day there are more posts from ppl returning from afghanistan and i am Buttmad irl at their generalized dumbness

youre posts are ass and i hate you. fuck off

tpaine posted:

Lessons posted:

tpaine posted:

Lessons posted:
sup tpaine. i tried this icehouse 8% stuff but its basically like a steel reserve tallboy except more expensive and tastes shittier lol
yeah i had that, it's eh. i'm too scared to do the hard stuff like steel reserve or loko anymore

yeah i kinda feel that, i rarely actually get overly drunk on it but it's more like i just wanna stop drinking or go to bed early because it's too much to drink in a short period. i'd rather just have normal beer over several hours. 4loko is just nasty though, i hate the taste

there's a new pineapple four loko and i'm scared if i buy it

i would honestly just buy some cheap liquour and mix it with sprite, it would taste better

Lessons posted:

Goethestein posted:

every single day there are more posts from ppl returning from afghanistan and i am Buttmad irl at their generalized dumbness

youre posts are ass and i hate you. fuck off

ill take Ape Tit for 400 alex. lmao - norm mcdonald as burt reynolds as turd ferguson, saturday night live, "celebrity jeopardy"

roseweird posted:

Lessons posted:
Goethestein posted:

every single day there are more posts from ppl returning from afghanistan and i am Buttmad irl at their generalized dumbness


youre posts are ass and i hate you. fuck off


how do you feel about essays though

i didnt read yours. im sorry.

roseweird posted:

the word "I" always ultimately refers to a person who speaks. this is why when we are learning to read, we sound things out—only later do we develop sufficient skill at reading to write as easily as we speak. the earliest examples of writing in history are tablets in which a messenger is instructed to say, "my lord says: i am the king and you should give me gold" or whatever, and although the messenger and not the king says "i", the "i" is understood to refer to an earlier act of speech by the king. dictation is not so much in favor these days, so we tend to forget this step, but this doesn't change the fact that even an "i" so far removed from a speech act as to conjure only a vague notion of raw, bodiless, inhuman subjectivity (for example, a very old divine name, conveyed in a sacred text to a person prepared to regard it as sacred) is rooted in an act of human speech. in fiction, the word "I" doesn't refer to an actual speaking body, but then, the word "duck" doesn't refer to an actual living duck, either, so why does this confuse you?

You can see how ‘I’ fails to refer when your king says these sentences: “I proclaim that you should give me gold” and “You should give me gold.”

Is there a referent in the first sentence that isn’t in the second? To me, what would satisfy the first command would satisfy the second, all else being the same. The role of ‘I’ in the first is to draw attention to the speaker, maybe for performative reasons, but not to refer to something that isn’t in the second, and thereby potentially change how it is to be understood.

roseweird posted:

so, swirls, i am tired of going in, uh, circles here. i met your challenge to describe my conception of thought, and you are pettily trying to mock it while suggesting that you are relying on some common-sense definition of the word that does not need to be spoken. what do you think thought is? it seems, given your totalizing conception of language, that thought is actually a completely superfluous term, such that "let me share my thoughts with you" and "let me share my words with you" are totally interchangeable. is this so? then why talk about thought at all?

“Let me share my words with you” is a more poetic and uncommon way of saying “Let me share my thoughts with you”. An author’s ‘words’ might be the index of his newest book, and if we went to one of his talks and he just read the index, we would probably be surprised that he meant that sentence literally when we were prepared to be charitable.

roseweird posted:

why not say, there is no thought, only language?

I didn’t say that. I said language is a requirement for thought, not that it’s the same thing. Sentences –whether spoken, written, hand-signed, or thought– are not identical with a language. Rather, they are expressed in/with a language. It’s easy to see why this is when you consider that from a modest vocabulary of 50,000 and some rules about how to use it, basically what it is to know a language, no one will ever come close to exhausting the possible sentences they could think or say, and find themselves effortlessly coming up with sentences that no one has ever uttered before in all human history every single day. Yet learning 25 new words or the complete conjugation of a verb from an unfamiliar language in the same day can be a struggle. Initially grasping the rules of how to use a language is always more difficult than applying them.

Hope this clears things up for ya, and keep those cards and letters coming in!

Edited by swirlsofhistory (May 17, 2013 02:48:52)