Posts by Mark Harris
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Oddly, as Paul's is the first post on page 24, I see at the top of the screen
the Prime Minister gamely dancing with a couple of drag queens.
Have we come full circle?
-
You didn't get the general gist of what superpower Tutta Patata possesses?
Well, I kind of worked it out via the glowing rings, but I was trying to relate it back to the hairdressing salon and coming up blank.
Damn you, logical consistency! Damn you to hell!!
-
You just need to get up earlier, Stephen
-
Okay, this is in Italian, sorry, but you'll probably get the gist of it. It's the trailer for a film about a superhero called Tutta Patata (patata means potato but in Genoese it also means... ah, but why spoil it?)
Well that's 2:26 I won't get back...
Giovanni, I suspect that lost a little in non-translation; perhaps you'd be so kind as to add a few commas and apostrophes so we can all share?
-
:-D
-
Damnit, there is so much specious reasoning on display here it's difficult to know where to start.
That's the way he rolls, muthafucka. ;-)
-
I cna haz sheepburger?
-
-
It seems to me that Ben's argument(s) centre around an assumption of equivalence for all languages - i.e. that all languages are inherently the same thing, just with different vocabularies - and that the aim of language is communication of information, thus each have the same needs/requirements and are therefor interchangeable. Ben will no doubt deny that this is what he meant, and I'll admit that it's not explicitly stated, but I just read through 5 pages at once rather than as they are posted and that's the subtext I've come away with.
IMHO, language serves many functions in a culture and/or society. It is created by the culture just as much as it creates the culture. It entertains as much as it informs, it can serve to define the limits of a society (taboos etc) and it can be used as a barrier just as much as it can aid inclusion (see Gio's) post about immigration rules)
An example of this is Te Reo Māori. Before I started learning Te Reo, I had pretty much assumed that same thing - that it was a matter of learning new words and how they fit together. I'll also admit I had a hard time understanding how the Māori world fit together and why Treaty discussions were so fraught. I remember mentioning to a Māori workmate some news item about the Māori Queen. She snorted and said: "She's not my queen. Bloody Tainui queen!". This was my first inkling that some iwi just don't get along ;-)
<anecdote>I studied using the http://www.teataarangi.org.nz/}Te Ataarangi method which is total immersion, no english spoken, and uses the old Cuisenaire rods to teach numbers and colours (by guessing, mainly, just how children learn). It then moves on to matters of relationships (e.g. "your rods, my rods, our rods, oh wait there's more than two of us - we need a different word") and when I realised that Te Reo Māori revolves around the relationship of one speaker to another, or to possessions or environment, it all started to click and I saw that tikanga Māori also can be understood in terms of relationships, including the Māori relationship to history. </anecdote>
The language is an outgrowth and expression of the culture, and vice versa. That is why it is so vital for Te Reo Māori to be revived and used - not because people would be "heartbroken" at the loss of another language, but because tikanga Māori will not survive without it.
-
Sorry, the ambiguity has escaped from its box. Thet should read " Melber goes on to state... " - it looks like I was saying that Garcia was commenting on the Fair Use qualification, which is not the case.