Update

human_language.md

@@ -12,11 +12,13 @@ Languages are sadly often what easily divides people into groups and so fuels [f
 
 ## The Grand Curse Of Human Language
 
-{ The following is a thought dump made without much research, please inform me if you're a linguist or something and have something enlightening to say, thank you <3 ~drummyfish }
+{ The following is a thought dump made without much research, please inform me if you're a linguist or philosopher or something and have something enlightening to say, thank you <3 ~drummyfish }
 
 On one hand human languages are cool when viewed from cultural or [artistic](art.md) perspective, they allow us to write poetry, describe feelings and nature around us -- in this way they can be considered [beautiful](beauty.md). However from the perspective of others, e.g. programmers or historians, **human languages are a [nightmare](nightmare.md)**. There is unfortunately an **enormous, inherent curse connected to any human language**, both natural or constructed, that comes from its inevitably [fuzzy](fuzzy.md) nature stemming from fuzziness or real life concepts, it's the problem of **defining [semantics](semantics.md)** of words and constructs (no, Lojban doesn't solve this). [Syntax](syntax.md) (i.e. the rules that say which sentences are valid and which are not) doesn't pose such a problem, we can quite easily define what's grammatically correct or not (it's not as hard to write a program that checks gramatical correctness), it is semantics (i.e. meanings) that is extremely hard to grasp -- even in rigorous languages (such as mathematical notation or programming languages) semantics is a bit harder to define (quite often still relying on bits of human language), but while in a programming language we are essentially able to define quite EXACTLY what each construct means (e.g. `a + b` returns the sum of values *a* and *b*), in a natural language we are basically never able to do that, we can only ever form fuzzy connections between other fuzzy concepts and we can never have anything fixed.
 
-Due to this fuzziness human languages inevitably change over time no matter how hard we try to counter this, any text written a few thousand years ago is nowadays very hard to understand -- not because the old languages aren't spoken anymore, but because the original meanings of specific words, phrases and constructs are distorted by time; when learning an old language we learn what each word meant by reading its translation to some modern word, but the modern word is always more or less different. Even if it's a very simple word such as "fish", our modern word for fish means a slightly different thing than let's say ancient Roman's word for fish because it had slightly different connotations such as potential references to other things: fish for example used to be the symbol of Christianity, nowadays people don't even commonly make this connection. Fishermen were a despised class of workers, to some fish may have signified food and abundance, to others something that "smells bad", to others something or someone who's "slippery". Some words may have referred to some contemporary "[meme](meme.md)" that's been long forgotten and if some text makes the reference, we won't understand it. The word "book" for example meant something a bit different 2000 years ago than it means now: back then a book might have been just a relatively short scroll, it was expensive and people didn't read books the same way as we do today, they commonly just read them out loud to others, so "reading a book" and the word "book" itself doesn't conjure the same picture in our heads as it did back then. Or another example showing the difference between languages existing at the same time is this: while the Spanish word "perro" translates to English as "dog", the meanings aren't the same; some English speakers use the word as a synonym for "friend" but in Spanish the word can be used as an insult so shouting "perro" and "dog" in the street may lead to different (possibly completely opposite) images popping up in the heads of those who hear it. How do you describe a word precisely if you can only describe it with other imprecise words that are changing constantly? No, not even pictures will help -- if you attach the picture of a cat to the word "cat", it's still not clear what it means -- does it stand for the picture of the cat or for the cat that's in the picture, does it stand ONLY for the one cat that's in the picture or all other animals that are similar to the one in the picture? How similar? Is lion a cat? Is a toy cat or cartoon cat a cat? Or does the picture signify that anything with a fur is a cat? If it looks like cat but walks on two legs and speaks, is it still a cat? Now imagine describing a more abstract term such as *thought*, *number* or *existence*. There is no solid ground, even such essential words as "to want" or "to be" have different meanings between languages ("to be" can stand for "to exist", "to be in a place", "to temporarily have some property", "to permanently have some property" etc.). Even dictionaries admit defeat and are happy with having circular definitions because there aren't any foundations to build upon, circular definitions are inevitable, dictionaries just help you connect fuzzy concepts together. All of this extends to tenses, moods, cases and everything else. This can be very well seen e.g. with people interpreting old texts such as the Bible, for example some say [Jesus](jesus.md) claimed to be the son of God while others reject it, saying that even if he stated the sentence, it actually wasn't meant literally as it was a commonly used phrase that meant something else -- these people will argue about everything and they can comfortably interpret the same text in completely opposite ways. The point is that we just can't know.
+Due to this fuzziness human languages inevitably change over time no matter how hard we try to counter this, any text written a few thousand years ago is nowadays very hard to understand -- not because the old languages aren't spoken anymore, but because the original meanings of specific words, phrases and constructs are distorted by time; when learning an old language we learn what each word meant by reading its translation to some modern word, but the modern word is always more or less different. Even if it's a very simple word such as "fish", our modern word for fish means a slightly different thing than let's say ancient Roman's word for fish because it had slightly different connotations such as potential references to other things: fish for example used to be the symbol of Christianity, nowadays people don't even commonly make this connection. Fishermen were a despised class of workers, to some fish may have signified food and abundance, to others something that "smells bad", to others something or someone who's "slippery". Some words may have referred to some contemporary "[meme](meme.md)" that's been long forgotten and if some text makes the reference, we won't understand it. The word "book" for example meant something a bit different 2000 years ago than it means now: back then a book might have been just a relatively short scroll, it was expensive and people didn't read books the same way as we do today, they commonly just read them out loud to others, so "reading a book" and the word "book" itself doesn't conjure the same picture in our heads as it did back then. Or another example showing the difference between languages existing at the same time is this: while the Spanish word "perro" translates to English as "dog", the meanings aren't the same; some English speakers use the word as a synonym for "friend" but in Spanish the word can be used as an insult so shouting "perro" and "dog" in the street may lead to different (possibly completely opposite) images popping up in the heads of those who hear it. Westerners who spend a lot of time in eastern countries will confirm that it is absolutely the case that many eastern spiritual terms and texts are untranslatable to English, or translatable only very, very imprecisely: there are words for concepts that western culture simply lacks and even words that have more or less direct translation may carry different connotations, such as the word "void" which in the east has often a positive connotation, unlike in the west. When you study philosophy, you'll be told you have to read philosophers in their original language in order to really understand them. Imagine you speak to an isolated bushmen tribe somewhere in Africa and you have to translate the word "vaporwave" or "doomer meme" when they don't have a word for Internet, computer or electricity, they don't know what depression, multimedia or technological addiction is and can't even comprehend the concept of a social network because they have hard time imagining there could exist many more people in the world, being unable to count beyond 10, thinking the world probably ends beyond the horizon -- you may perhaps say "vaporwave" is "funny music" and "doomer meme" is a "sad idea", but you know it's actually a very poor translation. It's not because their language was be poorer than yours (in fact many of such languages have been found to be extremely hard to learn), it will just have evolved to express other things, ones you can't understand, complex things about nature, jungle, hunting, hundreds of different plants, what's edible and what's poisonous (in which ways, to whom, with what certainty, in which quantities, under which circumstances, ...), subtle distinctions of many different species of animals, rocks, water, trees, fire, weather and so on. Even within our own culture we struggle to communicate, depressed people have hard time explaining what depression really is to people who never experienced true depression, we use words like "sadness", "emptiness", "exhaustion", but once again, only as rough approximations to the true, indescribable feeling.
+
+How do you describe a word precisely if you can only describe it with other imprecise words that are changing constantly? No, not even pictures will help -- if you attach the picture of a cat to the word "cat", it's still not clear what it means -- does it stand for the picture of the cat or for the cat that's in the picture, does it stand ONLY for the one cat that's in the picture or all other animals that are similar to the one in the picture? How similar? Is lion a cat? Is a toy cat or cartoon cat a cat? Or does the picture signify that anything with a fur is a cat? If it looks like cat but walks on two legs and speaks, is it still a cat? Now imagine describing a more abstract term such as *thought*, *number* or *existence*. There is no solid ground, even such essential words as "to want" or "to be" have different meanings between languages ("to be" can stand for "to exist", "to be in a place", "to temporarily have some property", "to permanently have some property" etc.). Even dictionaries admit defeat and are happy with having circular definitions because there aren't any foundations to build upon, circular definitions are inevitable, dictionaries just help you connect fuzzy concepts together. All of this extends to tenses, moods, cases and everything else. This can be very well seen e.g. with people interpreting old texts such as the Bible, for example some say [Jesus](jesus.md) claimed to be the son of God while others reject it, saying that even if he stated the sentence, it actually wasn't meant literally as it was a commonly used phrase that meant something else -- these people will argue about everything and they can comfortably interpret the same text in completely opposite ways. The point is that we just can't know.
 
 { Just one more of other countless examples I recently encountered: it used to be generally believed that [Jesus](jesus.md) was crucified so that he was nailed on the cross through his palms, however it was shown this wouldn't work and also other evidence showed people were nailed more in the arms, in a way that would hold the weight of the body but wouldn't hit the artery. The confusion came from translation -- the Greek word for "hand" also includes part of an arm, i.e. the word for hand in Greek is different from the word hand in some other languages. ~drummyfish }