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8:00 PM
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 No, that's not it. Imagine not having the verb "have", and simply not being able to say certain things.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That's probably a higher order impossibility. An Aleph-One in the bedroom.
 
+1 Meta
 
@Bane You would just use some other verb to double as "have".
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What if it had no pronouns except "me"? I think that you would change the language by doing that.
 
@Bane pronouns are not required in a language.
 
8:03 PM
What if it had no tenses except present?
 
@Bane Like Chinese?
 
For example, what if they could only reconstruct several cases and only the present tense, and declared that to be PIE?
 
@Mr. Shiny yes but at the end of this process you have at least a word that you cannot explain with other words.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 If Chinese is anything like Japanese, then you could rely on context. But then that wouldn't be a problem...
 
There is no language that is self consistent
 
8:05 PM
@Bane So, what if they only know part of the language and not the whole language? Then you cannot express certain ideas the way they would have been expressed at the time.
@Bane Well, for example, in Chinese you can use several words to express futurity or pastness but there aren't tenses per se.
@Carlo_R. You can always explain words with other words.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, that's what I meant by "Turing-complete". In the current state of PIE, if anyone knows it, are there concepts your simply cannot express, that you, for example, can express in English?
 
@Bane So what you mean by "turing complete" is "completely reconstructed"? Because as I said before, there are lots of languages that make certain kinds of ideas hard to express and others easier.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Is it possible that some ideas/concepts simply cannot be completely, correctly and consistently expressed in a language?
 
By the way @Bane, I'm pretty sure your question is a duplicate of this one:
11
Q: "Which" vs. "what" — what's the difference and when should you use one or the other?

Korneel BoumanMost of the time one or the other feels better, but every so often, "which" vs. "what" trips me up. So, what's the exact difference and when should you use one or the other?

 
Hm, yes, that's true. I simply forgot to check, sorry.
 
8:10 PM
@Bane I don't know. In a living language, I'd say no. When a new idea comes up that is difficult to describe, new words are coined for it. Or old words are given new meanings or new shades of meaning.
It's probably pretty hard to write documentation for the iPhone SDK in PIE, for example.
 
Yeah, but I was referring to grammatical constructs, not words. I still haven't thought all this out yet, for example, I'm not sure I'd consider a language in which you cannot directly say "tomorrow I will eat a zebra" "Turing-complete". If you say "tomorrow I eat a zebra", you are fully relying on context, not the grammar, to carry the information about the tense.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 How do you ask WH questions?
 
Hmm, English isn't a good example for this...
 
@Bane except that the word "tomorrow" effectively doubles as a tense marker.
We don't need tense.
if we have other ways of expressing when something happened or will happen.
 
@DavidWallace oh, because "who", "what", etc, are pronouns in questions? Okay, I suppose they are important.
But necessary? I'm not sure.
 
8:16 PM
If you didn't have them, they'd develop.
 
@Bane English is not a good example because "will" is not a tense.
 
Yeah, I realized that only after I posted the message...
 
I mean, you could perhaps say "Person is outside the house - identify person" instead of "Who is outside the house".
But if you say that enough times, "person" will become a pronoun.
 
@DavidWallace from a certain point of view, yes.
 
Hey, @DavidWallace, how would you say "Person is outside the house" in the past tense, without an actual past tense, and without specifying an actual point in time?
 
8:18 PM
"Person is outside the house when I look; I not look now".
I don't know.
 
@Bane Well, you need either a past tense or a time marker of some sort. Some kind of indicator.
Anyway, @bane, you should maybe head over to the linguistics.stackexchange.com site and see what they have to say about PIE and how completely it is known. However, I disagree with your overloading of "turing completeness" to refer to languages that are only partially known.
 
Yeah, that's a very sloppy use of that term, I'll stop. It was just at the top of my head...
 
Yeah, I don't like the use of "Turing complete" in this way either. The analogy seems a bit forced.
 
lots of languages get by without an explicit tense distinction
often by being aspect-oriented rather than tense-oriented
 
@JSBձոգչ Which ones? I only know that Japanes has two tenses: past and "not past", and now I've learned of Chinese, that apparently doesn't have tenses.
>aspect-oriented rather than tense-oriented
Would you care to elaborate?
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hmm, will do, I didn't know there was a linguistics site.
 
8:22 PM
This has nothing to with Turing completeness.
I banish the Turing.
AÍ! A TURING HAS COME!
 
Sorry, I'm going back several questions, but I think if there existed a language that was not rich enough to express all the things its speakers wanted to express, it would gradually grow in expressiveness until it WAS rich enough.
 
@MετάEd You just like typing that accented I character
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hëll yès I dô.
 
I also think that the fact that we don't know how to express everything in PIE doesn't imply that speakers of PIE didn't know how to.
 
@Bane Also you can read wikipedia about it
The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is advanced and detailed. Scholars estimate that PIE may have been spoken as a single language (before divergence began) around 3700 BC, though estimates by different authorities can vary by more than a millennium. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the P...
 
8:23 PM
Here's something that I have difficulty expressing in English.
 
@DavidWallace Actually I think you expressed that quite well.
 
@Bane sure...
just a moment
 
What adjective can I use to qualify hair that is red? Where by "red" I mean the colour of a fire engine. If I say "red hair", that means some kind of gingery brown colour.
Tweeners!
 
@David I agree
with you.
 
@DavidWallace That's because English didn't used to have the word "orange" and so some orange-coloured things, like red hair, are called "red".
 
8:26 PM
@Bane i can't find a good reference right now, and google fails me. anyway, there are languages where the primary grammaticalized distinction is between "complete" and "incomplete", or between telic and atelic verbs
 
And so you have to qualify hair colour: Her hair was fire-engine red.
 
@DavidWallace Since historically "red" was the word for that color of hair, you will have to qualify. "Fire engine red" or "f——k me red" for example.
 
in these language "tense" is only marked optionally, and usually takes the form of an adverb
 
But what if I can't think of an object that's the same colour? So it's not EXACTLY the colour of a fire engine, but some nearby shade.
 
@JSBձոգչ "complete" and "incomplete"? You're talking about tenses?
 
8:28 PM
@DavidWallace You'll need to specify a precise make and model of a fire-engine that DOES use that shade.
 
@Bane no, i'm talking about aspect. do you know spanish or italian?
 
@DavidWallace You can always use PANTONE. Or CMYK. Or RGB. :-p
 
Yep, I got it. Is Latin an example of a such language? For example, perfect is a complete past tense, and imperfect is incomplete?
@JSBձոգչ Sorry, I don't.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 He can use the dropper tool.
 
@Bane that's the right idea. Latin (and the Romance languages) generally indicate tense and aspect, but there are languages that indicate aspect but not tense
 
8:30 PM
@John Lawler Please John, come here; we need you.
 
My darling, I love that 2003 Dennis Hydraulic Platform colour you've dyed your hair.
 
so while Latin has past imperfect and past perfect, some languages just have "perfect" and "imperfect", without any particular tense marking
 
@MετάEd And #FF2304 really brings out your eyes.
 
so "perfect" could mean either "completed in the past" or "completed in the future" depending on context
 
(Considers the difference between "first future" and "future complete" in some Slavic languages).
 
8:32 PM
Oh! Or you could use a pantone colour. "Her hair was PANTONE Red 032 C"
 
the slavic languages in general are aspect-dominant, with only a sprinkling of tense to go with it
 
dammit, while I was getting a link @MετάEd jinxed me
 
@JSBձոգչ Do you think that comment has some tense-dominant bias to it?
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I've got your color right here.
 
@JSBձոգչ Huh, are you sure about that? Because there's a hell of a lot tenses in Croatian... Perfect, imperfect, aorist, first future, second future...
 
8:33 PM
@DavidWallace which comment?
 
And lets not forget plusquamperfect...
 
I mean, I think that Slavic languages have a mix of aspect and tense; and the two complement each other well. It seems like you use both together. But as a speaker of a tense-dominant language, it's the aspects that stick out for me. If I were a speaker of a truly aspect-dominant language, I might feel that Slavic languages were tense-dominant (although obviously less so than English).
 
linguists generally codify slavic languages as aspect-dominant, so it's not just me.
anyway, most languages have some indication of both tense and aspect
 
@Bane Or quasihemidemisemiquaver.
Or antepenultimate.
 
@MετάEd Oh god the horror, what is that?
 
8:37 PM
@Bane it's a sorta-1/8th quaver.
 
@JSBձոգչ I don't mean to imply it's just you. What about linguists whose first language is not a strongly tense-dominant one though?
 
@Bane What part of ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn don't you understand?
10
 
No Lovecraft in chat.
 
@Reg do you have an opinion?
(since you're here and Slavic)
 
@KitFox Shouldn't that be "There is no Lovecraft in this chat"?
Maybe it's "are"?
 
8:38 PM
shouldn't be?
 
Surely the tunnel of love has more than one Lovecraft.
 
@MετάEd It should be "No X in this chat" where X is, in this case, Lovecraft.
2
 
mustn't*
 
My Lovecraft is full of eels.
 
<—playing Lego Clone Wars, not paying attention
 
8:39 PM
If I said you had a Turing-incomplete natural language, would you hold it against me?
2
 
No, but I might sell it to you.
 
@DavidWallace I always have an opinion, whether or not I'm here or anything else.
 
Would you like to come back to my place, *rebhājō, *rebhājō
 
Except it's a lot to catch up, so my opinion right now is that I'm lazy.
 
@DavidWallace I vill not buy this David Wallace, it is scratched.
 
8:42 PM
@RegDwighт Do first-language-Slavic speakers consider Slavic languages to be more strongly aspect-oriented than tense-oriented?
 
Anyway, it has been nice chatting to you all, but I've got work to do, so bye!
 
Can't speak for others, but I'd say that it's exactly 50/50 in Russian.
 
Bye
 
@Bane bye. Good luck with Latin class.
I too must be heading off.
 
@RegDwighт That is my feeling about Bosnian. Possibly not 50/50 - we rely more on tense than aspect.
 
8:44 PM
Obviously aspects are very important if your language has two forms of each verb.
 
Bye Mr
 
@DavidWallace "we"? You're Bosnian?
 
Jez
well, red dwarf was quite good
 
@RegDwighт Tenses seem more important to me.
 
But I wouldn't want to miss the tenses, either.
 
8:44 PM
@Bane I speak Bosnian. I am not Bosnian.
 
I could not life without tenses
 
Oh, that's great, we can understand each other on a non-English language :) Also, just one more thing before I go: why do you know Bosnian, if I may ask?
 
Jez
@Carlo_R. or verbs?
 
I tense without main verbs.
 
@Jaz Hmmm
 
8:46 PM
@Bane If you're looking for complexity, Latin has it in a big list of tense/aspect/mood/action combinations, plus 4 sets of forms (conjugations) for each, plus a good number of irregular verbs (don't fit any pattern, for one verb you just have to memorize every form. Then there are nouns, 5 declensions, 5 cases (sometimes 6).
 
@Bane Moja zena je Sarajevka.
 
So if it is complexity you care about, Latin is pretty close to Slavic.
 
@DavidWallace in Russian, you can only have what Barrie England would consider a true future tense in perfective aspect. In imperfective, it's composé.
 
Ours is composé both ways.
 
@Mitch I know, I'm forced to learn it. I'm just trying to find some motivation.
 
8:47 PM
That bears repeating. Which tenses you have depends on the aspect. That's how much they are intertwined.
 
Bane, you seem to me a native of English language. I will believe you are bosnian only after having see your passport
 
Which is why I say 50/50.
 
@Carlo_R. I'm not Bosnian, I'm Croatian. Why don't you believe me? Do you want me to say a few sentences on my native language so @DavidWallace can confirm? ;)
(Btw Bosninan, Serbian and Croatian are pretty much the same.)
 
@Bane also, there is very little literature on 'learning' PIE or really anything about PIE, but you can find all sorts of vocabulary and grammar and original texts for Latin, even though nobody speaks it out loud. Actually that's not exactly true. I have heard that Latin is sometimes used as a lingua franca at the Vatican.
 
No, you could know Bosnian as second language, but I'm sure you are native of English
 
8:51 PM
@Carlo_R. But why? I already said that I'm from Croatia, why don't you believe me?
 
@Bane Some can be motivated by practicality. No one speaks it but academic English (as well as academic French/Spanish/Italian) is mostly Latin derivatives. Learning Latin will increase your English vocabulary, especially in medicine and law, tremendously.
 
Your English is perfect.
 
Carlo_R - Bane made a minor grammatical error two English remarks ago. Not one that a native speaker would make. I am certain he/she is not a native English speaker.
 
@Carlo_R. I highly doubt it...
(Also, please do point out any mistakes I make, so I can correct myself. Thanks.)
 
Mkay, who's starring all that?
 
8:52 PM
Not I said the cat.
 
I am, well, some of it...
 
@David if you say that, I believe.
 
@RegDwighт note how this is the opposite of Latin, in which your tense determines which aspects you have available
 
@JSBձոգչ I don't know the first thing about Latin, so I have trouble noting.
 
@Bane You should say "in my native language", not "on my native language". Not a big deal. But "na" in Croatian doesn't always correspond to "on" in English.
 
8:53 PM
@Carlo_R. " on my native language " -> "in my native language"
jinx
 
@Reg well, i'll note it for you
 
donuts for everyone!
 
this is part of why we say that the slavic languages are aspect-dominant while Latin is tense dominant
 
@JSBձոգչ How is that the opposite?
 
@DavidWallace Thanks, I always get that wrong...
 
8:53 PM
There are valid combinations of tense and aspect; and invalid ones.
 
Hi!
 
@Bane the stars only make sense as long as the messages are still on the wall on the right hand side. Starring a message pushes previously starred messages off of it, thus making it rather pointless to have starred them in the first place.
 
@DavidWallace what are some invalid ones?
 
If I'm not mistaking, in both Latin and some Slavic languages, the tense determines the aspect.
 
@Mitch I couldn't use present tense with perfective aspect in the main clause of a sentence.
 
8:55 PM
and @Reg just said that in Russian the aspect controls the tense
 
@DavidWallace "I am done"?
 
@JSBձոգչ I'd say that they're tied together. But take imperfect in Latin, it defines its aspect, correct?
 
@Mitch Ugh! What does that even mean?
 
@RegDwighт Sorry, I didn't know that.
 
I just finished eating.
I mean "I just finished eating"
 
8:56 PM
@Bane correct. but it's the only simple tense that really specifies aspect
 
@Bane No prob. I'm just saying you only have 30 stars a day for a reason. Use them sparingly.
 
@Mitch That's a past tense, modified by an adverb to give it an almost-present meaning.
 
"am" is past tense and "done" is an adverb?
 
@RegDwighт Will do.
 
No, I mean "I just finished eating". "Finished" is past tense.
 
8:57 PM
@Bane also, you can uncheck things if it isn't too long since you checked them.
 
Oh, you mean, "I am done" means "I just finished eating"? Interesting!
 
How come we have two questions about the same sentence? wonders
 
@DavidWallace sure, but my given sentence that I care about is "I am done". "I just finished" is just to tell you closely what it means.
@DavidWallace yes.
 
OK, if I HAD to translate "I am done" into Bosnian, I would probably say "Završio sam", which is past tense.
 
Oh I see. One is a result of the comments on the other.
 
8:59 PM
@RegDwighт you mean on some Q&A site? how would we even know about that? Strange.
 
@Mitch you should ask that, you know, on a Q&A site.
 
@DavidWallace Maybe "Gotov sam" would be more specific? That isn't the past tense, but present.
 
I would also translate "I finished" as "Završio sam" though.
 
@DavidWallace also, I am talking about the English. You may have been claiming no present perfect in Croatian.
@RegDwighт I will!
 
@DavidWallace I agree on that.
 
9:01 PM
When I said "there are valid combinations of tense and aspect; and invalid ones" I meant in Slavic languages. Not English.
 
Or maybe I'll ask where to pick up the donuts instead. "May donuts be not yet begun to finish being eaten"
@DavidWallace Oh. Never mind.
 
@Bane Yes, it would depend on context. I'm not really sure what "I am done" means. It's not an expression that I use.
 
@DavidWallace After finishing a test, for example, you could say "I am done", couldn't you?
 
I can imagine contexts in which "I am done" would be best translated as "gotov sam", and others in which it would be best translated as "završio sam".
 
@Mitch i dont know what you mean with lf but afaik latin is official vatican language
 
9:02 PM
@Bane I would say "I've finished". But that's just me.
 
Yeah, changing the tense wouldn't change the meaning there, I think. And I agree that saying "I've finished" is probably more correct, that's why I put "could" in there.
Anyway, now I really need to go. This chatroom is really great, I'll probably come back!
 
Bye
 
Vidimo se.
 
Se vedemo
 
@Carlo_R. I was saying less than you. I suspected that is true, but you know more than I do about the Vatican.
@Bane "I have finished" is more formal than "I am done"
 
9:06 PM
"I am done" seems almost like an Americanism to me.
Like "off of".
 
Ah...well, there it is.
Since those don't sound like anything to me, that must be what I am.
well...not an Americanism. That would be wrong.
how about 'spot on'? what kind of person says that?
 
"I am done" literally translated in Italian means "Io sono fatto", which one say after drugs assumption.
 
Umm, I might say "spot on".
There used to be a New Zealand child's TV programme called "Spot On".
 
Was it Language Log (Geoff Pullum) who claimed that 'spot on' was a Bertie-Woosterism? I thought it was pretty common and um middle class if that's what you call it)
 
Umm, "Spot On" in Italy is a programme for adult!
 
9:09 PM
That doesn't sound good..or rather maybe too good.
 
It's probably not the same programme.
 
probably not. kept the kids attention though.
 
Yes, we are at the antipode of NZ, so it is normal.
 
@Carlo_R. Have you moved to Spain?
 
Spain, no I'm not precise.
There is only a little error
In sayng that Italy is at the antipode of NZ.
 
9:12 PM
Hey, if you can consider New Zealand and Australia to be the same place, you can do likewise with Italy and Spain.
 
Incidentally Spain and Italy are like they are the same
Spain and France, no
Italy and France, no
Germany and Italy, absolutely no
But Spain and Italy are almost the same.
Same culture, same religion, similar language, ...
 
"I am done" is a bedroom term and usually you only hear it if you found the "spot on".
 
Meta, haha ...
You are more like of it seems
Hey, this bane guy is an interesting user!
It seems his age is 16, but I do not believe it.
I think he is at least 23
He has some intersting crackpot theries
We will see. In my language we see "chi vivra', vedra'"
Literally "who will life, will see"
@David is it true that in NZ, contrary to what happen in Italy (and Spain), the cars go on the left of the road?
 
live
 
Hello
 
9:25 PM
Yes, but they call it right.
 
Tchrist, you have lost bane. Thank you.
Tchrist, please see the interesting backlog.
 
@Carlo_R. Yes.
 
:)
 
:)
@tchrist bane is a new intersting user. We have tolk about "turing completeness" applied to language.
I feel you absence in that discussion
@David In Italy the most diffused car is FIAT, then Volkswagen. What is the situation in NZ. Do you have a lot of Japanese cars?
Honda, Toyota etc
 
9:31 PM
@Carlo_R. Yes. The huge majority of cars are Japanese. Mine is a Honda.
 
:)
We has become a new phenomenon of Chinese car. Todey they have 3% of the market. Is this pheonomenon in NZ too?
Obviosuly 3% in Italy, I mean.
Now the percentage has become 4%!
And probably if you do not answer early the percentage will growth both in Italy and in NZ.
 
 
2 hours later…
11:23 PM
@tchrist I used to listen to that too. It was always at bedtime and half the time I fell asleep before the end. Urgh!
 
11:47 PM
Hello.
Has my customer disappeared? Aww...
If you want to study European culture (which includes North and South-American culture), Latin has been the most important language to learn for the past two thousand+ years.
 
Who's your customer?
 
Some guy complaining about his Latin class.
So Latin is very important in history, culture, literature, etc.
That is the most important aspect.
Then there are other, minor considerations.
 
It really takes me all my free time to catch up by reading the transcript. I hadn't gotten that far.
 
Latin is a great exercise for the mind.
It can help you a great deal in understanding many modern languages.
 
You won't be surprised to know that I don't know Latin.
 
11:51 PM
Even Germanic languages often have lots of difficult-to-learn concepts and words based on Latin.
@SpareOom It's OK. I was just replying to that guy.
 
But I did take a class in college "Greek and Latin Roots of English Words"
 
Now I'm done.
@SpareOom That's a start.
 
ok. Sorry I interrupted.
You should have @ed the guy so he sees your reply.
@Cerberus But it was so long ago, and I've probably forgotten most of it.
 
@SpareOom Too lazy to look up his name.
@SpareOom But you probably subconsciously relearned many roots.
Like e-.
What do you think the prefix e- could mean?
 
@Hauser, maybe ^
 
11:55 PM
It doesn't mean "@Hauser, maybe ^", no.
 

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