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Re: Abducktion

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Steve Smith

Re: Abducktion

Every time I write "passive", Android mail client auto-completes it as "passive aggressive".

I also find auto-complete/correct to verge on passive aggressive itself sometimes. I'm not sure where the UX for these began to change to "remember" when you "uncorrect" and allows you your idiosyncratic preferences/choices/specifics in the future. Context matters, of course...

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, 4:43 PM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Literally it says “it pleases me” which is the passive voice leading to the question who is “it?"

_______________________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home) [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Aug 7, 2020, at 4:30 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm no grammar expert, even in my native English, but I don't believe "me gusta el cafe" is using passive voice. It literally says "coffee pleases me". Comments, Frank? But then, I may be confused about what passive voice is.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 5:23 PM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:

Isn’t it a consequence of the routine use of the passive voice in Spanish as in “me gusta” instead of “yo gusto?”

The passive voice is pretty much gone in textbooks but I occasionally I get objections from Spanish speakers who claim my textbook can’t be serious because I don’t use the passive voice.

Ed

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home) [hidden email]
505-453-4944 (cell) http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Aug 7, 2020, at 4:17 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Despite living in a Spanish speaking country for 12 years, I still struggle mightily with Spanish grammar. This is mainly due to laziness on my part, as well as lack of necessity to immerse myself in the language (there are a lot of English speakers here, not to mention expat groups on Facebook in English). Still, Spanish is *so* much more consistent in all respects than English - pronunciation especially. But the reflexive verbs are still somewhat of a mystery to me. I've wondered exactly the same thing that Frank mentioned: does "the cup fell itself on me" and "the pencil broke itself on mf" represent desire to avoid responsibility? Maybe even blame the victim? Ouch! Your nose nearly broke my fist!

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 2:06 PM Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Or the equally famous Spanish phrase, "The pencil broke itself." A phrase which you think I would remember.
TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data

============================================

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On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 12:55 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:

In Spanish if you drop your cup you say, "See me cayó la taza". A literal word--for-word translation is "The cup fell itself on me". Some people say this is an effort to avoid responsibility.

Frank

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, 9:01 AM Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Very much so. We hired a grad student a long time ago (he stayed with us until he retired). He wrote great Pascal programs. He wrote great Pascal programs in C++, and in JavaScript. The effect of your first programming language on style, idioms, and your feelings about recursion and encapsulation.

—Barry

On 6 Aug 2020, at 23:24, [hidden email] wrote:

Nah. He means more than that. Even ordinary languages predispose users to one kind of discourse or another. I assume that programming languages do the same.

N

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David Eric Smith

Re: Abducktion

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

There ought to be some good version of this conversation that juggles both considerations of precision and questions of good or bad faith.

One of my least-favorite ways to spend a few minutes is by being attached by one of these people who seem to take their identity from all the ones they can stand in judgment over, on the ground that I have just used the third-person English singular pronoun and am therefore a domineering chauvinist. I wish to offer such a person to switch into conversing in Bahasa Indonesia, where we can just use “dia” everywhere, since that language does not use gendered 3rd-person singulars. The economists’ convention of substituting “she” everywhere received English uses “he” also doesn’t seem great, in the sense that one goes from something that was not “marked” syntactically, and was marked in pragmatics for those carrying a social upset, to something that becomes explicitly marked for everybody, and more openly calls out gender than by using a default. So one doesn’t escape marking; one just gets to choose whether it is marked to everybody or only for some people, and how.

The replacement of the 3rd-sg by “they” seems somehow disappointing, in that we have lost the ability to make gender distinctions if they happen to exist. One could here switch the conversation from one of precision to one of good faith, and go through the corpus of all English locutions, and ask in how many of them the speaker has any business mentioning gender, even if a definite gender exists. If there are few, then the loss of precision is small.

However, it may not be quite as small as one would think if one were only cataloguing that, in pragmatics, anyone who doesn’t consciously exclude references to gender has deliberately committed a wrong. I am aware, because I spend a lot of time in the company of Filipinos, who grew up speaking a western Malayo-polynesian language that does not use gendered pronouns, that (a subset of them) often seem to switch in a quasi-random way between he or she, if there is one of each in the discourse. What gets obliterated turns out to be pronoun-antecedent agreement. One realizes in these Taglish contexts that English has come to make use of gender distinctions in dependent clauses, to refer back to who is the actor and who the acted upon (or lots of other prepositional relations), by using the extra layer of gender tagging in the back reference. I will often be successfully following the thread of a sentence or conversation, and one of these random-variable pronouns will be thrown in, at which point suddenly a grammatical trace that I would have done in Broca without conscious attention goes completely haywire, and I have to go back to medial prefrontal and the pragmatics of the conversation, to identify where the dependent clause attaches back into the thread of who had what relation to whom. Of course, one can puzzle it all out, but one goes back to trying to follow sentences at the level one uses in a new language, not a fluent one. All that to say, if we do want to abandon gendered 3rd-person pronouns, there will probably need to be various other adjustments that grow into the language to lead it away to referential dependencies it got into the habit of using on such pronouns, over the history in which they have been available.

On the other hand, though, back to precision, the argument can go either way. Often I specifically want to refer to a gender-nonspecified third person, the living equivalent to an “it”. English makes it impossible for me to do so. I have been told that there are many languages in Africa (which probably means, Bantu), that maintain 12 versions of “we”. All combinations of the inclusive/exclusive w.r.t. the listener, as well as gender combinations. Those speakers are really in a handicap if they want to make a generic referent. So the loss of a generic to a set of specifics can create other imprecisions that arise constantly.

Clearly these things can drift, and languages adjust around them. Dutch-Frisian-English have shed much of the gender marking in West Germanic that German has kept. North Germanic (the Scandinavians) have shed even more, as part of that seems like a diversity-reduction in many structures. Some typologist somewhere could regale us for hours with all the other little adjustments that co-occur across the languages, as necessary functions get relocated in other parts or other levels of grammar or pragmatics.

Eric

On Aug 10, 2020, at 1:21 AM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

Please ask that language-teaching daughter of yours if “impersonal” is a “voice”. The French adore impersonals. “Il me faut que” = I must” “Qu-est-ce que c’est que” = “What is it” (literally “What is it that it is” I suspect that part of why Americans are thought to be so assertive is that we use impersonals less? Polite writers often try to obfuscate the agent of an action, making prose inpenetrable. “It would appear that” (Appear to whom? For God’s) sake!) And my favorite, “Mistakes were made”

In my never-to-be written book, Who Was This Old White Guy and Why Do We Need to Read His Stupid Book? (About the current implications of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”, I want to explore the degree to which there are any universal dictates of clarity that go beyond cultural dictates of deference or politeness. White would say that “Mistakes Were Made” is unclear; to understand what happened we need to know the agent of those mistakes. A defender of that obfuscation might call it a “gentle style”. Using “they” as a gender=neutral singular deprives a writer of one of the methods by which to thread agent and recipient of action in in describing a complex scenario. Other priorities trump clarity? Why not? Some times clarity isn’t faithful to a writer’s purpose.

Yet to me there is some fundamental violation, a logical contradiction, in speaking unclearly. If one is not going to communicate a meaning unambiguously, why speak at all. Ach! There is a reason that 80 years is a normal lifetime.

Some day somebody is going to make a heluva lot money by writing a book entitled “Brown and White: Elements of Woke Style.” It could be YOU! Or your daughter, for that matter.

Nick

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, August 9, 2020 7:47 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Abducktion

It's usually obvious from.the context who/what "it" is. People do say "yo gusto" but like "yo te gusto?" Do you like me? And sometimes to be cute "tu gustas?" which is incorrect. These examples are not passive voice. "Se gusta?" meaning "is it liked?" is passive voice. Any disagreements will be referred to my daughter, the Spanish teacher.

An improvement on my earlier comment "se me cayó la taza" would be "the cup was fallen on me" which is also passive voice and also makes responsibility ambiguous.

Every time I write "passive", Android mail client auto-completes it as "passive aggressive".

Frank
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, 4:43 PM Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:
Literally it says “it pleases me” which is the passive voice leading to the question who is “it?"
_______________________

Ed Angel
Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]
505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Aug 7, 2020, at 4:30 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

I'm no grammar expert, even in my native English, but I don't believe "me gusta el cafe" is using passive voice. It literally says "coffee pleases me". Comments, Frank? But then, I may be confused about what passive voice is.

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 5:23 PM Angel Edward <[hidden email]> wrote:
Isn’t it a consequence of the routine use of the passive voice in Spanish as in “me gusta” instead of “yo gusto?”

The passive voice is pretty much gone in textbooks but I occasionally I get objections from Spanish speakers who claim my textbook can’t be serious because I don’t use the passive voice.

Ed
__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]
505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Aug 7, 2020, at 4:17 PM, Gary Schiltz <[hidden email]> wrote:

Despite living in a Spanish speaking country for 12 years, I still struggle mightily with Spanish grammar. This is mainly due to laziness on my part, as well as lack of necessity to immerse myself in the language (there are a lot of English speakers here, not to mention expat groups on Facebook in English). Still, Spanish is *so* much more consistent in all respects than English - pronunciation especially. But the reflexive verbs are still somewhat of a mystery to me. I've wondered exactly the same thing that Frank mentioned: does "the cup fell itself on me" and "the pencil broke itself on mf" represent desire to avoid responsibility? Maybe even blame the victim? Ouch! Your nose nearly broke my fist!

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 2:06 PM Tom Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Or the equally famous Spanish phrase, "The pencil broke itself." A phrase which you think I would remember.
TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson - [hidden email]
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)               505.473.9646(h)
NM Foundation for Open Government
Check out It's The People's Data
============================================

Virus-free. www.avast.com

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 12:55 PM Frank Wimberly <[hidden email]> wrote:
In Spanish if you drop your cup you say, "See me cayó la taza". A literal word--for-word translation is "The cup fell itself on me". Some people say this is an effort to avoid responsibility.

Frank
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, 9:01 AM Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]> wrote:
Very much so. We hired a grad student a long time ago (he stayed with us until he retired). He wrote great Pascal programs. He wrote great Pascal programs in C++, and in JavaScript. The effect of your first programming language on style, idioms, and your feelings about recursion and encapsulation.
—Barry
On 6 Aug 2020, at 23:24, [hidden email] wrote:
Nah. He means more than that. Even ordinary languages predispose users to one kind of discourse or another. I assume that programming languages do the same.

N
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