Category Archives: Uncategorized

The cat the rat the dog the cow… wait, what?

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Over at Mental Floss, I found some of the oddest sentences that are perfectly grammatical and yet which don’t compile [1] properly.

One of the most famous is,

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

A visual explanation of this monstrosity is the most effective:

Buffalo_buffalo_WikiWorld

You can also visit Wikipedia for a detailed linguistic deconstruction; like Columbus’ egg (an appropriate simile for today) [2], it’s easy when you see what they’re doing.

However, only slightly less well known is this one: Never go in against a Sicilian sorry, I meant

“The rat the cat the dog worried killed ate the malt.”

This is an example of nested relative clauses. The structure is easy to follow when only few are used:

The rat ate the malt. The cat killed the rat. These become, “The rat (that) the cat killed ate the malt.”

Add in “The dog worried the cat” and you get “The rat (that) the cat (that) the dog worried killed ate the malt.” Since the subordinating conjunction “that” is optional in such clauses, the resulting sentence begins to become incomprehensible as the nestings are more and more difficult to follow.

The human mind is a wondrous machine, capable of prodigious feats of memory, calculation, and creativity, but it can only perceive so much at a single glance. In the case of determining how many items are within a field of vision, this skill is called subitizing, and the current human limit seems to be between five and seven.

Quick, how many dots?

Three

Three. No challenge, right?  Now try this one. Quick, no counting!

scatter

The answer is “24,” but you didn’t know that without counting, unless you happen to be one of those few people, either autistic or supergenius, who has somehow bypassed the normal human ability.

But let me show you the same number like this:

24

And while you can’t subitize the dots, you can immediately calculate how many there are based on your encyclopedic knowledge of the universe and a bit of simple math.

In the same way, the human mind is able to understand and generate language, but there are limits to how much complexity can be comprehended, even if all grammatical rules are followed. Thus taking our example to its logical conclusion, “The House that Jack Built” becomes:

This is the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow3 the maiden4 the man5 the priest6 the cock7 the farmer8 kept waked married kissed milked tossed worried killed ate, that lay in the house that Jack built.

It’s interesting from a scholarly standpoint, but nowhere near as fun to recite while bouncing your grandchild on your knee.

Remember, time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] This is computational linguist slang for “I don’t get it.”

[2] I am 1/2 Italian by descent. As such, Columbus Day has long been a great celebration, especially in New York where I grew up. Sadly, in much the same way as we now know that brontosaurus is now an apatosaur, and that Pluto is no longer a planet but a Trans-Neptunian Object, we now know that Columbus is not the national hero he has been made out to be; October 14th would better be renamed “Genocide Day.” Yes, he played a significant rôle in the development of this nation, but the human toll that was left behind in his wake is staggering. A couple of things you might be interested in reading are at The Thunder Mountain Monument, The Oatmeal, and Lies My Teacher Told Me.

[3] with the crumpled horn
[4] all forlorn
[5] all tattered and torn
[6] all shaven and shorn
[7] that crowed in the morn
[8] sowing his corn

Daddy’s Girl is not Daddy’s Wife!

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This needed to be said. This needs to be shared.

inshadowz's avatarinshadowz: out of context

Iran passes new bill that lets men marry adopted daughters

Within the same month as the news told of an eight year old girl in Yemen died from internal injuries sustained from being forced to perform her “marital duties” to her 40 year old husband on her wedding night, a man five times her own age, the lawmakers of Iran cough up a bill that will allow men to marry their adopted daughters from as early as the age of 13.

“Officials in Iran have tried to play down the sexual part of such marriages, saying it is in the bill to solve the issue of hijab [head scarf] complications when a child is adopted.

“An adopted daughter is expected to wear the hijab in front of her father, and a mother should wear it in front of her adopted son if he is old enough.”

This is the…

View original post 319 more words

Know : Languages List and their Writing direction

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Propel Steps added a pingback to my article on writing systems, and this article is fascinating in its own right.

Propel Steps's avatarPROPEL STEPS

Language direction

This is an index of the all the writing systems on this site arranged by the direction in which they are written. Some writing systems can be written in a number of different directions, others were originally written in various directions but eventually settled on one direction.

Why some writing systems are written in one direction, and others in other directions is a bit of a mystery. It might have something to do with the writing surfaces and implements originally used, fashion, the handedness of the creators of the writing systems, or other factors.

Directions

  • Left to right, horizontal
  • Right to left, horizontal
  • Left to right, vertical, top to bottom
  • Right to left, vertical, top to bottom
  • Left to right, vertical, bottom to top
  • Right to left, vertical, bottom to top
  • Boustrophedon
  • Variable

Example of Armenian written from left to right

Left to right, horizontal

The following writing systems are written from left to right in horizontal lines:

View original post 1,079 more words

Stay the hell out of Syria

Posted on by The Old Wolf

To whom it may concern in the halls of power:

In 2007, President Obama said the following to the Boston Globe:

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat.”

I share with you here a comment I made elsewhere, but which bears repeating:

It is very hard to express the depth of my feelings about the escalating situation in Syria without resorting to blasphemy and profanity. I remain astonished at the obtuseness and pig-headedness of my legislators and my executive branch. They claim that the populace is demanding action; instead, the populace is demanding jobs, is demanding food, is demanding universal access to healthcare, is demanding that we stop throwing away money on unwinnable conflicts in countries where we don’t belong, for the sole purpose of enriching the oligarchs who are heavily invested in oil companies, security companies, and the military-industrial complex.

The people want peace and prosperity, not frivolous military actions. Surely nobody wants the people of Syria to suffer from the actions of a brutal tyrant, but as a nation we simply don’t have the resources or the moral mandate to play global cop any longer. There’s too much wrong at home, and we can’t afford for the Fed to print more fiat money to finance the insanity. I am ready to march on Washington with pitchfork and torch, if I thought it would do any good.

Let me be clear:

The United Nations has not passed a resolution supporting military action in Syria. I do not support action in Syria, and neither do most Americans.

There is no legitimacy to the mistaken conception that “action is demanded” in Syria. The only people who are demanding action are the ones who stand to profit from it, either financially or politically. I refuse to support the spending of my tax dollars or the creation of artificial money or the incurring of additional debt for fruitless military pursuits that threaten to drag us into yet another interminable conflict,

Stop this madness. I demand better; I demand responsibility and accountability to the American people to whom you are duty bound to answer. None of you have political capital to spend; your reputations and approval ratings are already in the toilet. For the love of whatever you consider holy, be it gods or humanity – do not pull the chain.

stf164_mob

To the lords of the castle: you are getting closer to this every day. Do not test the patience of the American people.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Plans for pet repository in San Francisco spur theological flap

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A San Francisco church is creating a space for pet cremains, in honor of the patron saint of animals. But the project is stirring a theological controversy.

Presidio$presidio-pet-cemetery-photo

An outdoor pet cemetery in the Presidio in the 1990s.

“This is, after all, the City of St. Francis. So when a shrine named in his honor announced plans to build a repository for pet ashes in a catacomb-like hollow under the stairs of its 19th-century church, many animal lovers were elated. Little did they know the plan would stir old-fashioned church politics and deep theological questions. (Is the stair nook a sacred space? Does placement of cinerary urns equate to pet burial? Did St. Francis only care about living creatures?) Now, as plans for the pet columbarium move forward, critics are taking their concerns well up the church hierarchy.”

Read more at the Los Angeles Times.

Of course, the voices in my head being what they are, I was immediately put in mind of this lovely story, which I originally heard in Irish Gaelic: [1]

Muldoon was living in the country in Ireland and he had a dog. Muldoon was very fond of his dog, but one day the dog died, and he went to the priest.
Muldoon said, “Father, my poor dog died. Could you be saying a Requiem Mass for him?”
Said the priest, “‘Tis sorry I am, Muldoon, but there’s no Requiem Mass for animals. There’s a Protestant church down the road, God alone knows what they believe. It’s to them you should be going.
Said Muldoon, “Faith and that’s a good idea. I’ll be going there straightaway. What do you think? Would 50,000 pounds be enough for the services?”
Replied the priest, “Damn you, Muldoon! Why didn’t you tell me the dog was Catholic?”

From where I sit, the joke makes more sense than people arguing about a pet cemetery, but that’s just me.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Original Irish text:

Bhí Muldoon ina chónaí faoin tuath in Éirinn agus bhí madra aige. Bhí Muldoon an cheanúil ar an madra sin, ach lá amhain fuair an madra bás.
Chuaigh Muldoon chun an tsagairt.
Deir Muldoon: “A Athair, fuair mo mhadra bocht bás. An féidir leat Aifreann na Marbh a rá?”
Deir an Sagart: “Gabh mo leithscéal a Mhuldoon. Ní féidir Aifreann na Marbh a rá d’ainmhí. Tá teach pobail nua thíos an bóthar, agus ag Dia atá a fhios cad é an creideamh atá acu. Iarr orthu.”
Deir Muldoon: “Smaoineamh maith atá ann. Beidh mé ag fiafraí láithreach bonn. Céard do bharúil? An mbeadh 50,000 punt go leor le haghaidh na seirbhíse?”
Deir an Sagart: “Damnú ort a Mhuldoon! Cén fáth nár dhúirt tú liom go raibh an madra Caitliceach?”

Original Interstate Numbering Map

Posted on by The Old Wolf

tumblr_mqmr8yCjUt1rasnq9o1_1280

 

Official planning map for the US Interstate Highway system. However, during the 4-year freeway reconstruction project for I-15 prior to the 2002 Olympics, we wondered if the good folks at the Utah Department of Transportation were doing this behind closed doors:

UDOT-Small

 

(This is a multi-generation Xerox… I’d pay dearly to have a good copy of the original)

Recently we had to endure three years of freeway widening down south, 24 miles of road torn up at the same time from American Fork to Spanish Fork; I created this video to commemorate the event, with music shamelessly stolen from Salzburger Echo:

As with the Salt Lake project, we did survive… but it was a hellish experience, and I’m glad it’s over. Of course, now they’re adding an extra lane from Spanish Fork to Payson, which will take another two years. There’s no rest for the wicked.

♫ And they tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you can’t get through,
This road is
under construction. ♫

(From MAD Magazine, if I remember correctly)

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Johnny Depp: Mensch

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Reblogged from tribute.ca:

Johnny Depp never travels without Jack Sparrow costume

captain-jack-sparrow

Johnny Depp never travels without his Captain Jack Sparrow costume. The 50-year-old actor often surprises sick children in hospital by arriving dressed as his character from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and makes sure he has the costume with him at all times, just in case. He told E! News: “Sometimes you go to kiddie hospitals and things like that. I’ll just sneak in and go and surprise a bunch of kiddies through the different wards…It basically turns into a two-, three-hour improvisation and it’s really fun. So I travel with Captain Jack.” However, Johnny doesn’t think he will be doing the same thing with the costume of his latest character, Tonto from The Lone Ranger as he worries it wouldn’t get through customs. He explained: “That bird going through customs is going to be weird, isn’t it?. I’ll just put a handle on top of it and it will be a handbag.” Johnny – who has two children, Lily-Rose, 14, and Jack, 11, with ex-girlfriend Vanessa Paradis – reached the milestone age of 50 on June 9 and insists he doesn’t have any problems being half a century old because he is just glad to still be alive and appreciates every day of his life. He recently said: “It’s great. I mean, I think any day you wake up and you’re still around is a good thing. Every time you could take a breath and exhale and inhale again, it’s a good thing; 50 is like, ‘Sure! Why not?’ ”

I love this guy. I can’t imagine how much happiness he has brought to so many people, especially the young. One brilliant example is helping a young lady lead a mutiny at her London school.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Judge not. Period.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Found this story on Reddit, posted by user dk0, and felt moved to share it here, mildly edited for clarity.

A man who worked as an archaeologist was leading a tour group through a museum as part of his summer job. He had a large and prominent tattoo in a visible place, not anything obscene or even particularly challenging.

A person in the tour group, a middle aged woman, was persistently very snippy and dismissive of his lecture and when he finally confronted her about it in front of the group, she said she couldn’t take him seriously because he was tattooed.

He replied “this isn’t an ordinary tattoo, you see.” while slightly tilting the tattooed extremity, almost as if he expected it to beam a glint of light back at the viewer if cambered just right, “this tattoo is magic.” he said with a twinge of mysticism in his voice.

“If i hold it just right, it exposes the prejudice and ugliness of small and petty people.”

It puts me in mind of the little vignette by St. Ex found in The Little Prince:

I have serious reason to believe that the planet from which the little prince came is the asteroid known as B-612.

This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909.

On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.

4c

Grown-ups are like that…

Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report.

4d

One would think that certain subsets of society would get the concept of judgment; a man named Jesus is reputed to have said, around 2 millennia ago,

“Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”

Certainly those who follow the teachings of that individual understand this, right?

These are “Christians”:

westboro1-3d0baab9ccc674c5428c2cf5342da0ffcee7da0e-s6-c30

The Westboro Baptist Church condemns just about everyone to Hell, without knowing a thing about who they are.

These are Christians too:

Street Morons

Evangelical Christians sending Latter-day Saints to Hell, because they happen to understand God differently than they do.

Of course, debates of this nature always seem laughable to humanists, sort of like fighting over this:

FSM-Fight

So of course, humanists have a firm grip on the destructive nature of judgment, right?

Humanism is a worldview which says that reason and science are the best ways to understand the world around us. Dignity and compassion should be the basis for how we act toward others.
-American Humanist Association

And yet we see statements like the following from Ernest Hemingway: “All thinking men are atheists,” which banishes 4/5 of the world’s population from the ranks of thinking humanity.

To people on both sides of the fence, I say this:

world view

Atheism has taken a prominent place in social dialog since – it seems to me – Madalyn Murray O’Hair entered the scene. It’s hip to be atheist, and in most academic circles it’s de rigeur. People of faith are ostracized, belittled, humiliated, and sidelined. The only acceptable topic of discussion when it comes to religion is its excesses and abuses. By the same token, in other communities, standing up for documented scientific realities such as evolution or global climate change are enough to get you excommunicated, or at the very least subject to the same ostracism and denigration.

That’s no way to run a railroad; it’s no way to run a planet.

I have massive respect for the likes of these gentlemen [1]:

Scientists

Each one has been, in his own time, a crusader for reason and fact. Some have been combative, others encouraging. Some take the position that religion is an evil to be purged from the face of the earth, others put more energy into encouraging free thought and curiosity. Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s quote is one of my favorites:

“I don’t have an issue with what you do in the church, but I’m going to be up in your face if you’re going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they’ve got to teach what you’re teaching in your Sunday school. Because that’s when we’re going to fight.”
The Amazing Meeting, Keynote Speech, 2008

But I have to say this: I’ve read their writings, and at least two of them sound more than a little hopeful that this empirically-observable universe is not all there is. To their credit, all of them have subjugated any personal hopes or beliefs to the rigors of empirical observation.

There must be room at the table for everyone. No faith is going to convert the world with persuasion or the scimitar, and the passage of time will not still the yearning in the breasts of billions for something higher than themselves, something more personal than the thought of hydrogen atoms evolved to consciousness.

Judge not. Just stop it. Promote what you love, but don’t put down those who don’t fit your mold.

Of the faithful, I beseech: Believe what you will, but don’t deny empirical evidence. Of the humanists, I implore: Promote scientific truth and awareness, but stop relegating believers to second-class intellectual citizenship. Neither of these positions are worthy of a world that works for everyone, with no one left out.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Asimov, Sagan, Dawkins, Nye, Tyson. It does not escape my attention that there are no ladies in this lineup; I have no doubt that I could find an equal number, but in this case the reality is that the spokespeople for the triumph of reason via science happen to be overwhelmingly male at the moment.

Donnerwetter! German’s longest word stricken

Posted on by The Old Wolf

If you’ve ever read Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad, you have probably encountered Appendix D: The Awful German Language. Therein, Twain waxes eloquent about the vagaries of the Teutonic tongue and mentions the habit of the German language to smash nouns together into long, unreadable strings. He mentions “Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen” (legislator meetings) and “Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen” (cease-fire negotiations.) He does not mention “Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe” (the widow of a captain of the Danube Steamship Voyage Company), and I have seen longer versions having to do with the cleaning lady of the captain’s cabin, but this one is somewhat sniffed at by German purists.

enhanced-buzz-15726-1363114236-3

 

“Hardwood floor sander rental”

Now it appears that the longest official word in the German dictionary has been stricken, because it’s no longer needed.

the Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, or “law delegating beef label monitoring,”  was introduced by Germany in 1999 as part of measures against mad cow disease. But the DPA news agency reported today the law was removed from the books last week because European Union regulations have changed. Just to show you how these monsters are cobbled together:

  • Rind (cow)
  • Fleisch (flesh) [Rindfleisch -> “beef”]
  • Etikettierung (labeling)
  • Überwachung (monitoring)
  • Aufgabe (task)
  • Übertragung (delegation)
  • Gesetz (law)

The additional letters between the nouns are there to make things flow smoothly, in the same way as we take “girls” and “baseball” and “team” and come up with “girls’ baseball team.” And that’s really all they are doing – they just happen to cram everything together into one word.

German has other peculiarities, among which are the maddening tendency to throw all their verbs to the end of a very long clause or sentence. I’m currently reading The Lord of the Rings (Der Herr der Ringe) in German; I can’t wait to get to Volume 3 to find out what happens, because that’s where all the verbs are. [1]

But with the “Längsthauptwortsabschaffung” (longest noun elimination, and I just made that up) having been performed, what’s left as the longest official word? That honor falls to Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung (automobile liability insurance)

For what it’s worth, “The Awful German Language” was not Twain’s only foray into German philology. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he came up with Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackpfeifenmachersgesellschafft (İstanbul bagpipe maker company, and remember it’s İstanbul, not Constantinople), which my Teutonically-enabled friends will be quick to point out is improperly formed, but it makes a heck of a magic word. But this segues into the fact that when it comes to smashing words together, the Germans are rank amateurs when compared to Turkish.

turkish-flag-300x225

Avrupalılaştırılamayabilenlerdenmısınız? is a complete sentence, a question which means “Are you one of those who is not easily able to be Europeanized?”

Here’s how it’s formed:

  • Avrupa: Europe
  • Avrupa-lı: European
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-mak: become European
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑mak: to make European (mak is an infinitive ending)
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑ı‑l‑mak: (reflexive) to be made European (‑l‑ is a linking consonant)
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tir‑ıl‑abil‑mek: to be capable of being Europeanized (‑mek is again the infinitive ending, changed as a result of vowel harmony)
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑ıl‑ama‑mak: not to be capable of being Europeanized
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑ıl‑ama‑y‑abil‑mek: this time the ‑abil is probability: that there is a probability that one may  not be capable of being Europeanized
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑ıl‑ama‑y‑abil‑en: the one that may not be capable of being Europeanized
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑ıl‑ama‑y‑abil‑en‑ler: the ones…..(‑ler, ‑lar is the plural suffix)
  • Avrupa-lı-laş-tır‑ıl‑ama‑y‑abil‑en‑ler‑den: of or from the ones who may not be capable of being Europeanized
  • mı? ‑ question tag (legally, this should be written separately, but it is a very common mistake not to).
  • mısınız? ‑ are you (formal or plural)

To be fair, this is a rather contrived sentence, but it’s legal and grammatical and shows how Turkish agglutination works. Pope John XXIII is reported to have said, at one point during his ten years in İstanbul as Papal Nuncio, “I am fond of the Turks…  It is my special intention, as an exercise in mortification, to learn the Turkish language.” Mortification is right.

I spent about 10 years associating with Turks, the Turkish language, and Turkey, and I would like to go on record as saying that John had the right idea. They’re lovely people, with a beautiful country and a hellish but intriguing language. I keep chipping away at Turkish, and perhaps in one or two more lifetimes I’ll be able to say more than “Günaydın, nasılsınız?”. As Robert Sheckley’s character said in “Shall we have a little talk?“, “Stop agglutinating, dammit!”

Given the events taking place in Turkey at this very moment, I pause to wish the good people of this land every good thing, and the right to freedom and self-determination.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Just kidding. All the verbs are in the appendices.