Who Think Post Modern Prophet has debunked the scientific principle of common decent?

Has Post Modern Prophet debunked common decent?

  • Yes he has debunked common decent

    Votes: 2 18.2%

  • No he has failed to debunk common decent

    Votes: 9 81.8%
  • Total voters
    11
  • Poll closed .
Damocles said:
I had to relearn how to spell diarrhea... Because I learned the Brit way back in 2nd grade...

diarrhoea

Extemporaneous letters are fun.

Here are a few "u's" to add as you want above, for the Brits among us... (or is that amoung?)

What I really want to know is why we dropped the "i" out of Aluminum... I mean, really. In every other language that I know it is aluminium...
Click to expand...

More to the point, why don't you say titanum, beryllum and magnesum as well?
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
I have given up trying to get Mott to differentiate between too and to, he is one of the brightest people on here but his spelling is a nightmare at times. As for spelt, that is a normal usage in proper English as opposed to the variant you use in the former colonies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:American_and_British_English_differences/Spelled_v_Spelt
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I have a huge problem with accidentally spelling a word using a spelling that's phonetically the same but actually describes a different word. The worst case is probably when I put "one" in place of "won". In the case of words like to and too, they're and their, it's pretty hopeless. I often catch these errors when re-reading what I've written, and god knows how often it must occur when I don't do so.
 
When I am emperor, I will implement spelling reform, and all words that are pronounced the same way will be spelled the same way. This will solve my problem.
 
Damocles said:
I had to relearn how to spell diarrhea... Because I learned the Brit way back in 2nd grade...

diarrhoea

Extemporaneous letters are fun.

Here are a few "u's" to add as you want above, for the Brits among us... (or is that amoung?)

What I really want to know is why we dropped the "i" out of Aluminum... I mean, really. In every other language that I know it is aluminium...
Click to expand...

How often did you need to use the word diarrhoea in the second grade?
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Spelled or spelt are equally valid in English English.
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I often like to come up with new* words, like "unrememberable", and when people call me on it because it's "not a word", respond by saying "it's a valid combination of morphemes". Which is absolutely true. They also can't formulate a response, because they've never actually taken a course on linguistics and don't know what the fuck I"m talking about. Grammar Nazi's know nothing about language. We have sort of an obsession in the modern age with "correct" grammar, treating it as something objective that should never change. But human language isn't a formal system like math. There's not anything objective about it. It's honestly damaging to language to attempt to pretend like it's a formal system.

And really, some pieces of "incorrect grammar" actually make the language more clear. For instance, English used to have a singular second person pronoun, thou, and a plural form, ye. Then that fell out of usage, and was replaced with you. That leaves English as one of the only languages without singular and plural second person pronouns, and is inconsistent with the first and third person pronouns of the language. So peoples develop "y'all" and other variations of the second person plural in order to make the language clearer, more concise, and more consistent. But then grammar Nazi's come in and declare that "wrong", as if some child had answered an arithmetic question in the wrong way. How on Earth does that make sense?

At best, this could be said to be a matter of aesthetics. Some people like their language tidier than others do. Some people dislike Justin Bieber, others do not. It's not a case of one person being "wrong" and the other being "right".

*BTW, I spelled this as "knew" when I first wrote it out.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
English isn't the only language with silent letters, French is notorious for the silent letters as in escargot, beaucoup, froid and trois.
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A lot of the "silent letters" in English are a result of the fact that most spellings were basically frozen in stone from since the time when printing was developed, even though language has changed a great deal. For instance, the spelling "knight" makes absolutely no sense in modern English. It doesn't resemble the actually phonemic pronunciation at all. However, back in the 15th century, you really did say "knight" something like that. I imagine that French suffers from the same problem.

Aoxomoxoa said:
If you think that is bad then your mind would boggle at Thai where consonants can be initial or final, meaning that the sound can be different depending on whether it is at the start of a word or the end.
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Actually the romanization schemes of eastern languages typically make a great deal more sense than our own spelling system, once you know the rules. To a westerner that naively walks in and starts trying to pronounce the words, they will probably get them entirely wrong. But to someone who actually understands it, the spelling is going to resemble the actual pronunciation with much more consistency than English. This makes sense, because these system were typically developed sometime in the 20th century or so, so they had less time to change, and were developed by a few guys guy writing down a consistent set of rules, rather than printers randomly coming to a consensus as to which spelling would match which word half a millenium ago. Now, the actual writing systems these guys developed for themselves are an entirely different story. I'm kind of astounded that they're still in use.

Also, Eastern languages typically have a low density of morphemes per a word (something that is referred to as an "isolating" language), so you get systems with "initials" and "finals" because most words just have an initial and final syllable.
 
Also, our alphabet actually doesn't match our phonemes. There are 4 vowels and 22 consonants in the Latin alphabet. But there are actually something like 20 vowels and 25-30 consonants in the actual language.
 
I can relate to Mott's dilemma. When I was in second-grade, and going over my weekly spelling words, I got into a debate with my mom about the merits of the word "island." She finally argued that, at least it looks prettier this way. :D
 
General Sherman said:
I often like to come up with new* words, like "unrememberable", and when people call me on it because it's "not a word", respond by saying "it's a valid combination of morphemes". Which is absolutely true. They also can't formulate a response, because they've never actually taken a course on linguistics and don't know what the fuck I"m talking about. Grammar Nazi's know nothing about language. We have sort of an obsession in the modern age with "correct" grammar, treating it as something objective that should never change. But human language isn't a formal system like math. There's not anything objective about it. It's honestly damaging to language to attempt to pretend like it's a formal system.

And really, some pieces of "incorrect grammar" actually make the language more clear. For instance, English used to have a singular second person pronoun, thou, and a plural form, ye. Then that fell out of usage, and was replaced with you. That leaves English as one of the only languages without singular and plural second person pronouns, and is inconsistent with the first and third person pronouns of the language. So peoples develop "y'all" and other variations of the second person plural in order to make the language clearer, more concise, and more consistent. But then grammar Nazi's come in and declare that "wrong", as if some child had answered an arithmetic question in the wrong way. How on Earth does that make sense?

At best, this could be said to be a matter of aesthetics. Some people like their language tidier than others do. Some people dislike Justin Bieber, others do not. It's not a case of one person being "wrong" and the other being "right".

*BTW, I spelled this as "knew" when I first wrote it out.
Click to expand...

LOL...wtf. you crack me up.
 
personally, I think it would be progress if we established a Board of Fixing Really Stupid Spellings......screw "i before e except after c" and order it spel(t) receeve and beleeve......
 
General Chamberlain said:
Hey, WM, math is an evolving language as well. We're not still speaking the same language that Greek geometry experts spoke...
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Most of the things the Greek geometry experts said are still valid. They had a set of axioms defining a formal system, and they offered proofs. True, we've defined other formal systems since then. We've explored further. We may use different symbols for the same things. But the proofs the Greeks came up weren't a matter of opinion. If you differ when it comes to mathematics, someones wrong. Or both of you are. A formal system is probably the closest we can come to objective truth - because a formal system is a universe that works according to rules entirely in your head.

It depends upon nothing in the outside world, and doesn't necessarily even describe anything in the outside world. It's only something that's supposed to model the natural world; although you can just as easily make a formal system that doesn't for the purpose of intellectual masturbation. Then again, there've been a great deal of people working on formal systems that they believed would have no practical applications, people who've been quite proud of the fact that they believed their work was useless, because it could never be used for war and other such purposes, when it actually turns out to have a great deal of practical implications.
 
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