The number system is called the "Major System"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
Competition
http://www.memoriad.com/
Less common languages:
http://www.openlanguages.net/
I = icepick
We = (potter's) wheel
You boy = boiler
You girl = Grill
You Couple = Cable (like a cable car, or a zip line)
You girls = Gills
You boys = Bus
He = (boot) heel
She = Sheet
They two men = Tomb (stone)
They two woman = Tow (truck)
They Gentlemen = Gingerbread Man
They Ladies = Ladles
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
The "Practice" of various World Religions
As I was running today, I was thinking about the focus of various world religions and what there actual "practice" rather than cosmology or belief system was centered on. Thinking of Max Weber's landmark sociological study of Protestantism for example, in "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," it seems apparent that the core focus of the practice of Protestantism is Mastery, which has mostly expressed through market capitalism since the inception of this branch of Christianity. Continuing along this strain of thought I was musing that the following might be the core elements of practice in the various major religious movement of the world:
1) Protestantism: Mastery (The efforts of the individual being of paramount importance.)
2) Catholicism: Service (Doing your duty in attendance, giving to charity, vows of poverty, serving the poor.)
3) Judaism: Tribalism (Taking care of your brethren, supporting the homeland.)
4) Sunni Islam: Detachment (through the practice of prayer and fasting to detach from temporarily and materialism.)
5) Shia Islam: Support of Hierarchy (through annual self punishment for not protecting ancient leaders as a group, and through stringent familial and societal hierarchy reinforcement.)
6) Sufi Islam: Serenity (Through the exercise of perceptual discipline and introspective exercises.)
7) Hinduism: Acceptance? (Through knowing and behaving according to your karmic place and time?)
8) Buddhism: Harmlessness? (Through avoiding causes of pain or injury effecting oneself or others?)
9) Confucianism: Stability (Not rocking the boat anywhere or in anything when at all possible and respecting elders and everything they and society have established?)
10) Baha'ism: Education (Learning and then Teaching, viewed as the means towards world peace and unity)
1) Protestantism: Mastery (The efforts of the individual being of paramount importance.)
2) Catholicism: Service (Doing your duty in attendance, giving to charity, vows of poverty, serving the poor.)
3) Judaism: Tribalism (Taking care of your brethren, supporting the homeland.)
4) Sunni Islam: Detachment (through the practice of prayer and fasting to detach from temporarily and materialism.)
5) Shia Islam: Support of Hierarchy (through annual self punishment for not protecting ancient leaders as a group, and through stringent familial and societal hierarchy reinforcement.)
6) Sufi Islam: Serenity (Through the exercise of perceptual discipline and introspective exercises.)
7) Hinduism: Acceptance? (Through knowing and behaving according to your karmic place and time?)
8) Buddhism: Harmlessness? (Through avoiding causes of pain or injury effecting oneself or others?)
9) Confucianism: Stability (Not rocking the boat anywhere or in anything when at all possible and respecting elders and everything they and society have established?)
10) Baha'ism: Education (Learning and then Teaching, viewed as the means towards world peace and unity)
Friday, October 22, 2010
Arabic Perfect and Imperfect Verb Tenses
Two words: Arising and Arisen. Think daily cycle of the sun rising and setting. Time is not linear in Arabic, and it is not a progressive staircase whatsoever at all. Time is cycle. Hence the paradigm latent in the words arising and arisen is helpful for understanding these tenses.
The Mother Load of Arabic Source Documents
http://www.wilbourhall.org/index.html#AR
PDF | Description |
Wright's Arabic Grammar Vol I Corrected Google Scan | |
Wright's Arabic Grammar Vol I [Million Books Project] | |
Wright's Arabic Grammar Vol II Corrected Google Scan | |
Wright's Arabic Grammar Vol II[Million Books Project] | |
Hans Wehr's Arabic- English Dictionary [Million Books Project] | |
| Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Arabic to Latin Dictionary) George W. Freytag (1830-37) [Million Books Project] | |
| Lexicon Arabico-Latinum ex opere suo maiore in usum Tironum excerptum.(An abridgement of the edition above for the use of students)George W. Freytag (1837)[Google Books] | |
Van Dyke Bible (Arabic). Microsoft Word. | |
| Chrestomathia Arabica. Arabic reader with Latin notes. Kosegarten 1828[Google Books] | |
Van Dyke Bible (Arabic). PDF | |
Concordance to the Quran and Van Dyke Bible. (Lists occurrences and morphology of all words in both texts) | |
| Lexicon | |
| Editio Princeps of the Latin Quran. 1543. Uncorrected.[Google Books] | |
| One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة Kitāb 'alf layla wa-layla; ) Edited by W.H.McNaughten, Esq. Four Volumes. Arabic. London/Calcutta. 1839-1842. Uncorrected.[Google Books] | |
| Tausend und Eine Nacht Arabisch Nach einer Handschrift aus Tunis.[One Thousand and One Nights - Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة Kitāb 'alf layla wa-layla; )]Ed. Habicht. German introduction. Arabic Text. 12 volumes. 1825-1838.Uncorrected [Google Books] | |
| The Book of The Thousand Nights and One Night English translation by John Payne. London: 1901. Volumes I-IX: The Thousand Nights and One Night Volumes X-XII: Tales From the Arabic Volumes XIII: Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp [Million Books Project] | |
| The Book of a Thousand Nights and One: Its History and Character. John Payne 1884 [Google Books] | |
| Link to various English translations of the the Thousand and One Nights | |
Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome | |
The late G.M. Browne, former professor of Classics at Harvard and of the Classics and Linguistics at the University of Illinois, suggested that a good way for non-Muslims to learn pointed Arabic is by reading the Van Dyke Bible. It is useful to compare the Arabic constructions with those of the Latin Vulgate, hence its inclusion in the above list. | |
Philippians 2:13, Causality in Semitic Measures? Hebrew/Arabic connection?
God it is who is working in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
Young's Literal Translation
Philippians 2:13
Young's Literal Translation
Philippians 2:13
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Whorf: my hero
“Some researchers, like Whorf who formulated the ‘linguistic relativity’ hypothesis, consider the characteristics of the language spoken by a certain group of people to be the factor that denoted how they think and how they visualize the realities they live. The structure and other aspects of language are therefore considered to be basic factors in the way a given society visualizes the world”. A strong statement to make and one that is very controversial in the world of linguistics.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Indiana university Arabic measures
Although the Semitic languages do differ from one another--just as French and Spanish do--they share one characteristic that facilitated transition from one to another. This is a reliance on verbs made up of three consonants (the "tri-consonantal root," as it is sometimes called) as the basic building blocks from which other elements of the language are derived, following a surprisingly regular (or at least it may seem so to Indo-European language speakers) set of word patterns. In Arabic, for example, the three consonants *sh-11r-b convey a basic idea equivalent to the English word "drink." From this "root" has been derived a simple verb "sharaba," meaning "he drank." The simple verb (generally called "Form I" or "Measure I") can then be altered in various ways to extend and refine the verbal idea in different directions. For instance, one can pronounce emphatically ("double") the second consonant of the root to convey the idea of making someone or something else do the action referred to by the Form I verb. In a smaller number of cases, such a "Form II" verb can have an intensive meaning. With "sharaba," when the "r" is doubled, both meanings can be found. "Sharraba" therefore can mean either "he made (him/it) drink," "he watered (it)," or "he drenched (it)," "he soaked it" (i.e., "he watered it intensively"). On the other hand, lengthening the vowel following the first consonant ("shaaraba," generally transliterated as "sharaba," with a macron indicating the lengthened vowel) often conveys the idea of doing the Form I action with someone or something else, or doing the action over a period of time. Thus "sharaba" means "to have a drink with (someone)," "to drink in (someone’s) company." If one prefixes an additional consonant "t" to the Form II verb, the meaning generally becomes passive or reflexive. In the case of "tasharraba," the usual meaning is a reflexive of the intensive meaning of the Form II: "he/it got drenched/soaked," "he/it soaked (s.th.) up." Originally, Arabic had fifteenth such derivational patterns, but only ten are in common use today and one of those, Form IX, is used only in very limited circumstances, because it can be applied only to verbs expressing colors ("he/it turned red") or defects ("he/it was one-eyed").
There are similar patterns used to form nouns, adjectives and even (sometimes) prepositions and other parts of speech. For example to prefix the syllable "ma" to a root, make the first consonant vowelless, and then follow the second consonant with the vowel "a" results in a noun that refers to either the place (most common) or the time when the verbal action occurs. In the case of the root *sh-r-b, for example, "mashrab" means most generally "place for drinking," which can be used to refer more specifically to such varied objects as a watering hole, a drinking trough, a fountain or a restaurant bar.
Another such "noun pattern" is the active participle pattern (‘ism fa‘il) where the first vowel of the root is a lengthened "a" placed immediately after the initial consonant and a second vowel, "i" is inserted between the second and third root letters. One of the most common uses of these nouns is to designate the person or thing that performs the action of the Form I verb. From *sh-r-b, then, one can derive the noun "sharib." One of the meanings of "sharib" is "drinker." English, somewhat similarly, uses the suffix *-er to indicate the doer of a verbal action. But English is much less regular in the way it uses such suffixes and prefixes than Arabic. "Drink-er" may illustrate our general rule perfectly, but "actor" and "flier" show that sometimes irregular vowel changes occur when these words are derived. Similarly, the nouns "pilot" and "workman" show that we can use entirely different forms to designate the doer of the action.
There are similar patterns used to form nouns, adjectives and even (sometimes) prepositions and other parts of speech. For example to prefix the syllable "ma" to a root, make the first consonant vowelless, and then follow the second consonant with the vowel "a" results in a noun that refers to either the place (most common) or the time when the verbal action occurs. In the case of the root *sh-r-b, for example, "mashrab" means most generally "place for drinking," which can be used to refer more specifically to such varied objects as a watering hole, a drinking trough, a fountain or a restaurant bar.
Another such "noun pattern" is the active participle pattern (‘ism fa‘il) where the first vowel of the root is a lengthened "a" placed immediately after the initial consonant and a second vowel, "i" is inserted between the second and third root letters. One of the most common uses of these nouns is to designate the person or thing that performs the action of the Form I verb. From *sh-r-b, then, one can derive the noun "sharib." One of the meanings of "sharib" is "drinker." English, somewhat similarly, uses the suffix *-er to indicate the doer of a verbal action. But English is much less regular in the way it uses such suffixes and prefixes than Arabic. "Drink-er" may illustrate our general rule perfectly, but "actor" and "flier" show that sometimes irregular vowel changes occur when these words are derived. Similarly, the nouns "pilot" and "workman" show that we can use entirely different forms to designate the doer of the action.
New York Times -- A reason to vote party-line Democrat
In Climate Denial, Again
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.
The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.
Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.
A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.
In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.
According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)
The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.
Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.
In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”
Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Intellectual Fertilizer Intro + Language as a World View
It has occurred to me that it would be useful to keep a running log of some of the more interesting ideas I read online or elsewhere that continually refine the overall schemata of ideas in my mind that shape and influence what I chose to learn and how I learn it. To that end, here is my first posting for this dreamscapers schemata source material:
Quote:
http://www.bartleby.com/186/6.html
...it must be obvious to any one who has thought about the question at all or who has felt something of the spirit of a foreign language that there is such a thing as a basic plan, a certain cut, to each language. This type or plan or structural “genius” of the language is something much more fundamental, much more pervasive, than any single feature of it that we can mention, nor can we gain an adequate idea of its nature by a mere recital of the sundry facts that make up the grammar of the language. When we pass from Latin to Russian, we feel that it is approximately the same horizon that bounds our view, even though the near, familiar landmarks have changed. When we come to English, we seem to notice that the hills have dipped down a little, yet we recognize the general lay of the land. And when we have arrived at Chinese, it is an utterly different sky that is looking down upon us. We can translate these metaphors and say that all languages differ from one another but that certain ones differ far more than others. This is tantamount to saying that it is possible to group them into morphological types.
Quote:
http://www.bartleby.com/186/6.html
...it must be obvious to any one who has thought about the question at all or who has felt something of the spirit of a foreign language that there is such a thing as a basic plan, a certain cut, to each language. This type or plan or structural “genius” of the language is something much more fundamental, much more pervasive, than any single feature of it that we can mention, nor can we gain an adequate idea of its nature by a mere recital of the sundry facts that make up the grammar of the language. When we pass from Latin to Russian, we feel that it is approximately the same horizon that bounds our view, even though the near, familiar landmarks have changed. When we come to English, we seem to notice that the hills have dipped down a little, yet we recognize the general lay of the land. And when we have arrived at Chinese, it is an utterly different sky that is looking down upon us. We can translate these metaphors and say that all languages differ from one another but that certain ones differ far more than others. This is tantamount to saying that it is possible to group them into morphological types.
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