Re: Settling an Argument - Assembly *IS* a Language, Right?

hanumizzle@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
hanumizzle@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
hanumizzle@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

One could certainly look at the earliest Sumerian record keeping and
debate about whether or not it constitutes a form of written language:
the rudeness of its forms is comparable even to assembly.

Again, what (if anything) do you know about Sumerian?

What is "rude" about its "forms"?

The limited range of expression is what's rude about early Sumerian
writing:

``Early scripts were incomplete, ambiguous, or complex, or all three.
For example, the oldest Sumerian cuneiform writing could not render
normal prose but was a mere telegraphic shorthand, whose vocabulary was
restricted to names, numerals, units of measure, words for objects
counted, and a few adjectives. That's as if a modern American court
clerk were forced to write "John 27 fat sheep", because English writing
lacked the necessary words and grammar to write "We order John to
deliver the 27 fat sheep he owes to the government." Later Sumerian
cuneiform did become capable of rendering prose, but it did so by the
messy system that I've already described, with mixtures of logograms,
phonetic signs, and unprounced determinatives totaling hundreds of
separate signs.''

-- Jared Diamond, _Guns, Germs, And Steel_

Oh, fer cryin' out loud. One of Diamond's legion of fans showed me his
couple of pages on writing, and they were such crap, I knew he couldn't
be trusted on any topic outside his own field of ornithology, so I have
no intention of reading the book. Or its sequel.

Could you qualify that?

"incomplete, ambiguous, or complex"?? With no explanation, is that
congeries of adjectives supposed to make any sense at all?

"could not" suggests that its goal was to write normal prose, which it
wasn't -- as if "writing normal prose" were something every society
should aspire to. We have such authorities as Plato to argue against
doing so.

And is what I said about early Sumerian script
correct or not? (This is a simple yes or no question.)

It's simply uninterpretable. It makes no more sense than anything I
could say about computer programming.

The attitude I am perceiving in your responses suggests some
measure of disgust that I'm even typing.

No, that you're typing before reading.

But I did read before typing. And everything I have read about Sumerian
script describes such a development from crude record keeping to a more
mature writing system. The original point stands.

In my experience, the Usenetters who complain the most vehemently about
other people on Usenet are the ones who a) spend inordinate amounts of
time here and b) spend inordinate amounts of time arguing with people
they don't like (i.e., trolling).

I have not complained about the person posting these silly posts, just
the silliness of expecting computer languages to have anything to do
with human languages.

And that's not the meaning of "trolling." Trolling is posting
provocative, usually off-topic messages for the purpose of generating
outraged comment. (So I suppose you could be considered to have engaged,
albeit unwittingly, in trolling!)

Do you have a name? That word suggests a Chinese penis.

Here you have clearly crossed the line into unprovoked insults.

It's intended as a suggestion that you find yourself a handle with fewer
unintended associations.

But, yes, I do. If you need to know it, you can find out by looking at
the POSTCARDS file in the VASM development tarball for Vector Linux.

As you may imagine, I don't have the slightest idea what that means. Are
you in fact the only person named in that file?

Normally, I would give a straight answer, but being as my *name* is
immaterial for this discussion, and you are being unusually rude, I
will leave you to find it for yourself. I don't know where you pulled
the ethnic reference from, but for the record, my nick, 'hanumizzle' is
a corruption of Hanuman. Incidentally, one of my best friends is a
software engineer named Sriram, so this actually works out quite well
(Rama and Hanuman).

Quite simply, "Han" is Chinese for 'Chinese' (as is well known to people
who dabble in linguistics), and "mizzle" is a rather quaint and archaic
term for 'penis'.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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