Week 1 Update, Spring

[willowisp]

I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac and was one of the three people who posted a response on time. I may well also be the only one who did what the assignment asked. Hooray for reading comprehension.

Tuesdays and Thursdays look like they're going to be fun, interesting, and hellish. I have Tolkien, feminist theory, food and identity (aka senior seminar) and theory of language. On the first day of language we watched the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok". I already liked the professor from last semester; this just made me like him all the more.

In non-school-related news, I won a teddy bear in a raffle. Sadly, as it is a breast cancer awareness bear, I already have a name for her (my other two were named for my grandmother and my best friend Heather, both of whom died from breast cancer), though in this case the namesake is still alive and will hopefully be so for a long time.

Comments

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

I will keep my fingers crossed and say a prayer that your bear's namesake does indeed live for a very long time.

Just send me your address and I'll get her on her way.

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

we watched the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok"

Ok, I'm curious what he/the class had to say about this. I've always hated that episode -- the language structure just seems absurd and unsustainable to me. So I wonder what somebody who has, you know, actual background in languages and semantics would have to say about it.

[willowisp.livejournal.com]

I think he's more interested in the notion of confounding the universal translator. He considers that the most unrealistic of the <tech>, even more so than the transporter. Some of the things we've been studying in class seem to be as arbitrary and unsustainable as the one on Trek. It's no wonder translating is so difficult.

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

He considers that the most unrealistic of the tech

cough Arguing about which ST tech is most unrealistic is like arguing whether it would be more painful to be tortured to death by the rack in Spain or by the death of a thousand cuts in China.

That said, yes, clearly there are some absolutely untranslatable things, even among human languages. Still, I found the synthetic language they portrayed to be wildly implausible. I mean, how the hell did they raise children if they could only talk in terms of analogy to historical events? How do you even say what happened at that event -- establish raw, factual data -- if you can only make reference to history? Somewhere you have to be able to ground it out to relatively concrete terms.

I'm far from having any real expertise with languages, but I really have trouble conceiving of a human language that works that way. But hey, I'd be happy to learn about the wild things that languages do. ;-) So what have you studied that's as unsustainable as the trek language?