As a theoretical linguist, I’m going to stay out of this one, as I would end up hi-jacking the thread to the extent of a coursebook, and we’d have the philosopher and those who’ve grown up on logic for computer programming among you disagreeing at length for evermore. But a couple of things:
I love Rodix’ comment:
From the age of 12 to the age of 21 my home was in France and just independent French-speaking Morocco, and from all the French people around the mantra was that French is the only logical language! Thank you Rodix, you have set the world to rights.
As I see it, there is an underlying logic to all languages; it’s just that they all use a different underlying logic … English, French, Chinese, Spanish, German, Thai, Japanese, Latin, Greek … In learning a foreign language people generally think in terms of pronunciation (getting their tongue round it), words (especially in non-cognate languages), and inflexional forms and harmony between them (what is generally termed “grammar”, e.g. “Chinese and Thai have no grammar to learn!”). To me, the problem is getting to grips with the underlying logic … if you get that, so much else falls into place. In the case of two closely cognate languages like Spanish and French, the difference is not great, so in that sense French speakers should not have too much trouble learning Spanish; French and English are further apart, so we each of us, to greater or lesser extent have problems; English and Chinese are so far apart in their logic, that … well a lifetime of work is truly needed, unless you’re lucky enough to have gone through a childhood acquiring both!
As a sop to the philosophers and logic-based among you, H.P. Grice, whose work is really the starting point of Pragmatics, titled his first major paper “Logic and Conversation”, and a major pre-occupation in his work was the correspondence or otherwise between logical &, ⋁ and → and the natural language “and”, “or” and “if”.
And as I said in my earlier posts, those “rules of grammar” were imposed by people who came from a preconceived idea of what a language should be, rather than observing how the language actually worked, and their prescriptions have been handed down as if written on tablets of stone.
A very excellent statement. My moment of comprehension with Japanese was when I finally got the whole “no, this language really is head-last” part. A lot of the grammar just clicked for me at that point.
Hm, that’s a good question. I think it’s just a colloquial idiom, “Until you go and X”. In my mind, it implies a “things were fine until X happened”.
Now that I think about it, it’s short for “they go ahead and X”. As in, “we put roadblocks in their way, but they still went ahead”. As in a, defying-lack-of-permission sort of thing.
Still colloquial, though.
In my case, that’s because that wasn’t what was said. I basically hijacked valleygirl in order to indicate that was paraphrasing, as opposed to quoting.
That is, there’s a difference between “She said ‘I’m going to the store’” and “She was like, ‘I’m going to the store’”. The first indicates that she actually said those words; the second indicates it was a summary or paraphrase; in reality, she might have something like “Oh, don’t worry about it, I’ll stop by the store on my way home from work”.
I don’t know how widespread the paraphrase-vs-quote thing is in English-speakers, though.
Yep. But don’t worry, I do the same back, I’m sure
Speaking of double negatives, I presume everybody here is familiar with the old-ish joke:
Professor to class: “As in several languages, a double negative in English can express a positive. But English does not have a double positive that expresses a negative.”
Bored voice from the back of the room: “Yeah yeah.”
I think Im right, but I could be wrong (unlike vic-k, whos always right, even when he is wrong), but Im sure Ive just heard Vic-k (on the other side of the WritersRoom) muttering something along the lines of, “Bless my soul, but, in all my years aboard Scrivener, that is the most illuminating thread I`ve ever read.”
Then I think he muttered something about a migraine attack.
Fluff
“Uptalk” … actually blame California[1]. In 1996 when at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies as a consultant, I was asked if I would spend time recording the examples and exercise keys for a course-book on English pronunciation written by the local project director. The whole book was British English pronunciation and intonation, and not a problem for me till the very last exercise. Recording took two evenings: we had to stop every time a plane took off from the airport, as the studio was right under the take-off flight path with the planes at a couple of hundred metres — the sound-proofing was simply not up to it — and I shared the work with an English woman who had never done any recording and couldn’t repeat a phonological form or an intonation pattern consistently.
So there we were for two evenings, and then we came to the last exercise. The prof. had chosen the speech — about 7 lines — from Kramer vs Kramer in which Dustin Hoffmann is telling the kid that mum isn’t coming back any more. She had transcribed it exactly, including marking up the intonation. I had to record it a couple of dozen times; she kept saying “No, that’s wrong. Your intonation should go up at the end of the sentence!” And I was answering, “But it doesn’t, the standard intonation on a statement is a low fall on the nucleus.” — which is also what her section on intonation had been reinforcing — to which she replied, “But in the film they all go up at the end!” Eventually, I managed to do it to her satisfaction, but thinking all the time that this was totally wrong.
It was only a couple of weeks later, when I was in Beijing on my way home and heard a young American woman talking, that it clicked that she had transcribed American dialect intonation! The prof. had committed the gross error of writing a book based on British English pronunciation and then using an example of American “uptalk” as the key, “bring-it-all-together” exercise … not just that, but a bit of American dialogue, spoken in a clipped British accent — I’ve often been accused of that — with imitation Californian, what I have learnt to call “uptalk”, intonation!
[1] cf, for example, Steven Pinker, 2007 The Stuff of Thought, London, Penguin Books, p. 382.
One thing I kind of scoffed at during the keynote was the “instant on” bit. I mean, everyone knows Mac laptops already are pretty much instant on, right? No long wait screens while waiting for the RAM to get loaded up with hibernation data; no mysterious long pauses while the computer wakes up; no manual button presses required—you just flip open the lid and the thing unsleeps. What could be faster?
Well, I was wrong about that part. This thing really is instant on, even faster than the iPad. You don’t have to paw around at the screen trying to swipe that locking mechanism off. Half of the time, it’s already turned on waiting to go before I even get the lid fully lifted. So, I have to give Apple props for that. Whatever they did to optimise the standby system, it worked.
I do agree with the article in terms of performance. It’s amazing what they are pulling off with this 1.6ghz chip.
As a sort of hypothetical question, do you think it would be feasible to make a MBA 11" one’s only computer, if 90% of the work you did was writing, researching and web-related work? If so, how would one handle storage of digital photos and archives? External hard drive?
I think everyone here uses their Mac 90 % of the time to write, browse on the web, listen to music and do some simple tasks (photo management…). The problem is what you need for 10% of the time. If you need a lot of hard drive space, then a MacBook Air might be a problem. And an external hard drive is 1) inpractial when you need to have it connected all the time, 2) very slow, 3) not very reliable (even more because you might drop it on the floor). If you need a lot of processing power to edit images, or to compile applications, it will br slower. And even 2 GB of memory is not very comfortable now (the 4 GB option could be helpful depending on what you do with a MacBook Air). Finally, the screen is big enough for text, browsing and all, but sometimes it is nice to have something bigger.
It really depends on what you plan to do with your computer, and buying two Mac computers is very expensive, but a MacBook Air as a primary computer has a lot of implications.
RodiX definitely has good advice. It’s the 10–20% that makes the difference between whether or not you need more power, because if you do occasionally crack open Lightroom and Photoshop to edit 40 RAW format images—MacBook Air probably isn’t the best choice for that, especially if you do not have a large desktop screen to plug it into.
If I were to actually consider an Air Only home, I would definitely invest in these three things, in this order of priority:
External hard drive (there is no other solid way to do backups otherwise)
External USB SuperDrive (with no other computer to operate as host, this will help keep you out of pickles that would otherwise require a trip to the Genius Bar)
An external monitor. This will greatly increase your productivity.
Does anyone using the 11.6" 1.6 ghz have any experience running VMware Fusion (or similar products)? I imagine the 4gb ram would be essential – but beyond the ram, how does the processor and new SSD interaction play out in regards to this? Furthermore, does the .2ghz difference between the 1.4 and the 1.6ghz versions really amount to much in matters that require processor (like VMware, or compiling LaTeX)?
I’ve been an Air-only shop for well over a year now and the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. But I do agree a desktop setup is essential for the daily grind otherwise it’s bottle-bottom specs and dowager’s hump not that far down the line. I use a large LED display, a keyboard & magic mouse, and a 1Tb dirve for mirror & Time Machine. I love the speedy startup, the speed of the SSHD (really noticeable compared with an old-style HD); there’s now precious little time overhead in VM, unlike the old days; and call me bozo, but I’m even happy with the speed it runs Aperture 3. I don’t know about video because I don’t do it really; the little I’ve done has been rather s l o w, but if I were doing lots of I’d I would use a different setup.
Only real complaint? I could do with more RAM. 4Gb rather than 2Gb.
Isn’t that the same as the very peculiar English construction, “you can’t but…”, as in “You can’t but wonder what David Cameron thinks he’s doing”? Even odder, the non-negation “you can but” means not "you have no option except but “you can only ” (E.g., “You can but try”.)
That’s why all those Victorians went round the bend when they tried to fit English grammar into Latinate rule.
Unless writing in French*, in which case they’d spend three hundred pages explaining what it didn’t mean. (Stand up at the back there, Prof. Derrida) 8)
*Yes, yes, I know about Heidegger but I can only attack one major Western philosophico-linguistic tradition at a time, n’est-ce wahr?
David Pogue weighs in with a very favourable review, and having tested both the 13" and 11", has some good points on the merits and weaknesses of each.
Huh, I stopped by this post to do a bit of gloating about my UTTERLY BEAUTIFULLY FANTASTIC new MacBook Air 11". You’d think I’d know this forum well enough by now to have expected that after six pages this thread would be about linguistics instead.
But did I mention I got a MacBook Air? And that it it is not not bloody marvellous?
It is like totally PWNing my other machines, yeah? Boyage man.
