User talk:Diderot/archive20040910

Hey there! Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like this place--I sure do--and want to stay. If you need help on how to title new articles check out Naming conventions, and for help on formatting the pages visit the manual of style. If you need help look at Help and The FAQ, plus if you can't find your answer there, check The Village pump or The Reference Desk! Happy wiki-ing! Alexandros

Thanks for the work you did on Vanir/Aesir theory. Some context: all the text you edited was originally scattered through a number of different articles, from which it was extracted and collated into one page, to minimize the confusion. We'll see what Kenneth Alan has to say about your changes, but I'm glad I'm not the only one anymore who is trying to keep this in balance. Martijn faassen 21:12, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your message of appreciation. As a bit of practical advice when communicating with another Wikipedian the message should be on his "User talk" page rather than his user page. That way the person is notiffied that he has a message. If you put a message on my user page there is a risk that I may not see it for months.


 * My apologies for placing it on the wrong page. I'll stick to user talk pages from now on. Martijn faassen 08:26, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Martijn, I think he meant the message I left him. Diderot 08:28, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Oh, I haven't been reading well, and perhaps I haven't messed with talk pages after all. :) Sorry. Martijn faassen 08:46, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)
 * Diderot's right, but I apologize for not having put in the horizontal line. With the indent that I gave, my message does look as though I'm responding to Martijn's comments. Eclecticology 19:17, 2004 Apr 18 (UTC)

Our colleague User:TDC is quite stubborn in his anti-Castro bias. I have reverted his efforts several times, but they keep re-appearing. Feel free to revert his work there when the opportunity arises. If several people did this just one a day each, it might wear him down. The article Allegations of human rights abuses in Castro's Cuba was simply Human Rights Abuses in Castro's Cuba until I moved it. By having the word "alleged" in the title, readers are forwarned that the contents are highly debatable. Still one needs to accept the fact that right or wrong such allegations continue to be made. Eclecticology 08:18, 2004 Apr 18 (UTC)


 * I moved most of the material to the Fascism article since it's really more germane to fascism than to socialism or communism. If necessary we can put a specific link to the sections in fascism under Stalinism and totalitarianism. AndyL 18:03, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Translation in progress: User:Diderot/French_Third_Republic

Considering your apparent interest in postmodern academics in Fashionable Nonsense, I wanted to invite you to join WikiProject Critical Theory. Snowspinner 15:25, 2 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Actually, we'd be happy to have some focus on philosophy of science and on Latour. Critical theory is such an umbrella term that a variety of perspectives would be helpful. And I'm so totally hateful of Latour that someone who can actually talk about him with sympathy would be really nice. :) Snowspinner 21:44, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Fascism
Could you please weigh in at Talk:Fascism? WHEELER seems to think I'm the only one against his suggestions. AndyL 07:26, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Greetings!
Love the fact that you've done professional translation. I've worked on professional translation software, so I guess that makes us, what, third cousins? Please see Multilingualism [oops! --ed.] and correct my estimates of your fluency on Translators. +sj+ 04:39, 2004 May 16 (UTC)

Actually, I work on profession translation software too, computer aided translation and machine translation in particular. We're probably competitors.

My professional translation experience is largely of the past tense variety - I get paid to write LISP code nowadays. I see nothing at Multilinguism. "Canadjan" and "Joual" are Canadian jokes, from an old book called "Canadjan, eh?" which pointed out that while Canada's official languages are English and French, 98% of the Canadian population speaks either Canadjan or Joual, and French and English are rarely heard outside of official discourse. I'm of two minds whether to keep the joke on the Translators page, but it's okay for the moment. Diderot 11:54, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
 * well, not competitors any more! I meant Multilingualism, excuse me.    Joke noted... +sj +  07:16, 2004 May 25 (UTC)

(TGG debate continued from )

Hi Diderot, hope you don't mind me giving a response here...

Move-alpha does not in itself place any restrictions on movement, but this is because those restrictions have been factored out of the movement operation itself and distributed to other modules of the grammar. This goes towards the goal of eliminating construction-specific transformations, which is entirely sensible. In practice, move-alpha cannot move anything anywhere; here are some of the major conditions on its application: So your statement that there are no restrictions on Move-alpha is true only in the technical sense that these restrictions are not built into the rule itself (Although in derivational theories, locality conditions are built into the definition of move-alpha, since they are no longer conditions on where traces may occur in a representation, but conditions on movement itself.)
 * Structure preservation &mdash; heads can only move to head positions; XPs can only move to specifier positions, etc.
 * Economy of derivation &mdash; movement must occur in order to check uninterpretable features. The existance of such features is independently motivated by redundant agreement morphology.
 * Locality conditions on movement. In current minimalist theory, this would involve some kind of cyclicity condition (perhaps derivided from the need to check "strong" features quickly) and something resembling Relativized Minimality (i.e. that movement cannot "skip" a suitable position).

I must admit I'm not very well read in the literature on Chomskyan analyses of free word order languages; suffice it so say, there is such a literature. True, TGG has to resort to a lot of movement operations to derive the various word orders, but there is independent evidence for these movements (e.g. quantifer scope, positioning of adverbials). In any case, stipulating movements is not much worse than stipulating different underlying word orders, even if independent evidence is lacking. I don't doubt that the current theory of word order variation is wrong, just as every other significant linguistic theory probabaly is. However, if one accepts Chomsky's epistemological argument for a universal grammar, one must expect a certain amount of complexity in descriptive accounts, given that these must be based on a small set of universal principles, rather than whatever rules or principles make it easiest to describe one particular language.

The accusation that Chomskyan theories only make sense for English is a common one, but I don't see a great deal of evidence for it &mdash; TGG research certainly covers a wide range of languages these days. The Principles and Parameters approach imposes a pretty harsh discipline on descriptive theories, so it's only to be expected that descriptive adequacy will suffer somewhat in the persuit of explanatory adequacy.

I'm not sure to what degree the popularity of TGG dropped off in the 70s-90s. It certainly has less of a monopoly these days, but that might just as well be due to the field expanding and new approaches being developed alongside it. I don't think there's been any mass-defection (as it were) of Chomskyan linguists to other theories (although of course there are some academics who will go from one fashionable theory to the next without a second thought ;)

HPSG doesn't radically reject TGG at all &mdash; it's pretty similar really. Pollard and Sag's book on it certainly gives TGG analyses quite a high regard, although of course in many cases they suggest alternatives. Still, the structure of the clause, for example, is not radically different in HPSG. HPSG perhaps even has different levels of representation (you could see the SYNSEM/PHON distinction as corresponding roughly to the LF/PF distinction). Personally, I see HPSG as a very Chomskyan theory, at least in terms of its general philosophy. The difference is mostly that it has a precise formalism, and that it does not use movement (although it does have gaps in the syntax of some kind, if I remember correctly).

Finally, I'd like to agree with you that we must get some better coverage of linguistics on Wikipedia. I'm at least a biased as you are, unfortunately (I'm doing a degree in linguistics in a very pro-Chomsky department), but at least we should have a pretty good range of knowledge. Cadr

Cadr - I'm sorry, I have exams all week and can't really get into this now. You can respond to this, and I'll try to take it up at the end of the week after my Russian exam.

First - the Chomskyan analyses of languages with freer word order than English are not widely read because they're often not highly regarded. It is difficult to assert that some of these languages have a natural, default word order in all cases - at which point the notion that an internal ordering has to be transformed in order to get surface structures becomes hard to take. Slavic linguistics in particular has been vocal in rejecting the Chomskyan approach. Their approach rejects the notion of movement, seeing deep structure as explicitly non-linear and surface structures as the result of a mapping from deep structures rather than a transformation of them.

As for HPSG - did we read the same book? HPSG is built atop GPSG, which was explicitly non-transformational. Pollard and Sag genuflect towards Chomsky in discussing the role of formal grammar and the generative paradigm in their formalism, but then turn around and set out very explicitly non-transformational mechanisms for everything that was perviously held to require a transformation. HPSG has been particularly well received in the German- and Dutch-speaking world because the TG theories about German all assumed either SVO or SOV word order to be the natural, underlying, deep structure of German. By eliminating this highly unnatural belief about the German language, GPSG and HPSG were able to gain far greater acceptance in Germany. There was a period in the 80s when German linguistics students in Chomskyan departments wrote their theses on problems in English rather than German, because the TG tools they had were so ill-disposed to German.

You might also read Sag's interview with Ta!.


 * It is for reasons like that that I got involved in GPSG - the possibility of solving problems like the interaction between coordination and extraction - actually predicting complex facts that are difficult or impossible to state precisely within transformational theories. So you see my attraction to nontransformational approaches to syntax was based on purely linguistic grounds that have nothing to do with weak generative capacity, worst-case recognition results or any other mathematical property. It may seem paradoxical, but it is on these purely Chomskyan grounds that I don't do GB, and why I got involved with theories like GPSG, and now HPSG.

As for moving the constraints out of the grammar - that is the whole point of lexicalist arguments against TG. Once you have unloaded all the productive features out of your grammar, you're just using a very bizarre framework to lexical dependency syntax, which eliminates any value in universal grammar at all. At best, you end up doing constraint-based grammar like Sag and Pollard where you end up adding at most constraints to a system where all the real rules are bound up in the lexicon.

Thanks for the response. I'm also a little tied up with work at the moment, so I may as well respond next week or so. I don't expect either of us is going to change the other's mind to any great degree, but it's still been an interesting discussion for me so far. Good luck with the exam. Cadr

May 25 it is then. L'anniversaire de ma petite belle nièce. Thank you for the additional info in "Eskimo." I was working on the basis of Freeman's etymology - as a native Inuk speaker and a capable writer, I accepted that she knew what she was talking about. Further references by her to the term "Eskimo" in the Canadian Encyclopedia refer only to the "eater of raw meat" derivation, but I was not sure whether that was because she wanted to avoid offending Cree readers or whether some kind of political pressure had been placed on her by the Encyclopedia. (It also occurred to me that she may have well just discovered she was wrong.) I'm curious, though, as Freeman says, Inuit are not at all ashamed of eating raw meat, and though it may not be any longer true among the youth (who have discovered potato chips and Coke), it is still considered quite tasty, so why would the Inuit see it as offensive, except as a label put on them by outsiders? (And, though it is definitely not on my list of favorites, I have a friend who feels meat is overcooked if sunshine is allowed to fall on it.)

Anyway, I will leave tha article as it stands, If you wish to remove references to what you describe as questional etymology, please by all means do so. I will take no offense.

Salut.

Denni 23:57, 2004 May 20 (UTC)

Denni - this etymology really is very widespread. Both Cree and Inuit alike often believe it, but there just isn't any historical support for it. I heard it as a kid in Iqaluit, probably the same way Freeman did, by living there when the government started suppressing the word "Eskimo." It seems that it's only the Plains Ojibwa that actually call them a name that might be translated as having someting to do with raw meat, and it seems likely that it's just a coincidence. Very capable and intelligent people believe very silly things about languages and etymologies - the whole "niggardly" fiasco is an excellent example. I've even heard a few Inuit tell you all about the three zillion words they have for snow, when they - debateably - have two words that could be correctly translated as "snow" in English. Diderot 19:28, 21 May 2004 (UTC)


 * LOL! I think there are more words for specific types of snow in English than there are in Inuktitut. I've always found that breathless "did you know that..." statement amusing myself. BTW - would you be willing to add some of hat you said above to the article? I think it's germane, interesting, and certainly not well-known.Denni 19:37, 2004 May 21 (UTC)


 * Sure - but I need to get back to using Wikipedia as a study aide by adding Chinese words to Wiktionary for the moment. I've been thinking about expanding quite a few entries in linguistics and in the languages I've studied.  But, there's always work in real life to do...  Diderot 19:48, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

Maori
Bonjour! WHEN YOUR EXAMS ARE OVER, M. Diderot, you may be interested in hearing that I'm impressed with your idea of tossing a whole Chinese dictionary into Wiktionary. (Would you believe I tried a Random page just for fun and got one that was linked only from one of your pages, which was also linked only from one of your pages?! - so I discovered your current project.) On the same theme, I guess I can increase the Maori language content of Wiktionary by copying from an 1894 grammar book I have OR by persuading some serious Maori students to use Wiktionary for practice! Any tips will be welcome. Kind regards Robin Patterson 05:53, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Robin - Actually, I have some grandiose ideas that I haven't got to time to try to raise. I'm afraid I've decided to forgo a vacation for another five weeks in order to take another class that I really need (I need to learn Dutch ASAP) and to work on my research project, for which I have a grant and will need to finish by October. I wasn't trying to put a whole Chinese dictionary into Wiktionary - just the first volume of a Chinese second language curriculum. I think that that kind of resource would be very helpful in Wiktionary because Wikimedia has become such an important educational resource. I'm sort of a professional lexicographer, so I am very interested and I have some ideas, but I don't know much about Polynesian languages, so I can't help very much directly.

Really, I think Wiktionary could use a major rethink. If I had the time, I might start raising an appropriate fuss for it. I might anyway. But, let me bounce what I have in mind off of you (and, of course, everyone else who has put my Talk page on their watchlist).

I think Wiktionary as it exists is too unstructured to be useful. I think it has been started without any clear conception of how people are going to use it, and I think that's a mistake. This is a real problem with dictionary design in the print world too - one that is only now changing. The most popular dictionaries in the US, for example, are these big, thick "collegiate dictionaries" like the Merriam-Webster and the Random House Collegiate dictionary. People get them as graduation presents when they start university.

They are also useless as dictionaries, suited best as doorstops. They are nowadays updated haphazardly by contract staff and they advertise the sheer quantity of headwords they define without actually containing the word you're looking for.

What I think ought to happen is that the English Wiktionary should be thought of as several separate but somewhat overlapping projects:


 * 1) A real monolingual English dictionary, based on and extending the GCIDE.  The entry form should restrict editors so that they input data in a structured way, and words should be accompanied by useful examples.  There should also be conjugation tables and other structured linguistic information.  Definitions should be single sentences.  Entries should fit a very restricted structure based on modern lexicographic practice.
 * 2) A number of bilingual dictionaries, structured in the same way as the English dictionary, but with foreign headwords and English definitions.  The kinds of structures each language needs will vary somewhat.  For example: English nouns don't need a field for gender, French ones do.  Once again, good lexicographic practices should be implemented here.
 * 3) A collection of domain-specific multilingual glossaries.  Examples may not be necessary; grammatical and lexical category information is probably unnecessary in most cases.  Definitions may be longer, but they should not be encyclopedia entries.  This should follow modern terminological practice, based on the new TBX standard, for example.  We will need an ontology of domains and a way for users to edit domains.
 * 4) Wikabulary (a working title) - a database of specialised terms and usages found in Wikipedia and other Wiki resources and acting as a support document for Wikipedia.  This means covering words and usages found not only in Wikipedia but also in Wikibooks.  We might, for example, have glossaries for Shakespeare's plays, which are hard for native English speakers to read because the language is dated.  This also might mean devising a linking mechanism for novel, difficult, or special words instead of just interwiki links.
 * 5) An encyclopedic dictionary.  This is a common resource in French, but fairly rare in English.  It lies somewhere between a dictionary and an encyclopedia.  The idea is that it contains only the very briefest and most essential information about the entities it describes.  For people, date and place of birth and death, nationality, what they're famous for.  For places, general location, size, what - if anything - has happened there of any importance.  It means different kinds of information for different things, but the idea is brevity - just enough information to prevent cluelessness, but not enough to be engrossing.  It should aspire to the same level of comprehensiveness as Wikipedia, but with brevity and minimalism as its stylistic requirements.

Now, for a language like Maori, you should think about who is going to be using a Maori Wikipedia and Wiktionary. Most if not all native Maori speakers are bilingual. Few people outside NZ learn Maori. You have little chance of publishing a comprehensive, 200,000-article Wikipedia in Maori.

Instead, I would think about the following user communities:


 * 1) Maori-speakers looking for the right way to say or write  something in Maori that they already know how to say in English.
 * 2) Students learning Maori as a second language.
 * 3) Maori-bilingual scholars of Polynesian and NZ culture and life.

The Latin Wikipedia is looking at a similar kind of problem. It's not quite the same, since Latin is dead, but it is similar. No one knows Latin as their sole language, and the Latin community will never build an encyclopedia able to compete with English, French, German, etc. So, they are discussing building the Latin Wikipedia as a document about the Latin world: the Catholic Church, Medieval Europe, the Roman Empire. Very little space is to be devoted to modern topics. The Latin Wikipedia is to be about the Latin world seen through Latin eyes.

You might consider the same sort of path, although not quite the same. Think of the Maori Wiktionary as resource for the student of Maori. First, the student of Maori as a second language will want to see the words from his textbooks in the Wiktionary - both Maori words defined in English in the English dictionary, and defined in Maori in the Maori dictionary. Second, they will want to find the words for the things they want to say - everyday things like computers and hamburgers.

Then, native Maori speakers will end up using Wiktionary and Wikipedia to figure out how to say things in Maori that they know how to say in English. This means things like government ministries and offices, placenames, things from local affairs, maybe a few big international things like country names. By concentrating on New Zealandish things - and things from the rest of the world from a NZ standpoint - you provide coverage both for foreign scholars and Maori speakers looking for language help. It is particularly useful both to Maori and to outsiders if both Pakeha and Maori cultures are described in Maori. This tells them that theirs is a living language, a language suited for discussing the modern world, the real world, the things they really deal with in real life; while at the same time it keeps them connected to the past and to a sense of continuity.

Make sure that every entry in the Maori Wikipedia is linked correctly to the English version. You are trying to say, whenever a Maori uses Wikipedia, you could say this in Maori just as well as in English.

In short, rather than seeking a decultured kind of neutrality, bend the NPOV policy slightly and make Maori language resources Maori-centric. English is a big international language with hundreds of millions of speakers. Avoiding Anglocentrism has proven impossible in the English Wikipedia, but the effort is worthwhile if nothing else because it educates Anglos. The same could be said for French, German, Japanese, and other national and international languages with large monolingual communities. But, Maori and other less widely spoken languages are different. They have few monolinguals, and it would be better for Wikis in those languages to serve their user community in a more personal and more explicit sort of way.

I think this sort of approach is the right way for the smaller languages on Wikipedia to operate. French, German, and Japanese can compete with English for topical coverage. Maori can't. Instead of settling for less, it should aim for better targetted. Where it is impossible to compete in quantity, the smaller languages can compete in quality.

Anyway, that's my opinion anyway. I'm afraid I'm only fluent in a handful of languages, all of which have more than 10 million speakers.

Diderot 14:05, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

Please see my recent comment at Talk:Socialism, addressing your recent edit. -- Jmabel 19:13, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)

Howdy. I initiated the page cholo. In New Mexico, where I grew up, the term was not considered offensive, in as far as it was never said to anyone in a pejorative manner. It was merely descriptive of a style, and if anything, it was a rather value neutral term. Townbully 17:01, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC) (BTW: I accidentally put this in your used page at first.  My mistake -- sorry)

Kenneth Alan
Kenneth Alan's case is now in arbitration. See Requests for arbitration/Kenneth Alan. You may wish to add comment to Requests for arbitration/Kenneth Alan/Evidence Mintguy (T) 14:26, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * I have reverted your vote to accept the Kenneth Alan case. Only an arbitrator can vote there. &rarr;Raul654 13:30, Aug 24, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry - I saw the previous note during a busy workday and clearly didn't pay enough attention. Diderot 15:36, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

new translations
Hi Diderot, how has the summer gone?

You might be interested in some new translations on meta; a major press release and a new wikimedia newsletter. See Translation requests for details. Cheers, +sj +  20:48, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * How has the summer gone? Too quickly and lost in a hellish run of allergies.  God, how did I move to a country where I'm allergic to everthing during the two months of the year when it doesn't rain every day?  I swear, I'm going to buy a Bulgarian dacha and telecommute next summer. (Yeah, and Chinese rocket monkeys are going to fly out of my butt.)


 * But, my research project is now finished and I can finally actually breathe without medication. Anyway, I'm back.  I need to clean up the mess around here and then get back to work.  I'm going to archive this page in a couple of days and set up a structure for some real projects.  I got a load of French translation I wanna do, and I want to start looking at the Dutch Wikipedia to see what I can manage to pull from it.


 * I'll be back in school in October, I think - no Chinese this year, but lots of Russian and Dutch I suspect. So, I'm going to try to keep up my Chinese by writing Wikipedia entries for Chinese vocab.


 * I'm also thinking of downloading Wikipedia and using it as a corpus for writing definitions for Wiktionary. It gives me a chance to apply my research results in a novel context.  I may even get a paper out of it.


 * I'll see what I can do for you for translations. It doesn't look like there's too much translating into English to do for the newsletter.  It's not clear to me when there are non-English originals.


 * There is some tension at the office about a new project, but it's one that I can't do much about. Still, it tends to undermine my slacking off time.  It's better not to be spending tons of time on unpaid projects when there's deadlines.  Once that comes to a close - roughly as soon as the weather starts to suck and school begins - I ought to be able to manage something.


 * Diderot 10:53, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Fashionable Nonsense
In response to your latest comment on Talk:Fashionable Nonsense...
 * As for seeing the foolishness in S&B's examples, I have ask if you have read any of those authors in a context outside of Fashionable Nonsense?

No. And I really would rather not discuss this anymore, since I've already done so way beyond my real level of interest. BTW, you forgot to sign your comment. - dcljr 04:16, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)