A quote from somewhere or did I somehow get dragged into this?
Well, that’s what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass, Nick.
[quote=“Nick_Walter”]
A quote from somewhere or did I somehow get dragged into this?[/quote]
Ha ha, that’s as bad as Devil May Cry 1, which arrived at its first boss by combining lava with… spiders.
But at least you don’t have to fight the lava spider in a sewer![/quote]
I thought the entire game was set in a sewer. Was that supposed to be a gothic castle or a dungeon or something?
Man, I actually felt pretty sheepish when I got scolded for my assault on Cool Breeze’s crappy-ass White Zombie thread. Now I feel positively self-righteous and indignant. I’m a Holy Warrior!
Haha, I love that quote. That movie’s great. The Dude abides.
So get busy blowing yourself up in the name of your God, Holy Warrior, you’ll be doing the world a favor.
say what you will about the tenets of holy warriors, at least it’s an ethos
Heh. My definition of “professional” involves the exchange of goods with perceived monetary value, which leaves out, as far as I know, every single writing posted on the front page. (Marginal exceptions made for stuff that Tom may crosspost between here and his paying gigs; however, even those would seem, if I understand correctly, to effectively be reprints for continuity’s sake, to bolster further writings which are not professional pieces by my definition.)
I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut whether or not you have criticisms, whether they’re valid, or whether Kitsune is offended by such. I just think you chose a piss poor location to place them, given that this article isn’t (to the best of my ability to discern) linked to the front page, and is therefore the post of someone who’s just posting things in the forum. I’ll persist in considering the way Kitsune writes a form of style, in the same way that I consider the way ee cummings makes poetry a form of style as well. Except that when it comes to Kitsune I can often at least muddle my way through.
The rest of it really comes down to “Dude, couldn’t you have done this somewhere else, like in the other thread that had already devolved into this type of discussion, or in a new thread, or whatever, instead of a thread trying to re-introduce interest in what really was an awesome game”.
P.S. I was pretty convinved English was the “mutt” of languages, with many backgrounds (including corruption of latin based romance languages) as well as its Germanic origin.
You’re a cunt.
LOL
It is generally true that language has some influence over thought. It is blatantly wrong to claim that language is required in the way that you unthinkingly cite.
Immediate counterexamples:
Those primitive tribes that you cite are often extremely capable of distinguishing quantities between one, two, and many. They do not have the words for more than two, but one method is to count off body parts in a specific order. In this way they can mentally record a very large number (say, on the order of forty to fifty) objects reliably without actually having a word for it.
There are tribes that use the same color word for multiple colors, but have experimentally been shown to be perfectly capable of distinguishing the colors. They simply don’t bother to do so verbally. Think of the difference between the colors [16 16 255] and [32 32 255]. They’re both light blues which we can trivially distinguish and yet most people will not bother to learn or use names for both.
Chimpanzees are known for using twigs to collect termites out of their mounds. It is a substantially difficult skill passed solely by observation. Clearly the chimps must think to some degree in their twig selection and usage. Many other languageless examples of thought come to mind, such as pot-bellied pigs learning to open doors, and dogs learning to do tricks.
Clearly human infants are capable of some degree of thought, but they are essentially languageless.
Not that I mean to specifically cite you, Theodore - your’e just the last post I see - but how the everliving hell did this thread get this bad in the time it took me to write this response?
Not that I mean to specifically cite you, Theodore - your’e just the last post I see - but how the everliving hell did this thread get this bad in the time it took me to write this response?[/quote]
everything’s a fuckin’ travesty with you, man
It’s the Qt3 way … :wink:
Wikipedia claims just three. The Germanic language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes mixed with Old Norse (also Germanic) from the Vikings, then 300 years of Norman rule with French as the official language salted the mix with a lot of French vocabulary.
I’m sure English has been absorbing words here and there since then, but that’s probably still the core.
It’s funny that you get you respond with this, when it’s pretty much exactly what you did to Kitsune with your patronizing sneer over his manner of writing and his style.
Maybe we should write you up a long condescending post about how not to be an asshole to people when you post something?
-Tom
Not sure where I stated language was required to think. But the way in which one expresses themselves is necessarily tied to the way one thinks, and there seems to be varying levels of correspondence between methods of thought and language invented to classify such. This doesn’t mean that lack of spoken language implies lack of thought. Rather it’s very hard to get across abstract thoughts of significant complexity without being able to “describe” them (whether it be by spoken language or a gestural language such as the chimps you mention). Those same tribesman who can distinguish between separate colors would, assumably, be unable to pass that ability on to others without having the items as representative examples on hand, which is a form of visual language after all.
All of this is fairly esoteric though. The main point I was trying to make was that there’s an influence in the way thought patterns form/what’s considered standard as a function of the organizational methods your mind uses to store them. Things that are perfectly understandable to scientists aren’t to other folks, because they’ve learned, in effect, the language of logical deduction to a higher degree than, say, an artist. It’s not universal or anything similar, but it’s a pretty strong correlation. Similarly, I don’t believe there’s a “universal” method of thought. I’m willing to believe that humans and all intelligent animals use a basic process of deduction (to varying degrees of success), but that the particular formalized pathways these deductions take is affected by the language used to develop the categorizations that support these deductions.
(As an aside, given your color example, I would consider [16 16 255] and [32 32 255] to be names for them, albeit in a language that perhaps not everyone is familiar with. At some point if you want to impart the knowledge to others, you have to be able to name things. Otherwise you’re a slave to your perceptions which can, of course, be fooled in a myriad of ways. We should probably take this to a better thread to continue though; it’s a subject that fascinates me.)
Wikipedia claims just three. The Germanic language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes mixed with Old Norse (also Germanic) from the Vikings, then 300 years of Norman rule with French as the official language salted the mix with a lot of French vocabulary.
I’m sure English has been absorbing words here and there since then, but that’s probably still the core.[/quote]
During the Renaissance it was fashionable to use words with Greek and Latin roots, so a lot of greek got mixed in, e.g. “alphabet” for an obvious example. :)
Wait, I think I know a real-world example of this. If my Chinese girlfriend/wife/whatever sees a Welsh Springer Spaniel,
I’d say its ears are “red,” but she calls that color “yellow.”
Is that like what you’re saying?
I don’t like Viewtiful Joe. :( I just can’t excited about playing a superdeformed Fred Durst, and I really hate the word “viewtiful”.
Addressing only this specific statement, regarding the influence of language on the development of thought, Mouselock has a point. Have any of you heard of the Saphir Whorf hypothesis? You have now.
All I want to say is that I thought Kitsune’s piece was a bravura piece of writing, done with style and aplomb. I look forward to having the time to play through Viewtiful Joe on the GC, but Front Mission 4 currently owns my world, and I’m hoping to be done in time to play the Shin Megami Tensei game when it comes out.
[size=1]I could have done without the “fag” pejorative - though I think it is hard to gauge insults as a non native speaker.[/size]