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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style="font-family: Arial;">===========================================<br>
L O W L A N D S - L - 11 January 2009 - Volume 02<span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><br>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br>
From: <span class="ep8xu"><span><span style="color: rgb(0, 104, 28);"><a href="mailto:heatherrendall@tiscali.co.uk">heatherrendall@tiscali.co.uk</a></span></span></span><span class="hccdpe"> </span><span class="ldacoc"><<a href="mailto:heatherrendall@tiscali.co.uk">heatherrendall@tiscali.co.uk</a>></span><br>
Subject: <span class="hccdpe">LL-L "Language programming" 2009.01.10
(05) [E]</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial;">from heather rendall <a href="mailto:heatherrendall@tiscali.co.uk" target="_blank">heatherrendall@tiscali.co.uk</a></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial;">Marlou wrote</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial;">So you think humans can perceive abstract
things in principle independently of language, and language is dragged behind?
So there is more reality in things than in language? -- And a metaphor is just
a projection of strange (not necessarily abstract) things into the known world
of objects, hm? </span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial;">Isn't this precisely why we have poets?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial;">Don't they ( and in many cases religious
thought and experience) try to put into words the indescribable so that we can
know the unknowable which we may perceive with our more sensitive antennae
from time to time but so fleetingly ( like the 4D cube) that it is sometimes
easier to persuade ourselves there was nothing there and it was all a trick of
our imagination - until we pick up a certain book or hear a certain poem or
experience something profound, and get shaken out of our complacency once
again?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: Arial;">Heather</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">----------<br>
<br>
From: <span class="ep8xu"><span><span style="color: rgb(0, 104, 28);">Luc Hellinckx</span></span></span><span class="hccdpe"> </span><span class="ldacoc"><<a href="mailto:luc.hellinckx@gmail.com">luc.hellinckx@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Subject: <span class="hccdpe">LL-L "Language programming"</span><br>
<br>
Beste Marlou, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;">You wrote:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);" class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="word-spacing: 0px;">So
human thinking *is* limited because of language, or is it the other way round?
What is "well understood"? That which is pictured, brought
into our tangible reach. By analogy, by metaphor, by "model". I
studied physics, being anything but a natural talent. I found several concepts
of math and physics hard to imagine, and at some point I just said to myself:
"Come on, this is abstract. Just do not try to visualize it. You know how
it works, you can work with it. That's enough." I felt that at that moment
I somehow lost interest in the phenomenon. A stimulus was gone. Likewise, it
was an almost physical joy to really comprehend (german: begreifen = touch!) a
phenomenon, bring it into my "world of objects".</span></i></p>
<p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 40px; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><i> </i></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;" class="MsoNormal"><i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Even that joy of comprehension
can be learned, I know; mathematicians feel it when the find solutions in their
abstract world. For me it was always difficult to let go of the figurative. I
felt limited by this stone age heritage very much and often grew impatient with
myself. -- By the way, my finest moment was when I really succeeded in seeing a
3D cube as a projection of a 4D cube into 3D :-)) I "saw" the 4D
cube. It lasted ca. 20 seconds and never returned. But my brain could do it at
that time, thanks to training.</i><span style="font-family: Arial; color: black;"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Personally
I think one understands something as far as he/she knows what
characteristics/properties the object has (this number can be infinite).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">"Das
Ding" an sich, can probably never be fully understood because the number
of "interesting" features is dependent on your point of view. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Take for
example the imaginary unit i, which can be defined as a number whose second
power equals -1 (giving rise to complex numbers). Why was this number created?
One reason is that we wanted certain equations to have solutions, which they
didn't have in a smaller number set. But what is i actually, students often
ask. Nobody can tell, because if you could explain exactly what it is in
nothing but old terms, it wouldn't be new. Moreover, i is definitely not the
square root of -1. On a more positive note, all these intriguing numbers 0, 1,
e, i and ∏ are "married" so to speak: 1 + e^i∏ = 0.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">First time
I heard about negative numbers they looked nonsense to me, because I felt I
could not HAVE, TAKE, SEIZE minus 3 objects. After a while one's initial
stubbornness fades as he/she realizes that it is indeed the picture, the
metaphor that counts. Temperatures have been very negative the last few weeks,
and rest assured, I did FEEL the effect of this (but maybe less than having a
negative balance on my bank account *s*).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Look at how
electricians do their job: they know pretty well how to handle
electricity...vaguely remembering that in school they were taught that
alternating currents could be treated like complex numbers and realizing that
the current itself consists of "moving" electrons. Do they have to
know in depth what the substructure of an electron is like? Don't think so,
because working knowledge is enough. Same with using cars and computers.
Everybody's using them but nobody is fully aware of what is happening on a
subatomic level. Knowing a few basic properties is enough to deal with them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Same with
human beings. Can anybody ever fully know what a human being is (including
him/herself)? I tend to believe you know other people and yourself in terms of
features/properties/qualities which are pretty often generalizations of former
behavior.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">I strongly
believe in the power of a good metaphor, because the meaning of words is
shifting all the time (every couple of years another edition of a dictionary is
released). Take your brain. How can we study it? We make brain scans,
"slicing" it in dozens of 2D-images. Same is happening in M-theory,
which is the latest version of string theory. Space has 11 dimensions there
(got that from Michio Kaku, with whom I had the pleasure to spend some time,
waiting for a plane that had a huge delay). How do they interact? Slice
11D-space with a hyperplane and you get 10D-subspaces. Not simple enough? Slice
them again until you get 3D. This is just analysis, but like every enquiring
mind knows, taking stuff apart isn't that hard, fitting them together often
proves to be more difficult.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Kind
greetings,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">Luc
Hellinckx</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">PS: Using a
metaphor...language formats your brain in a certain way, just like formatting a
hard drive creates a file system (ext3, ntfs, hfs+ whatever) on a hard
disk...another language will organise your brain somewhat differently...so essentially
without language your brain wouldn't be organized..."language" should
be interpreted in the broadest sense here: some also consider math as a
language, because it carries information and enables communication (of a very
formal nature).<br>
<br>
----------<br>
<br>
From: <span class="ep8xu"><span><span style="color: rgb(0, 104, 28);">Luc Hellinckx</span></span></span><span class="hccdpe"> </span><span class="ldacoc"><<a href="mailto:luc.hellinckx@gmail.com">luc.hellinckx@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Subject: <span class="hccdpe">LL-L "Language programming"</span><br>
<br>
Beste Sandy, </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">You wrote:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153); margin-left: 40px;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><span style="word-spacing: 0px;">> Re Bushmen, I was somewhat wrong, they happen to
count to four (not<br>
> three) and then say many. Maybe their system matches the five fingers<br>
> of one hand, with which they may want to sign those numbers. Btw, the<br>
> Chinese use the fingers of one hand to show numbers from one to ten.<br>
> With five fingers you could theoretically code 2^5 (= 32) numbers in<br>
> one go; with both your hands even 1024.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Yes,
I wonder what's really behind this though? I doubt if I'd try to</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
steal a cow from an owner of nine cows just because he uses this</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
counting system: my guess is that he knows how many cows he's got and</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
probably there is a way of expressing "nine cows" in his language!</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Traditionally,
Bushmen are hunter-gatherers, so their language is probably still rooted in
that stage. Once agriculture took off, the notion of "property" must
have boomed, making new ideas necessary. Even today however, the concept of
"theft" has cultural bias. I remember a Japanese girl telling me she
had a real hard time living in a close-knit community of Koreans (they were
sharing flats), because the Koreans were not only sharing the flat, but
absolutely everything. If she bought some food she wanted to eat later on, it
had often disappeared within a couple of hours, because everybody was
using/consuming everybody else's stuff.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: black;"><span style="word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Really, we need someone who knows the language
properly to answer these</span><br style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">
questions.</span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Oh yes,
definitely. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">1, 2, 3, 4
and many could be the base of a more complex system. Maybe 9 is
"many" in a normal situation, but in case of a conflict it becomes
3^2, and if you would steal a cow from me I would still have 2^3 cows *s*.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Reminds me
of how I had once organized a game in a Chinese class. Two teams, and each team
had to guess an English word asking their rep (who stood in front of the class)
questions in English. The rep was only allowed to say "yes" or
"no". I noticed a couple of things:</span></p>
<ul type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">usually students were very quiet, but in this
situation, they were almost eager to "kill" the other team</span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">any trick was fine to beat the other team...first I
hadn't noticed, but after a while, by accident, I saw that the student
standing in front of the class, was often making minute movements with his
fingers (he was hiding his hands for me)...after the game they told me
that all of them knew how to sign, making very precise, small gestures
only with their fingers...imagine how many words you can sign with one
hand if you allow 4 modes on each finger: more than one million *s*</span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">they didn't think this was treacherous, quite the
contrary, being astute was morally perfectly ok</span></li></ul>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;">Kind
greetings,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">Luc
Hellinckx</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial;"><br></span></p>