From the preface of a book about composition:
Some readers may wonder why I have decided to write about music when so many exceptional scholars have already done so—especially now, when music has become a free-for-all and composers refuse to follow any rules or principles.
The book is Gradus ad Parnassum, published by Johann Joseph Fux in 1725. The translation is mine (and a bit loose); the original reads:
Mirabuntur fortassis nonnulli, cùm tot præstantissimorum Virorum exstent monumenta, qui de Musica perquàm doctè, & abundanter scripserunt, cur ego ad hoc scribendi genus me contulerim, hoc maximè tempore, quo, Musicâ ferè arbitrariâ factâ, Compositores nullis præceptis, nulisque institutis obstringi volentes[….]
You can see the original edition at Google Books. (Via Anatoly.)
Incidentally, does anybody know for sure whether the Gradus in the title is intended to have a short u (singular ‘step’) or long (plural ‘steps’)?
I like the timelessness/contemporaneity of the sentiment expressed in the quote!
“Fux” (which obviously = “Fuchs”?) is interesting to see… We’re used to English fox, vixen, box, ox etc. but German-speakers don’t seem to have done that sort of thing nearly as often. Wonder if this was this an old spelling or a conscious scholarly spelling
-this
GradUs
Here is Wikipedia to the rescue:
Wikipedia, cloning the 1911 Britannica, claims that the phrase, which originally referred to Latin or Greek dictionaries that marked vowel quantity, is singular (and self-referential), and the OED agrees. Dr. Google provides both answers, and I see nothing authoritative for either Fux’s book or Clementi’s and Czerny’s far better known etudes. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it is often construed as plural — after all, it’s not just a step to the home of the Muses, but a series thereof — and indeed might be freely translated “Step by Step up Mt. Parnassus”.
Wikipedia makes the interesting point that the title is intentionally multivalent in various ways as a teaching aid. Whether it’s intended as singular or plural or both is one such aid to teaching.
It’s definitely plural. He teaches you species counterpoint step by step, in ascending order of difficulty, first note against note, then two against one, then four against one, then on to suspensions, etc. This method is still in use in teaching counterpoint and composition, and basically, his book, which had an enormous influence on music history, could still serve as a textbook today. It’s available (or was available) in English translation.
Wikipedia:
In species counterpoint, as given in Fux, the student is to master writing counterpoint in each species before moving on to the next. The species are, in order, note against note; two notes against one; four notes against one; ligature or suspensions (one note against one, but offset by half of the note value); and florid counterpoint, in which the other species are combined freely. Once all the species are mastered in two voices, the species are gone through again in three voices, and then in four voices. (Occasionally, in modern counterpoint textbooks, the third and fourth species are reversed with suspensions being taught before four notes against one.)
Sorry to carp, but the a in gradus is short, so gradus singular is a pyrrhic (ˇˇ), and gradūs plural is not a spondee (¯¯) but an iambus (ˇ¯).
I should have mentioned that that while the title of the Latin verse textbook may be multivalent, Gradus ad Parnassum must definitely be plural in the context of Fux’s counterpoint book, in view of his step-by-step pedagogical method. Steps to Parnassus. Parnassus is of course the seat of the Muses.
Not only is the English translation still in print, it has a five-star rating from Amazon!
http://www.amazon.com/Study-Counterpoint-Johann-Joseph-Parnassum/dp/0393002772/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367074452&sr=1-1&keywords=0393002772
Can anyone enlighten me as to what the grave accents indicate? It’s clearly not stress.
@Gabriel F: Wikipedia says
Hmm… French does that for “à” and “là” and “où”; do you think they took it directly from the Latin convention? Who invented it?
Gonna second Bill W.’s reasoning. He’d be taking Steps toward Parnassus, ie the seat of the Muses. So a singular usage wouldn’t make much sense in this case. Or Step by Step as John Cowan translates which would make a ton of sense in an instructional manual.
Castilian uses the acute accent for the same purpose in at least one word: ‘sí’ = ‘yes’ (from Latin sīc), ‘si’ = ‘if’ (from Latin sī). Are there other such pairs in Spanish, with a non-functional accent used to distinguish homonyms?
@michael hendry: questions vs. relative pronouns (que, cual, quien, etc.), where only the question word takes the accent. Also de (of vs. I gave / imperative be), el (the/he), mi (my/me), se (reflexive pron./I know), te (you obj./tea), tu (your/you) and a few others.
…’imperative be’ is sé, not dé.
The 16th to 19th century Latin versification books with the title Gradus ad Parnassum taught you how to compose Ovidian hexameters and elegiac couplets, offering you various metrically convenient formulas such as adjective and noun pairs. Ironically, this was much like the way the composers of the Homeric poems could improvise while performing by drawing from a repertory of fixed formulas that fit specific metrical slots.
Historically in the Romance languages, the acute marked a stressed high or mid-high vowel such as é, í, ó, ú; the grave a stressed low or mid-low vowel such as à, è, ò. Neither was required on unstressed vowels, where there was no differentiation of the mid vowels. Among the standard languages, only Catalan preserves this system in full. In Spanish, the distinctions between é and è, ó and ò no longer needed to be made when the (mid-)high forms became the diphthongs ie, ue, so the grave accent was abandoned. In Italian, on the other hand, the grave accent was generalized to the high vowels.
French lost distinctive stress, so other than the opposition é, è it only has remnants of this system; there are enough clues to discriminate open and close o most of the time. I cannot account for the ù in où: it is I believe unique to this word, and may represent an error that got frozen.
Until the RAE’s latest change to the orthography, Spanish wrote ó instead of o ‘or’ between numbers, where “2 o 3” could be easily mistaken for “203”.
JC: I cannot account for the ù in où
The accent has nothing to do with the height of the vowel but serves to differentiate où ‘where’ from ou ‘or’. The spelling ou has always been a digraph indicating the single vowel [u], not a diphthong. A diacritic used with a digraph has to be on one of the component letters, even if the digraph represents a single sound.
Où ‘where’ versus ou ‘or’ is in the company of à (preposition) ‘at, to, etc’ versus a ‘has’ (a form of avoir ‘to have’), and là ‘there’ versus la ‘feminine singular definite article’. (Looking back, I see that Vanya made this point earlier).
(Unless a recent spelling reform has got rid of it) another à is still used in the word déjà ‘already’. There is no free counterpart jà but there used to be one in older French, while the formant *ja still exists in jamais ‘ever, never’, originally a compound where mais ‘any more, no more’ reinforced ja.
I see that that Latin passage is also using the convention of putting a circumflex over the long a of the first declension ablative. It’s a pity they didn’t see fit to do the same for the fourth declension plural. Well (almost) any orthography is bound to have missing information that you just have to fill in from context.
Looking back, I see that Vanya made this point earlier
Vasha.
Oops, sorry Vasha (or does Vasha = Vanya?).
Nope, I’m not Russian, the nickname comes from a complicated old in-joke.
Vanya isn’t Russian either.
I know, he told us long ago. But Russian names often have more than one short form or nickname.
Marie-Lucie, “Vasha” isn’t a Russian name at all–it’s the feminine of the possessive adjective “vash,” “your” (plural and polite singular, like votre).
Vanya is a Russian name, the familiar form of Ivan.
Thanks Bill W! I learned a little Russian years ago but have forgotten most of the details.
And while we’re at it, why isn’t the German word Fuchs spelled Vuchs? Or Forst spelled Vorst? (There actually used to be a German seafood restaurant on Broadway at about 66th Street called “Vorst’s Sea Grill,” which my father loved and my mother hated, leading to several family squabbles.) Or fuehren vuehren (not to bring the discussion to an end by invoking Hitler)? These are important questions that have been puzzling me since the mid-1960s.
Interesting article.
m-l: I realize that the ù has nothing to do with vowel height. The question is why the grave is used rather than the acute, for which I have no answer. Presumably analogy.
Bill W: A better question is why Vogel, Vater etc. are still spelled with v. Prevocalic /f/ was voiced in Late Middle High German (as still in Dutch and in some varieties of English), but then devoiced again; however, the spelling did not always revert to f, leaving the current situation, where native words in v show /f/, but foreign words such as November /v/.
JC, sorry, I misunderstood your comment, but the reasoning is the same for the à‘s. Only e can take either accent. I am sure someone must have written a history of French spelling which addresses this sort of query.
why isn’t the German word Fuchs spelled Vuchs? Or Forst spelled Vorst?
Others can give a diachronic answer to your question, that is, how this orthographic “f” , “w” and “v” business in German developed over time. A synchronic answer, in the context of how things are now, is simply: there’s no point in doing so, since the German letter “v” is phonetically superfluous.
The three letters “f”, “w” and “v” serve in German to mark only two sounds: [f] and [v]. “f” marks [f], “w” marks [v], and “v” marks “f” (99% of the time, except when it marks [v] in a few furrin words like Initiative or proper names like Vera).
This may surprise people who think of word-initial [v] as being a typically German sound represented by the letter “v”. But characters in The Katzenjammer Kids say “voss ist loss” because that is how “was ist los” is pronounced in German. It’s the letter “w” that is providing that “typically German” word-initial [v], not the letter “v”. Snoopy’s Baron von Ribbentrop is pronounced “Baron fon Ribbentrop”.
Actually I don’t remember if “loss” was the way the pronunciation of German los was indicated in the Katzenjammer cartoons. There’s a slangy German pronunciation “loss”, but the standard pronunciation is “low-s”.
To be genuwine, Snoopy should say: “Barówn fon Ribbentropp”
At least I think the name Ribbentrop was pronounced “Ribbentropp”, but I could be wrong, in that it may have been “Ribbentrope”.
Um – wasn’t Snoopy’s opponent von Richthofen, strictly Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, with Freiherr an aristocratic title only loosely equal to the English “Baron”? Or am I confusing a cartoon dog with a real German pilot?
The Red Baron
wasn’t Snoopy’s opponent von Richthofen
Yes.
And it has been forcibly brought to my attention, reading the Peanuts reprints from the mid-’60s in my local paper, that the quality of the strip went straight to hell once Snoopy took over. Up until the early ’60s, it was a brilliant comic, full of psychological insights, but then (lazy? bored? I guess I could read a bio) Schulz pretty much dropped all the interpersonal stuff and focused entirely on Snoopy and his tedious fantasy life, occasionally taking a break to show Charlie Brown’s marginally more interesting baseball experiences. A pity he didn’t retire at the top of his game, like Bill Watterson and Gary Larson.
(No offense to Snoopy fans.)
In Middle High German (1050-1350) things were more rational: the letters f, v, w represented the sounds /f/, /v/, /w/. As I noted, many /f/ sounds changed to /v/ late in the period (and the spelling adjusted accordingly); when they changed back in Early Modern German, many but not all of the v spellings stuck, particularly initially. Most of them were changed to f, though: Wikipedia cites the pair sträflich/höflich, where only certain southern dialects show signs of the original f/v opposition in MHG stræflich and hovelîch (the circumflex shows length).
Freiherr does correspond to English baron in the sense that it is the noble rank between Ritter ‘knight’ and Graf ‘earl/count’, and Baron was and is often used socially as a substitute for it. The mark of the Freiherr was that he owned his land free of any feudal superior except the Emperor; a Ritter could be hereditary (unlike in England), but always held his lands of a count or duke.
I like Zompist’s take on Peanuts a lot; I think you’re being excessively grumpy about it, Hat.
He doesn’t disagree with me, he just starts the decline later, which I can understand—it didn’t collapse instantly, it’s just that the boring stretches got longer and more frequent. I’m grumpy today because he’s now (c. April 1965) in a particularly Snoopified patch; when it picks up again, I’ll get less grumpy about it. But seriously, it’s like Rodgers moving from Hart to Hammerstein, only worse.
(No offense to Rodgers and Hammerstein fans.)
wasn’t Snoopy’s opponent von Richthofen
Well, serves me right for trying to play to the crowd, even if only as a joke. Years of ethereal lucubration have covered in mist almost everything I ever knew about Peanuts and the Katzenjammer Kids. Also, I couldn’t find a citation from Luhmann on the subject of “f” and “v” in German.
Snoopy and his tedious fantasy life
I actually remember only one Snoopy cartoon. It is the best brief depiction of phoney judiciousness that I have ever encountered.
a Ritter could be hereditary (unlike in England)
John, a hereditary knighthood is quite common. It’s called a baronetcy. It’s what Mrs Thatcher or her successor John Major gave Dennis, which is why now that Dennis is dead their son, the gormless old-Harrovian arms trader, is known as ‘Sir’ Mark Thatcher. I have a great-great uncle who was a baronet. He got it because he was MP for Marylebone, a constituency in central London that’s very convenient for getting to and from the House of Commons, and in his dotage his party (I think the Tories) eased him out with an offer he couldn’t refuse so they could give the seat to someone more important and deserving. Actually it was moot, because his title died with him, though I don’t quite understand why it wasn’t passed on to one of his brothers and thence to me. This is in stark contrast to my father’s great grandfather, a chicken stealer who was transported to Australia in 1817, only to murder an aboriginal woman for stealing corn (of course he was acquitted) – that dark secret was kept from me until this year. As m-l said, you can’t choose your ancestors.
Paul called f and v a Luxus.
Huh. I’ve never heard of Rodgers in any context but Hammerstein. They’re like Gilbert & Sullivan in my inner filing cabinet.
But to be fair I don’t think I’ve really heard all that much light opera in my time.
We used Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum (in English translation) as a textbook in my elementary music theory class, c. 1968. The rules he teaches are those followed in the time of Palestrina. If those are what you think of as +the+ rules, then Bach and Scarlatti would indeed sound lawless and free-form.
I’ve never heard of Rodgers in any context but Hammerstein.
Maybe not consciously, but you’ve certainly heard their work. Go here and scroll down to “List of well-known songs”: “Lover”, “Isn’t It Romantic?”, “Blue Moon”, “Where or When”, “My Funny Valentine”, “The Lady is a Tramp”, “This Can’t Be Love”, “Falling in Love with Love”, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”, “I Could Write a Book”… it’s half the Great American Songbook.
Bartships are recent, which in these terms means 1611, which means James I and VI with his insatiable demand for money, money, and more money. The term was used before that to refer to barons who had lost their right to be summoned to Parliament for one or another reason, but it wasn’t really a separate rank then.
The brother of the 1st Bart. can’t become the 2nd for the simple reason that their common ancestor was not a Bart. If it had been the 2nd Bart. whose line had failed, it would have passed to his next-younger brother all right, so you missed it by that much.
Thanks, John and Stu. Actually I had managed to figure out the synchronic explanation all by myself.
There’s another back-and-forth sound shift here. First, the High German consonant shift turned /k/ into /xː/ (roughly speaking), giving us the cluster chs. This was blocked behind /s/ (where /k/ wasn’t aspirated), so there’s still sk/sc/sg in Old High German, but then it was somehow unblocked, giving us sch. And then, my linguistic ancestors stopped liking fricative clusters, turning sch into [ʃ] and chs back into [ks]; the spellings, however, stuck, except for some pre-orthographic variation between chs and x (particularly in names, of course).
The Low German version of Fuchs is spelled Voss.
That varies. Those adjectives (well, most of them are; Initiative is not) were borrowed both from Latin, where they end in -ivus/-iva/-ivum, and from French, where they end in -if/ive; and they may have been borrowed in writing before they were pronounced. The spelling stays Classical: the predicative/adverb form is -iv, and the declined forms are -iver/-ive/-ives/-ivem/-iven. But how to pronounce that? After all, in native words, /v/ doesn’t occur at the ends of syllables (for the same reason that English /w/ doesn’t occur there).
In places with syllable-final fortition, like yours and much of the rest of Germany, where Sydney turns into [ˈzɪtni] and Zimbabwe or rather Simbabwe turns into a rather impressive [zɪmˈbapvɵ], the solution to word-final /v/ is straightforward enough: it switches over to /f/, so that -iv/-ive comes out as [ˈiːf]/[ˈiːvɵ].
Farther south, people don’t get the idea that /f/ and /v/ might alternate or might have anything to do with each other (any more than /f/ and /w/ in English). Instead, the v is interpreted as native across the board: -iv/-ive comes out as [ˈiːf]/[ˈiːfɛ], giving us one of the few instances of short /f/ between vowels (at least half of the others seem to be loans of Low German /v/, BTW). (…Yes, we retain consonant length; in the dialects it’s even phonemic.)
Even there there’s some variation, or at least used to be. Karl Valentin famously insisted on being pronounced with [f], and my grandma’s best friend pronounced me with [f]; I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard November with [f].
Specifically, the dialects that pronounce sträflich and höflich differently are Swiss – and Middle High German as we know it is for the most part the poetic register of a contemporary Swabian dialect; that corner is where the most glorious imperial dynasty came from, among other things. It was to some extent a standardized language; individual authors lost regionalisms during their careers. So who knows how widespread this Dutch-like voicing ever was!
Austrian Standard German has [fː] in Strafe and [f] in Hof (a better example is the plural, Höfe, where it’s between vowels), but I can’t find a difference (at least a consistent one) between sträflich and höflich, probably because of the consonant cluster formed with the following [l]. There’s no point in asking about my dialect, where höflich “polite” is borrowed from the standard and such an abstract word as sträflich “in a way that ought to be punished” doesn’t occur at all.
When [w] changed into [ʋ]* or [v] seems to be anybody’s guess. I read long ago in a popular magazine that [w] was considered quaint by the 13th century, but no evidence was mentioned.
* It’s [ʋ] here in Berlin, for instance. Wannsee is almost [ˈɔ̯̃ɑnzeː].
Uh, that tilde goes on the ɔ, not the ɑ. My combination of browser and font always moves all tildes one letter to the right.
In Dutch, sch is still [sχ].
my dialect, where … such an abstract word as sträflich “in a way that ought to be punished” doesn’t occur at all.
Aw c’mon, Daffid. Isn’t that claim somewhat exaggerated, if not quite sträflicher Unsinn ?
That is, it does occur in the vocabulary of learnèd Germans, but only as part of the fixed expression sträflicher Unsinn.
Meaning “culpable hogwash”.
In the vocabulary of learnèd German-speakers, I should have said. I’m assuming that the expression sträflicher Unsinn is high-tone-traditional enough to be common to Austria and Germany, but I don’t know that for sure.
He’s talking about his dialect, not his vocabulary. That expression may be part of the vocabulary of many dialect speakers, but it is a borrowing from Standard German, not echt dialect, so it has no echt dialectal pronunciation.
He’s talking about his dialect, not his vocabulary. That expression may be part of the vocabulary of many dialect speakers, but it is a borrowing from Standard German, not echt dialect, so it has no echt dialectal pronunciation.
I had nothing to say about the pronunciation. Also, I’m guessing you may mean “but if it is a borrowing from Standard German …”. If you will forgive me for saying so, I didn’t think your knowledge of German would cover such a small detail ! In any case there are some interesting questions here, at least for me.
I was assuming that by his “dialect” David was referring to his brand of Austrian German, not to a “dialect” in the sense of something spoken by simple folks. A German or Austrian “dialect” in the latter sense would, in practice, lack a lot of words that occur in the Standard or High Dialect. Are there technical expressions to distinguish between various types of dialect ?? In any case, whether the word is “borrowed from Standard German” surely has no bearing on whether it in fact is used in a “simple dialect” or a “high dialect”.
So I was assuming that the fixed expression “sträflicher Unsinn” just didn’t occur to David when he wrote “such an abstract word as sträflich doesn’t occur at all”. What does “abstract” have to do with anything ? It sounds like he may mean “in the simple dialect spoken where I grew up, the word doesn’t occur”: but that would hardly be worth saying, since there are hundreds of words – technical terms from politics and law, for example – that don’t occur in simple dialects either.
I happen to like unusual and old-fashioned words, sträflich being one of them. There are probably a lot of Germans and Austrians who have never encountered the expression sträflicher Unsinn, alrhough they could make a good guess at what it means. If you simply presented the word “sträflich” to them, however, they might well say “they ain’t no such word”.
Hat, I hope David will tell us what he meant by the second sentence in:
With regard to höflich, he is talking about pronunciation. He sppears be saying that there’s no point in discussing how höflich is pronounced “in his dialect”, since the word is “borrowed from the standard” and thus is merely a dialectally tinged, derivative kind of thing. It does not bear the hallmarks of an “echt” dialect word.
However, with regard to höflich he leaves pronunciation issues behind him. He says the word is “abstract”, an adjective that does not apply to pronunciation, and that it “doesn’t occur at all [in my dialect]” – its pronunciation cannot be discussed, because there is no “it”.
I freely admit to ignorance as to what linguists may mean by “dialect” in various contexts. But if höflich can be “borrowed” into a “dialect”, why can sträflich not be borrowed into that “dialect” as well ? It is David’s use of the word “abstract” that led me to refer to “dialects as spoken by simple folks”, contrasting them with “dialects as spoken by non-simple folks” such as ours truly. Nevertheless and be that as it may, words and pronunciations can and are “borrowed” in and out of German (and other) “dialects” every day.
The simplest way out of these imponderabilities was for me to assume that the old-fogey expression sträflicher Unsinn, however pronounced and however assigned to whatever “dialect”, simply didn’t occur to David when he wrote what he wrote.
I was going to ask why Verner, of Verner’s law fame, was pronounced with a /v/, though I heard a few people pronounce it with an /f/. Then I looked him up and vound out he was Danish, and eferything’s vine.
Grumbly, the point is that a dialect, in the sense meant here that excludes standard varieties (in another sense, of course, a standard variety is a dialect too), is normally only used in limited domains of discourse. If it is extended to other more technical domains, that can only be done by borrowing. The Scots word boat that we discussed earlier is a borrowing from English, and tells you nothing about how the vowel of Old English bát developed in Scots, unlike the now-lost native word bait and the still-extant words aik, tae ‘oak’, ‘toe’ < OE ác, tá. Similarly with the Scots word sphygmomanometer, only more so.
Pronunciation is out of the case: standard languages like English and German, and even Scots to the extent that it is standardized, may be spoken in a variety of pronunciations. In particular, people who speak both a dialect and a standard language usually use the same phonology for both, so David speaks Standard German using the phonology of his dialect, more or less. I speak only Standard English, but I share my phonology with people who speak mildly non-standard varieties near where I grew up. In principle a single dialect might be spoken with more than one pronunciation, but I don’t know of any cases.
Thanks for the explanation, John. I had originally only teased David a bit for having forgotten that fixed expression sträflicher Unsinn. I had no intention of opining on pronunciations or dialects.
I know that the notion of “domains of discourse” can serve to distinguish “simple dialects” from other kinds, say “standard dialects”. But it doesn’t help much in classifying a certain phenomenon very common in Germany and Switzerland (and elsewhere mut. mut.), namely “High Dialects” such as the various kinds of Bavarian.
In Bavaria there are many politicians, academics, tv presenters etc whose public speech consists of High German vocabulary that any Cologne intellectual knows, but will recognize only if he succeeds in penetrating the pronunciation. On the ground in Germany, a distinction such as that between “simple” and “high” dialects is just too primitive to be of much use.
It is in that sense that I claim that sträflicher Unsinn is just a fixed, old-fogey “German” expression that anyone in Germany, Austria or Switzerland can use without having to “borrow” it from some dialect or other. It marks book-larnin’, not dialectal provenance.
Remember that Goethe spoke hezzish. Last year I listened to a series of talks on CD by a famous Austrian physicist whose speech was, occasionally, not less difficult to understand than what he was talking about.
In Bavaria there are many politicians, academics, tv presenters etc whose public speech consists of High German vocabulary that any Cologne intellectual knows, but will recognize only if he succeeds in penetrating the pronunciation.
Quite so. That is Standard German spoken with a Bavarian pronunciation, as distinct from Bairisch proper, which has its own grammar and etymologies (and is by no means confined to Bavaria, either). In the U.K., about 15% of the population speaks Standard English (I’m not clear on whether this figure includes people who learn it at school), but only about 3-5% use the non-localized RP pronunciation; the rest use one or another specific regional pronunciation, as does (obviously) essentially everyone in the other English-speaking countries.
Similarly, there is a big difference between American Sign Language, which has nothing to do with English or any other spoken language grammatically, and Signed Exact English, which has one sign for every English word and therefore is just another “pronunciation” of English.
I was under the impression that there is a distinction in German between Dialekt and Umgangssprache.
I was under the impression that there is a distinction in German between Dialekt and Umgangssprache.
That is merely the distinction between dialect and informal language.
The article on Umgangssprache in the German Wipe describes the situation here in a good, non-controversial way, as it seems to me. However, the German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel is referred to there as claiming that informal language is the “metalanguage of last resort” (letzte Metasprache). Metalanguage ??
Oh well, I haven’t read Apel (yet?), primarily because his thing is Letztbegründungen in ethics, and he is from the same stable as Habermas. I don’t know enough to tip one way or the other, but I myself wouldn’t take a flutter.
John: That is Standard German spoken with a Bavarian pronunciation, as distinct from Bairisch proper
Not always. It was misleading for me to write “whose public speech consists of High German vocabulary … [requiring one to decode] the pronunciation”. There are different kinds of public, to which speakers speak in different ways.
For a soundbite that a politician knows will appear on national tv, he may cut back the Bavarian pronunciation as much as possible to ease understanding of Standard German content. However, he will also cut it back as little as he can and still be sure that everybody gets the message: “This is a message from Bavarian politics”. In contrast, at a political conference of the Bavarian CSU the same politican may use primarily “Bairisch proper” interspersed with Standard German words.
I think it’s fair to say that these German phenomena are rather complex. They are not reducible to, say, ones in which an American politician from Boston talks down to car workers in Detroit. Not everything in German cuisine has a counterpart on American tables (Saumagen, Handkäse).
(Saumagen, Handkäse, Bairisch)
I think it’s fair to say that these German phenomena are rather complex.
All linguistic phenomena are rather complex. Fortunately, linguists have developed a vocabulary and systems of classification for dealing with them. You are to consider (as Stephen Maturin would say) that you are not likely to trump them with your own naive (in linguistic terms, however well informed in terms of daily experience) ideas about what “dialect” might mean.
I guess I’m probably wrong, but my impression was that Dialekt referred to the old-style dialects (mutually close to incomprehensible), while Umgangsprache referred to what JC described as when ‘David speaks Standard German using the phonology of his dialect, more or less’. That is, ‘new dialects’ that are mutually intelligible.
Hat, why do you think I want “trump” something ? I have been airing my views and reporting on certain experiences in Germany. Where have I trespassed on tenets, or stepped in dogma doo-doo ?
I hope you will reveal what it is that you believe I have been trying to trump. I would much prefer to draw trumps or finesse, but I first have to know what game is being played and what the stakes are.
Bathrobe: my impression was that Dialekt referred to the old-style dialects (mutually close to incomprehensible), while Umgangsprache referred to what JC described as when ‘David speaks Standard German using the phonology of his dialect, more or less’. That is, ‘new dialects’ that are mutually intelligible.
Umgangssprache is an everyday word, not a technical one. It simply means “informal language”. Informal language does not have any particular connection with dialects or pronunciation.
“Speaking Standard German using the phonology of his dialect, more or less” is what all German speakers do and always have, for the simple reason that they are unable to do otherwise without great effort. The case where the dialect is Standard German is no exception. If there were such a thing as Standard American English, a similar statement would be true of Americans: they would be “speaking Standard English using the phonology of their dialects”.
Standard German is an artefact of science and culture, just as a dialect is. I am not here claiming that there is no such thing as a dialect. I am making the point that the phenomenon of dialects in Germany (and elsewhere as well, I guess) is not adequately accounted for by treating them always as classification slots equivalent to “domains of discourse”, or “social classes”. This is presumably a humdrum piece of knowledge in sociolinguistics.
What German speakers do is not best thought of as slot-hopping, or playing combinatorial games with clearly defined tokens. It may be useful to define them in this way for certain linguistic purposes, but we all know that science provides limited knowledge about deliberately restricted, artificially manipulated areas of “reality”.
If when David said “my dialect” he meant “Standard German using the phonology of my dialect”, then I can find only one explanation for his claim that “such an abstract word as sträflich … doesn’t occur at all”. That’s the explanation I already gave: he must have forgotten at the moment about sträflicher Unsinn, which is incontrovertibly a high-register, old-fogey item of Standard German. The very difficulty I have had here getting people to understand this simple point convinces me that I am not alone in being naive.
Having scanned what I just wrote for signs of trumpery, I think I see what it is that is making Hat tetchy. It’s my refusal to play along with realism.
I messed up two sentences, they should read:”‘Speaking X using the phonology of his dialect, more or less’ is what all German speakers do and always have, for the simple reason that they are unable to do otherwise without great effort. The case where X is Standard German, the dialect or both is no exception.”
Ok, is there a difference between Dialekt and Mundart?
What is realism?
Umgangssprache is an everyday word, not a technical one.
It’s a technical term too.
If when David said “my dialect” he meant “Standard German using the phonology of my dialect”, then I can find only one explanation for his claim that “such an abstract word as sträflich … doesn’t occur at all”.
When he said “my dialect” he surely meant “my dialect/Dialekt/Mundart”. The other thing, he called “Austrian Standard German.”
‘Speaking X using the phonology of his dialect, more or less’ is what all German speakers do and always have, for the simple reason that they are unable to do otherwise without great effort.
German, unlike English, does have a standard non-regional pronunciation. (RP is in effect a standard non-regional pronunciation, but for the U.K. only.) This is what is taught to foreigners, but it was also what my mother spoke natively. She never used the Mundart (which is best translated ‘traditional dialect’, I think) of her native village of Heringen, or even the pronunciation associated with it , for the simple reason that if she did, her Horrible Aunts got to hear about it, and she got whipped for it.
Bathrobe: not being a linguist, I don’t know whether there are German linguists who draw a technical distinction between Dialekt and Mundart. In everyday speech the words are treated as synonymous. John suggests “traditional dialect” as a translation of Mundart. But dialects never turn up over night, so they’re automatically “traditional” – on my everyday understanding of what a dialect is.
empty: sorry, I was referring to philosophical realism.
John, your mother may have had a special talent for mastering two versions of German – the Standard and a dialect – in all respects: phonology, syntax and vocabulary. Most Germans do not succeed at this, nor do they even try. I don’t expect that this is is a special feature of German.
By the way, a parent told me recently that dialects are no longer suppressed in schools, and are even encouraged. I don’t know how that would work in practice. It sounds more like wishful thinking.
Not every child grew up in the area where he goes to school, for instance if his family moved there when he was 10. If he speaks differently from others, will he be ostracized not just in the playground but in the classroom ? I know that it is now illegal to punish children for speaking dialect, but I doubt that speaking dialect is “encouraged”.
Stu, I very much enjoyed reading about Saumagen and Handkäse in Wikipedia.
empty: yes, especially if you’re a philosophical realist. Then you can be confident that they’re really out there, just waiting to be ordered.
Wait, so does the standard non-regional pronunciation of German which is presumably what I was taught (with whatever success) in U.S. junior high school etc way back when differ from ALL regional pronunciations? I had the sense that it was for complicated/arbitrary historical reasons very close to at least some regional dialects (maybe in/near Obersachsen?), just as standard Italian was built around Tuscan dialect, so that in both instances at least some people would natively have the standard version w/o being all hoity-toity social-climbery. But perhaps I was misinformed.
JWB:
The standard pronunciation of German is historically related to the speech of the capital, as is also true of both RP and standard French pronunciation. But in each case the non-regional standard split off from its ancestor about two centuries ago. In German, the standard has been described as the attempt of Low Germans to pronounce High German as written; in Berlin, Low German has been lost as a language, but its phonology is still dominant.
Standard Finnish is even less related to its dialects, and is essentially a spelling pronunciation of the very conservative Finnish orthographic standard. No Finn actually speaks it except TV announcers and such. There is no Standard Norwegian pronunciation at all: there are two orthographic standards, and people write one or both of these and speak their dialect. What foreigners learn to speak is essentially the dialect of the capital and surrounding area itself.
Grumbly:
By “traditional” I meant one that has existed from time immemorial, as opposed to one that arisen, usually in a city or other point of dialectal mixing, in recent times. The dialect of rural Yorkshire, for example, is traditional; the dialect of Liverpool (Beatle-speak) is the result of a collision between traditional Lancashire dialect and the Hiberno-English brought in by 19th-century immigration. In the U.S., the only traditional dialects in this sense are Newfoundlander and AAVE, as essentially all settlers passed through such mixing points on their way to the interior.
You raise a good point about my mother that nobody living can fully answer. I know that my mother was already pretty much separated from the other children, because they were peasants and she was of bourgeois origin. The aunts that were raising her were paternal, and they only lived there because my grandmother was dead and my father in America, and they were extremely class-conscious and repressed all promiscuous mixing with the (dialect-speaking) rabble. As such, she seems to have hardly interacted with anyone outside her immediate family.
So I don’t think she did master Thuringian traditional dialect, or speak it at all. As with her only son, also rather isolated from what would have been his peer-group, her only variety of her native language was the standard. In my case the effect was less extreme, since I did acquire a local pronunciation: America is not Germany, and the 1960s were not the 1920s (and the 2010s are another story again).
Same story with Standard Italian, though the much older orthography (Dante’s, basically) had a very big influence: there are very old features of Tuscan pronunciation that haven’t been taken up in the standard because they weren’t written down. Standard Chinese pronunciation also tracks Beijing’s, but in practice admits many compromises with other varieties of Mandarin.
JC: In the U.S., the only traditional dialects in this sense are Newfoundlander and AAVE, as essentially all settlers passed through such mixing points on their way to the interior.
Newfoundland dialect in the US? Newfoundland as a gateway to US immigration?
Newfoundland dialect
Thanks PO. There are (or were) several dialects, and some of them you can’t understand at all.
Stu, I’m not a philosophical realist, I’m just a naive realist, or something. Well, not totally naive. I do question assumptions about reality, when I think of it. But I tend to imagine that reality exists. I mean, that reality is real. I mean, that whatever is, is. I mean, that something is. I mean, I don’t know, that, I don’t know, that, um, …
I could never be a philosopher.
Caraway seeds on the table to demonstrate that the restaurant is a high-class joint? Flatulent onion music? My grandfather was Pennsylvania German, but not Pfalzisch (Ostpreussisch, rather), so I never heard of roasted sow stomach.
Sometimes I think Hat and I both jump a little too quickly from reading a Grumbly rant to dismissing your view as “nothing is real”. That’s an oversimplification, but, um, again, what is “realism”? I looked at the link. Platonism is Platonic realism? The ideal is real? Huh? Not playing along with realism means what? Why isn’t whatever you believe in instead of reality the real reality? What?
Sorry, I meant of course “in North America”. And I should of course have included Tidewater Virginian as a third traditional dialect. And I should have said “all other settlers.” And I should have, in general, thunk before I spoke.
“Newfoundland as a gateway to US immigration?”
Marie-Lucie: See “Early Life”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger
He’s also the brother of the former president of the Massachusetts Senate and the Univesity of Massachusetts.
There has always been a certain amount of population exchange between Newfoundland (and even, dare I say it? Nova Scotia) and the Boston area fishing communities.
Argh. I’m sorry I sparked such a discussion just by trying to find traces of the MHG f/v distinction!
Nope. The phonology of Austrian Standard German is of course influenced by dialects such as mine, enough so to be relevant to the present discussion, but it’s not identical. For instance, long vowels are phonemic there, while in Middle Bavarian dialects vowel length is like in Russian. The standard also seems to be full of spelling-pronunciations that make it misleading for historical phonology.
Sträflicher Unsinn isn’t even in my active Standard vocabulary, as it happens. It’s literary. But the important point is it’s absent from the dialect.
…That’s not how it works in most of Austria. Only Vienna really has an upperclass; practically everybody else is “simple folks” for sociolinguistic purposes and lives in diglossia – Standard German (Schriftsprache) for writing, for communication beyond linguistically Bavarian dialects, and for the most official purposes (because they overlap with the other two cases), and dialect for everything else.
In much of Germany, the dialects are moribund even in the countryside and have largely been replaced by Umgangssprachen, mesolects as creolists would call them, which are based on the standard and lack a clear separation from it but add plenty of phonological and grammatical features as well as many words of the regional dialect groups. Vienna has such a thing, probably because there’s an upperclass for people to imitate; my family only moved to Vienna when I was 11.
Standard German is never considered a dialect (in Austria at least), because it has completely different social functions and/or because it isn’t based on any one particular dialect. Luther famously went to great lengths to ensure his Bible translation would be understood as widely as possible, and the language of the bureaucracy of Meißen that he was basing his on was already drawing on different dialects plus archaisms.
Ah, I should have explained that.
Unlike any kind of Standard German, Upper German dialects are really remarkably deficient in abstract nouns. This goes so far that, I’ve read, there are places in Switzerland where the speakers of Rhaeto-Romance are considered unusually deep thinkers simply because they retain the usual Standard Average European amount of such words.
Similar in Austria, where politicians holding a debate* live on national TV will (at first approximation) put all the important substance in Standard German but their offhand comments in dialect.
* 5 or 6 people sitting at a horseshoe-shaped table with the moderator in the middle, not 2 people standing behind podiums or walking around like in the US.
It’s both. The technical term isn’t used much, though.
The latter term was invented as a replacement for the former. That worked only partially. I think some people have tried to make a distinction between the parts of this doublet, but definitely no such attempt has caught on.
To some extent. The standard phonetics and even phonology are a bit underdetermined; all standard pronunciations are quite similar to each other, but not identical. The actor Sky du Mont speaks a remarkably delocalized Standard German, but you can still (just barely) tell his pronunciation is from Germany and not Austria or Switzerland; he sounds very similar to an Austrian TV newscaster, but it’s not quite the same thing.
Funnily, the stage pronunciation is very strictly determined – and very northern. The actors in the Burgtheater in Vienna all sound like they’re from Hamburg; they do not sound like Sky du Mont.
…who plays the top villain in the Bavarian comedy Der Schuh des Manitu. It’s like how most Hollywood villains speak perfect or near-perfect RP.
Wwwwellll. In Austria, the dialects in and around the cities have become more regional as opposed to local over the last 100 years and have been borrowing more heavily from the standard. The technical terms for what older and rural speakers use is Grundmundart, the younger and urban thing is Verkehrsmundart. I speak one of the latter, my grandma is a bit borderline. But it would take you a long time to notice, and you’d have a lot more trouble understanding either than the Viennese mesolect.
Most Austrians are quite good at it.
I don’t think they ever were in Austria, except for being rather discouraged in Vienna by some teachers.
I wasn’t. Well, I was, but for a long list of other reasons!
It’s closer to some than to others, but AFAIK different from all. Obersachsen sounds good, except they have completely abandoned the fortis/lenis distinction, retain extra two vowel distinctions from Middle High German, and I think they don’t do word-initial /pf/. I once read that whatever’s spoken in the Harz mountains is closest, but no further information was given.
Heh. Which capital?
Of course you mean Berlin, and indeed that’s related to the stage pronunciation and is prestigious in Germany (less so beyond). But… well, Berlin hasn’t had distinctive local pronunciation features in a long time; its dialect had been a rather mixed affair for centuries.
(The stage pronunciation also has a few completely artificial features that were deliberately designed to make it easier to acoustically understand.)
That’s true for Germany, less so elsewhere.
I’d say what people speak here is similar to a Viennese-style mesolect. It’s arguably more random, though: many people will drop the occasional wat, dat*, det*, dieset, keen, ooch, allet, jut, but I can’t predict when.
* The standard seems to be the only form of German where dass and das are homophones. They also are in the Viennese vernacular, but all dialects I know of distinguish them in the vowel.
=========
Alle Klarheiten restlos beseitigt? 🙂
A different example: Wolfgang Schüssel, chancellor from 2000 to 2006, spoke Standard German on TV except that he dropped an [ɒ̈] at regular intervals, every minute or so. That seems to have been an attempt to be a bit more folksy; his conservative party is after all called Volkspartei.
Uh, actually, I can’t tell right now if Hamburg or Berlin. There are differences; one is that, here in Berlin, /t d n l/ are laminal like in the rest of mainland Europe, but farther north they’re apical like in English. I’m pretty sure laminal ones are used in the Burgtheater, but I can’t remember, and I can’t find if the official stage pronunciation even specifies this.
The mesolect of Hamburg.
The mesolect of Hamburg.
I like the first sentence of the Plattdüütsch Wikipedia article: “Missingsch is en Mischmasch vun Hoochdüütsch un Plattdüütsch.”
Bill W: There has always been a certain amount of population exchange between Newfoundland (and even, dare I say it? Nova Scotia) and the Boston area fishing communities.
I knew about Nova Scotia, not just the fishermen but whole families emigrating to the Boston area to find work in factories. This affected many francophones in Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and I am not aware of a movement in the opposite direction. Exchange is more likely in Newfoundland and perhaps indeed on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Of course in the heyday of the Newfoundland fishery there would have been fishermen coming seasonally from the US as well as Europe.
The technical terms for what older and rural speakers use is Grundmundart, the younger and urban thing is Verkehrsmundart.
Kranzmeyer 1956 speaks of Bauernmundart, Stadtmundart, Verkehrsmundart, Verkehrssprache, Hochsprache in Austrian varieties, but I don’t know just where he draws the lines.
…Speaking of Mischmasch, hoch has always struck me as one. In Standard German, /x/ behind a long vowel is decidedly unusual (note how the spelling epically fails to indicate that the vowel is long, and note how Hochzeit “wedding” indeed has the corresponding short one); I’d expect silent h there, and indeed that’s what the rest of the declension has – hoher, hohe, hohes, hohem, hohen, höher before it returns to ch in am höchsten. My dialect hasn’t lost short /x/, so everything is regular: [ˈhox ˈhoxɐ ˈhoxɛ hoxs ˈhoxŋ̩ ˈhɛçɐ ɒ̈mˈhɛkstn̩]. I guess that hoch was taken from a different dialect than the rest of the paradigm.
Which capital?
Yes, well, I always forget that germanophones have two empires in their past. (In the remote past, to be sure, they only had half an empire, having to share it with francophones in Charlemagne’s / Karl der Große’s day.)
Marie-Lucie: By “population exchange” I meant people going back and forth, people from Newfoundland or Nova Scotia spending part of their lives in the Boston area (including places such as East Boston, Brockton on the South Shore and, of course, Gloucester, MA) and part of their lives in Newfoundland.
Bill W, I didn’t realize this kind of “transhumance”, if I may use the term, was that widespread. Was it only the men, or did families move back and forth too?
David: Most Austrians are quite good at [mastering two versions of [Austrian] German].
That’s very interesting. As a result of your Lageberichte aus Kakanien here, I have learned to be velly, velly careful to avoid making general statements about “German”. At regular intervals I must actively force myself to take into account that I experience only a very small part of what goes under the name of “German”.
Similar in Austria, where politicians holding a debate* live on national TV will (at first approximation) put all the important substance in Standard German but their offhand comments in dialect.
That’s what I was trying to say: the uses of dialect in Germany (and apparently Austria) are not a once-and-for-all (barring condescension) affair of social classes, or cut-and-dried domains of discourse.
In much of Germany, the dialects are moribund even in the countryside and have largely been replaced by Umgangssprachen, mesolects as creolists would call them, which are based on the standard and lack a clear separation from it but add plenty of phonological and grammatical features as well as many words of the regional dialect groups. Vienna has such a thing, probably because there’s an upperclass for people to imitate; my family only moved to Vienna when I was 11.
Yes, the part I’ve bolded is a good description of the things I hear. The everyday word Umgangssprachen is too unspecific, though. I like mesolect.
Bauernmundart, Stadtmundart, Verkehrsmundart, Verkehrssprache, Hochsprache
Useful distinctions !
Marie-Lucie: My sample is actually very limited–I know of one family that came to the Boston area (Brockton) in the 1930s or 1940s and stayed. But other members of the same family came and went back, and the US family still has some ties to their Newfie relatives. I’m told there were other families like that, too. Another friend’s family moved back and forth between Nova Scotia and the North Shore of the Boston area (East Boston, Salem) around the turn of the century. I assume there were others doing the same thing. Perhaps I should have been less categorical in my statement, but I think there was indeed migration in both directions, just as there now is between the continental US and Latin America (and other parts of the world, too). Many immigrants to the US go back to their native countries in their retirement years.
Marie-Lucie, Bill Walderman: it’s my understanding that Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, was more or less simultaneously settled by anglophones from (mainland) Nova Scotia and from Newfoundland, and as a result Cape Breton English is the most Newfoundland-like variety of English spoken outside Newfoundland proper (leaving aside a few village-sized enclaves of Newfoundland English on Quebec’s North Shore).
The actor Sky du Mont speaks a remarkably delocalized Standard German
Yes, well, how many of us are familiar with the usual Argentine pronunciation of German?
(He was born there to German-immigrant parents, though the language of his home is said to have been English, thus accounting for his name: This is Caetano > This is Kai > This is Sky.)
Etienne, it is my understanding that after most of the Acadians were expelled, their place was taken by Gaelic-speaking Scots, and Gaelic was the main language in Cape Breton until around 1950 when (except for a few Acadians) the population started to switch to English, the language of schools.
😀
Same for me.
I had no idea. I thought his name was just a random nom de plume.
…ik isn’t dead yet either, though it does seem to be less common. There are also still people who use -t instead of -s as the neuter nominative indefinite adjective ending.
I thought his name was just a random nom de plume.
No, seemingly one of those childhood nicknames that ends up sticking. My mother was known to her close friends and relatives as Hanni, her own childish mispronunciation of Janni < Marianne pronounced German-fashion, her actual given name. I called her Ma; her husband called her things like Sweetie, Darling, Pettie (a diminutive of pet, unconnected with petty) but never by name, a habit I have postfigured in my own marriage. Her anglophone nieces and nephews called her Aunt Hanni, which they made nearly homonymous with Honey. What between switching from Schultz to Ordon (a married name she kept for far longer than the marriage) to Cowan (sometimes with the title Mrs., sometimes Professor), and these oscillations of given name, she really had no “proper” name at all, sort of like all those Roman females whose proper name was simply the name of their gens with a feminine ending.
those Roman females whose proper name was simply the name of their gens with a feminine ending
Surely within the family they were known by other names, perhaps nicknames, otherwise two or more unmarried sisters would have had to be called by the same name, the same as their mother (eg “Julia”), just like two or more brothers would be called like their father (eg “Julius”, but for instance Cesar was not just “Julius” as we now know him but “Caius Julius”, “Caius” being his own first name).
They were sometimes numbered (Tertia). But that’s apparently all.
And it’s Gaius with G. But when Lucius Cornelius Ruga invented the letter G, the abbreviation C for Gaius already existed, and it stuck. (Same with Cn for Gnaeus.)
Ruga was a freedman who taught reading and writing, and probably got tired of explaining that his name was pronounced “Ruga” and spelled RVCA, a problem with which I have every sympathy. Of course /g/ was the original sound of C, a variant of Γ, but because Etruscan had no voiced stops, it was repurposed for that language, and Latin inherited the same mapping to /k/.
However, there remains the issue of why it occupies the old place of zeta in the alphabet rather than standing next to its twin, as with I/J, U/V/W, and Cyrillic Б/В. So it’s possible that G isn’t a C-with-stroke at all, but a cursive form of zeta; the oldest Gs have a vertical rather than a horizontal stroke, which some people still use in print-style handwriting, and if this were prolonged and curved it would look like the lower part of a cursive z.
And yes, diminutives and other nicknames were common; the trouble is, they were commonly swapped around too. A Julilla might become Julia as she grew up, and her younger sister would then be Julilla. Robert Graves, writing as the Emperor Claudius, explains the problem with men’s names (and they at least had real given names) thus:
Thanks JC. I had forgotten about “Gaius”, as in Ubi tu Gaius, ego Gaia, and I did not know the reason for the C/G alternation in the spelling of the name.
I should also reread the Claudius books, which I much enjoyed some years ago.
For Portius above, read Porcius; it is the very cream of the jest that all six men have exactly the same name. Unfortunately (and Graves surely knew this), the list is itself thoroughly confused.
1. Cato the Censor
2. had two sons with the same name as himself, generally distinguished by their fourth (unofficial) names Licinianus and Salonianus after their mothers Licinia and Salonia (gens names per usual). It was Licinianus who was the jurist, but Salonianus who had the further offspring.
3. His son, also Marcus Porcius Cato Salonianus, died while holding the praetorship, so he could never have been consul.
4. His son, usually called Cato the Younger (it being Cato the Censor who was Cato the Elder) was indeed Julius Caesar’s lifelong enemy. After Caesar’s triumph, he killed himself in the city of Utica, and was posthumously known as Cato Uticensis, a style of title normally given to a general who had won a battle — the implication being that his suicide counted as a victory.
5. His son indeed fought at both Battles of Philippi and was killed in the second.
6. But if the fifth Marcus Portius Cato had a son, still of the same name, Wikipedia knows him not.
I only know the shorter version: ubi Gaius, ibi Gaia. Compare ubi bene, ibi patria. Chinese four-character idioms would have been a massive success in ancient Rome.
eferything’s vine
Or as Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake: “Comeday [Monday] morm and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s eve and, ah you’re vinegar!”
Just posting a comment to advertise the amazing variety and development to be found on this page, something like the semantics of the word nice which began as ‘holy’ and passed through ‘foolish’ and ‘precise’ among other senses before coming to its current meaning.
I second it!
There’s some conflation: nice < “ignorant” while silly < “holy”
Sorry, yes; post in haste, repent at leisure.
informal language is the “metalanguage of last resort”
On reflection, I think this must mean that while we can explain a formalism in mathematics with another formalism (its metalanguage), we cannot do so forever: eventually all formalisms must be grounded on informal explanations. Only when we have an informal grasp of what a (simple, finite, non-self-inclusive) set is can we go on to understand set theory and how it extends the concept to much more complex varieties of set.
ubi bene, ibi patria
This is so terse as to have two opposed readings: “the homeland is where everything is good” and “wherever everything is good is the homeland.” The variant ubi panis ‘bread’, ibi patria, which is said to be the motto of all immigrants, clearly tends to the second reading.
@John Cowan: It also means that there are some things that mathematicians take as axioms because when expressed in plain language, they seem to be obvious*. Moreover, there are “proofs” that cannot be executed in any normal level of metalanguage (typically of the form that statement X, which has countably many possible cases, cannot be disproved; therefore, it must be true).
* Jerry Bona famously said: “The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn’s lemma?” The joke is that all three are logically equivalent, putting the lie to the claim that such axioms are “obvious.” However, I personally find both the Axioms if Choice and Zorn’s Lemma obvious, with the Well-Ordering Theorem not intuitive but not obviously false either. It’s the (also equivalent) existence of nonmeasureable sets that really bothers me.
Fortunately, as a computernik I need deal only with simple, finite, non-self-inclusive sets, for which the Axiom of Choice is true and provable and obvious.
The Axiom of Choice is only needed for pairs of socks. Pairs of shoes, no problem. Also it is not possible to post on this subject without linking this, even though we all know it already:
https://xkcd.com/804/
That is, in fact, my all time favorite xkcd, not just because of the Axiom of Choice, but also because it has Beret Guy being… himself. My best friend at work also has that comic in his door. There is, actually, a pretty good popular science book about the Banach-Tarski paradox, The Pea and the Sun, by Leonard M. Wapner
I thought it was also needed for a pair of docs. Or ducks, whatever.
The joke is that all three are logically equivalent, putting the lie to the claim that such axioms are “obvious.”
Well, no; obvious statements can be logically equivalent to non-obvious ones. “Socrates is mortal” is obviously true (indeed, he’s dead) and is logically equivalent to the not-so-obvious “No immortal thing is Socrates.”
@John Cowan: But an obviously true statement cannot be logically equivalent to an obviously false one, as in Bona’s example.
The Axiom of Choice is obviously true in its obvious applications, but its implication of well-ordering is obviously not an obvious one. (I remember one glorious evening as an undergraduate when I was able to hold the complete proof in my mind; never again). One of the cases where our monkey brains trip us up by oversimplifying; as a statement about monkey brains, what Bona said is not wrong.
My take on this all is that Choice is a very convenient but very very big hammer and it would be nice if there was something more like a hex key that would cover the needs of the practicing mathematician without triggering foundational angst. But it seems that most such restricted versions turn out to imply Choice anyway, so we just have to grin and bear it.
Jerry Bona famously said: “The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn’s lemma?”
I do not know who Jerry Bona is, but I distinctly recall coming up with the exact same idea myself, in essentially the same words (though I called the well-ordering principle “Zermelo’s theorem”, and I’m not sure what my equivalent of “who can tell” was).
Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if the well-ordering principle is actually obviously false, but it is sufficiently counterintuitive that it gets pretty close.
In other branches of mathematics, there are some more obviously false theorems, such as the analyticity of holomorphic functions (essentially, that any function that has a complex derivative in a region of the complex plane in fact has, within that region, infinitely many such derivatives, and indeed is equal to the sum of its Taylor series).
I still agree about Zorn’s lemma, though.
It’s the (also equivalent) existence of nonmeasureable sets that really bothers me.
On this subject, however, I have a different opinion – as far as I’m concerned, on first glance, the existence of nonmeasurable sets looks like an obvious corollary of “beth-two exceeds beth-one” (i.e. that the set of subsets of an interval is larger than a continuum, which is easily provable by Cantor diagonalization).
It requires some serious consideration to figure out that it is not obvious that nonmeasurable sets should exist (and, in fact, this is not provable without the axiom of choice).
The really interesting thing here is the Banach measure in 2 dimensions: it is possible to assign a Banach measure (i.e. a finitely additive “measure”) to every subset of a 2-dimensional plane such that it is equal to the Lebesgue measure for any Lebesgue-measurable set.
This does not, however, work in 3 (or more) dimensions (which is why the Banach-Tarski paradox is possible).
IME the well-ordering theorem stops being “obviously false” once you grok the existence of sufficiently high order types (I would outright say “order type aleph-one”, but I really do not dare to say I grok it).
Then again, IME the Axiom of Choice also stops being “obviously true” once you realize that it’s only “needed” for dealing with reals that are nonconstructible or in any other way finitely identifiable.
J Pystynen: I pretty much agree, although I think I do have a clear understanding of the first uncountable ordinal, since it can be explicitly constructed. Most higher order types are beyond my intuition though.
My uninformed opinion is that the troubles began when otherwise well-meaning people convinced themselves that there are as many even numbers as integers. That was the true source of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
This old-timey talk about “intuition” and “obviously true/false” misses the salient point. Intuition moves with the times – or it doesn’t. Those who resist stay home, cultivate their garden and write cranky screeds to mail to math professors.
Although I studied algebraic topology, I was much more interested in mathematical logic and transfinite arithmetic, and over the years worked through several books on these as a hobby. I dabbled in non-standard analysis, Aczel’s work on non-well-founded sets and so on. There was a fat volume on set theory way over my head, that I kept by my bed to skim-read myself into pleasant dreams (“[stuff] … here we are on the brink of inconsistency, since [some limit] contradicts X”).
I never worried whether any of this would have fit my “intuition” at age 15. When it wasn’t, I cheerfully acquiesced in having my intuition rewired and steroided. The process is old hat to anyone who knows the history of quantum mechanics.
In a nutshell, all knowledge is of the form A -> B. There is no “A” knowledge to be grokked. No Letztbegründungen in ethics [contra Apel] or anything else.
The child is father to the man only if it grows up.
a fat volume on set theory way over my head
That gave me a pleasing image of the sword of Damocles replaced by a thick mathematics tome, Damocles being a hapless student.
You’re not far off. I think it was the sword of Solovay. I can’t find the book right off the bat here. I have a vague memory of discarding it a few years ago because it made me feel inadequate.
…make that “order type omega-one of course. Aleph-one the cardinal is somewhat more understandable really.
otherwise well-meaning people convinced themselves that there are as many even numbers as integers
According to Michael Potter’s Sets – An Introduction, Albert of Saxony discovered this in the fourteenth century. Blame the Bishop.
According to the same excellent book (which Potter says he was narrowly dissuaded from calling The Joy of Sets), when Cantor discovered that there is a one-to-one correspondence between R and Rⁿ for each n ≥ 1 he wrote to Dedekind Je le vois, mais je ne le crois pas.
(The true cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, as is well known, is that, lacking zero, they had no way to signal the successful termination of their C programs.)
Springer publishes The Joy of Sets by Keith Devlin.
In C it is strings, not programs, that are terminated – by the null character, not the zero character. Just imagine how tiresome it must have been for the Romans to type nullum at the end of every string.
They showed considerable prescience in not bothering to mark the end of their programs. They must have known it is impossible to tell whether programs terminate.
I meant returning 0 to the operating system (which was of course UNIX. Windows was introduced later, by the Barbarians.)
Germans have a slight problem here. “Null” means zero, “null” doesn’t. “null” SHOULD be pronounced differently, but isn’t always.
It’s bottom that’s pronounced null. I blame Ted Codd. But since it’s a loan from German, it’s hard to borrow it back in a different sense. Claiming a semantic split based on anglo inability to pronounce cardinal vowel 8 smacks of sophistry.
I didn’t know that was Codd’s doing, but I should have guessed. Like, who else ? I remember reading many of Date’s fulminations against the use of null, but not its mention, i.e. pronunciation.
I have no hard data, mind, on who perverted null to mean bottom, but who else indeed. And I didn’t mean that anybody should / would insist on a German pronunciation in English — but that insisting on the English pronunciation in German when it was loaned from there so recently seems a bit peevish.
(For those (not) following along at home, in programming language semantics there is a distinction between (for instance) the number zero / empty string on one side (the units in their respective monoids) and a distinct ‘bottom’ element that means your computation has not yet produced a result, or has failed. To be consistent with such mathematical usages as ‘null set’ null should be the unit element, not bottom, but the other usage was introduced with the Structured Query Language for relational databases, and has stuck in other uses as well. (A ‘null pointer’ is usually implemented as a zero bit pattern, but that’s not an essential part of the definition)).
insisting on the English pronunciation in German when it was loaned from there so recently seems a bit peevish.
I did not insist on the English pronunciation. I said “null” should be pronounced differently from “Null” in German discourse. Why did I say that ? Because it’s confusing to listen to someone talking in German – about, say, a Java class design and an RDB schema – and failing to distinguish between zero and NULL. Not only failing to distinguish these audibly, but failing to distinguish them in their minds. I want to say: “go home, little boy, and come back only when you’ve done your homework”. But that is a counsel of perfection.
The distinguishing-in-German, English pronunciation of “null” recommends itself only because there is no other candidate in sight.
Example of that confusion: a programmer proposes the bright idea of using zero to represent a NULLABLE NUMBER (the Oracle type).
Now that is a frustration of mine — why do people think that using an English word that is confused with a native one with different semantics is better than finding a native one with the right meaning? But they do, and we can only hope that no nuclear power plants explode as a direct result.
I agree. But where are these neologismophatic oracles for German ?
Dunno. Hamburger is pronounced à l’anglaise unless referring to people.
Anecdote: I was in a Deutsche Bank project with a young project lead who was pretty good at SQL. He went for direct telephone contact with SQL-deficient users who had problems. He had them open an SQL shell and type in what he said over the phone. In one case certain rows had to be deleted from a table, as a quick fix. He said: “Geben Sie DELETE FROM X ein”, and paused for that to be done. The other person said: “Ich habe es eingeben, was mache ich als nächstes?” Too late for the WHERE clause, the person had already pressed the EINGABE (return) key.
This is how nuclear power plants explode prematurely. DELETE FROM SENSOR_MEASUREMENTS.
In English it would have been natural to say “first type DELETE FROM X”, with no suggestion yet of entering it.
For those (not) following along at home
Thanks, I was wondering!
Hamburger is pronounced à l’anglaise — and that’s fine, I assume no actual people from Hamburg are in danger of getting et if people mishear. (Cue JFK stories). But when the difference between Null and Null spoken over the phone can lead to people writing either
0orNULLinto their nuclear reactor database, it’s a different matter.And just for fun, what the semanticists call bottom is known as * (pronounced point) in category theory or
Nothingin Haskell. (Haskell calls the corresponding monadMaybewhich I think is a nicely explicit way of denoting such types, I don’t think it has a conventional name in general category theory).empty string
WhenIwasalad the usual expression for a string containing no characters was “null string”. I’m glad that’s mostly died out.
But where are these neologismophatic oracles for German ?
Why, you are yourself one, as in your oft-repeated introduction of Datumswerte to disambiguate Daten (‘dates’ vs. ‘data’). Anyone can be an oracle provided someone else listens.
Nothingin Haskell.It’s
Optionin ML and Scala, which I think is not as nice asMaybe. If I get my way, the dynamically-typed version in Scheme will be Maybe.(Wow, I didn’t know we could use HTML <code> tags here to force monowidth.)
empty string — and to avoid all misunderstanding, zero-length string can be used. (I think I’ve encountered a predicate / boolean function called empty that returns true for strings with only whitespace… it’s not the PHP one, though, that one just conflates bottom with all kinds of unit elements).
Anyone can be an oracle provided someone else listens.
Aye, there’s one rub. Another is that on this null/Null business my mind returns an Optional.
I think I’ve encountered a predicate / boolean function called empty that returns true for strings with only whitespace
trim().isEmpty() is provided by the manufacturer. Better than nuttin’.
What do germanophones say to Nullum for English ‘null’ in this sense? Though Latin nullus is mostly an adjective ‘no, not any’, it can also be a neuter noun ‘none, nothing, no one’.
In researching this and rejecting Nil (homonymous with the word for ‘Nile’, the river) as well as Nihil/Nichil as possibilities, I discovered that Malay has no less than four words for ‘zero’: Latin nihil, Arabic sifar, Dutch nol, and native kosong ’empty’, presumably a calque of sifar.
Nullum. As in the tag “nullum crimen sine lege”.
Edit: I see you’re suggesting “nullum” as a German pronunciation for “null”. Well, they wouldn’t say much to that, I suspect, since hardly anyone in IT knows more than a tad of Latin. Unless they have failed to get a job in the Geisteswissenschaften and discovered a knack for IT. There are a surprising number of such people. Also lots of erstwhile physicists.
Well, you don’t have to know Latin to speak German. I’m merely suggesting that in addition to introducing the hitherto unknown, but plausible, Datumswerte to your grasshoppers, you also introduce the hitherto even more unknown Nullum, which is perfectly pronounceable, unambiguous, and will not displease those who do know (some) Latin. (The nullum in your tag is the adjective modifying crimen n., and means that every crime exists solely as a result of positive legislation. True in English law and modern Roman (civil) law, but not in Scots law, where some common-law crimes such as hamesucken ‘home invasion for the purpose of personal violence’ and stouthreif ‘the same, but in retaliation against the housedweller defending themselves’ still exist and are prosecuted today.)
My first manager was a recycled physicist who had started his financial career as a quant and risen to command his own department of programmers.
I’ve been thinking recently about how I’d adapt ye ancyent programming language Fact (younger than Fortran or Lisp, older than Cobol) to modern times. In Fact as in Cobol, strings are fixed-length with conventional trailing blanks to be mostly ignored. Fact has two constants BLANK and BLANKS as in Cobol, synonymous and meaning ‘as many spaces as are required to fill the destination variable’. In adapting Fact to be a modern dynamically typed language, I have decided
to express the accusative case with a prefixto let BLANK mean a string containing a single space, whereas BLANKS is the empty string, since conventionally a string of nothing but spaces is treated as if empty.to let BLANK mean a string containing a single space, whereas BLANKS is the empty string, since conventionally a string of nothing but spaces is treated as if empty.
That’s neat ! A nomenclature contravariant in what it describes. That should keep the chipmunks on their toes.
“Zip, zero, zilch, nada…”
Heimsuchung! That mostly refers to metaphorical haunting these days, but “home” and “seek” are still transparent.
Haunting ? Metaphorical or not, that’s a sense of Heimsuchung I’m not familiar with.
Duden:
Heim|su|chung, die; -, -en [1, 3: mhd. heimsuochunge = Hausfriedensbruch; 2: frühnhd. = Besuch]:
1. Schicksalsschlag, der als Prüfung od. Strafe von Gott empfunden wird: sie hatten viele -en zu ertragen.
2. (christl. Rel.) Begegnung der mit Jesus u. Johannes dem Täufer schwangeren Frauen Maria u. Elisabeth im Hause Elisabeths: das Fest der H. Mariä (kath. Rel.; des Besuchs von Maria bei Elisabeth; urspr. am 2. Juli, dann am 31. Mai); auf dem Altarbild ist eine H. dargestellt.
3. (südd.) Haussuchung.
Haunting ? Metaphorical or not, that’s a sense of Heimsuchung I’m not familiar with.
Hjem-/heimsøking is the standard Norw. word for haunting. A more literal meaning of the word would be contrived.
In German it is used in sentences where it variously means affliction, infestation, visitation (Cath., Mariä Heimsuchung).
Sorry, metaphorical haunting, as in “the consequences/the past came back to haunt them, and hit them hard and for a long time”.
Danish Verner is from German Werner; when I was a wee lad we didn’t have W in the alphabet on the classroom wall or in the song we learned. 28 is still the notional number of letters in the Danish alphabet even though everybody has inserted W by now. (Except in the song, it ruins the metre). We have to teach distrust of the authorities to preschoolers somehow.
We also have names like Volmer that have /f-/ in German but variably /f-/ or /v-/ in Danish. (This one is only a family name in Germany, though).
Geben Sie zuerst DELETE FROM X ein would have been an option, but a less idiomatic one.
Too late for the WHERE clause, the person had already pressed the EINGABE (return) key.
The moral is, I think, that in all such situations have the listener type
BEGIN;first, so that any errors can be undonein one fell swoopwithROLLBACK;.Unfortunately, they had AUTOCOMMIT turned on. Whoever invented that should be shot. Its sole purpose is to encourage laziness and flashlight-thought (seeing only one thing at a time in general darkness). It is the helpmeet of “people” who insist on working in CLIs.
BEGIN [TRANSACTION] and END [TRANSACTION] / ROLLBACK is, as you say, the way of clarity and industriousness.
As long as you don’t have DDL in there.
In DB2 and Oracle, individual DDL statements can’t be rollbacked or committed, the user has no control over that. I would have thought each runs in its own transaction, separately started and committed or rollbacked. Maybe no transaction at all is used.
Are you saying that DDL will ride on a surrounding TA containing further, subsequent statements, and when (internally) committed will thus expel the subsequent statements into a second TA ?
I wrote BEGIN [TRANSACTION] merely to go along with JC’s pseudocode. In SQL there is of course no such thing, a transaction implicitly begins with any statement issued when there is no open TA already present.
Actually I thought a DDL statement would force a commit if you have an uncommitted transaction in the same session. But maybe that depends on the product, I’m not really a DBA. (Data definition language, data base administrator).
Checking: They do force commits and get their own individual transactions so all DML transactions started with the old definitions of tables and so on get to run to completion. Except, of course, in some versions when they create or modify a session-local object.
In SQL there is of course no such thing
I believe that was true in standard SQL-92. But
BEGINis not pseudo-code, merely a non-standard extension. It was added to SQL-99, though it’s spelledSTART TRANSACTIONthere. By using it, you don’t have to worry about the setting of auto-commit. Some databases accept any or all ofBEGIN, BEGIN TRAN, BEGIN TRANSACTION, START TRANSACTION.As for the DDL story, it’s messy. In MySQL and (I believe) PostgreSQL, DDL runs in the current transaction and silently commits it, so your next statement is no longer in a transaction! In SQLite, though, DDL is translated into DML on the catalog at a fairly high level, so it runs in the current transaction and will be rolled back if the transaction aborts for any reason. The only safe thing to do is to always run DDL outside any transaction and assume it auto-commits, and use CREATE TABLE TEMP if you want to make sure your tables vanish by the end of the session, if not the transaction.
SQL-99 Complete, Really is just what it says on the tin: it documents the whole SQL-99 language in a much more readable style than ISO/IEC 9075, it is freely available, it is full of examples, what’s not to like? Though the Great SQL Standards Machine continues to roll on, SQL-99 is a very good choice to write to, requiring only occasional adaptation when you hit a missing or misimplemented feature in the the database of your superiors’ choice.
ObHat: The etymology of SQLite is not “SQL-lite” as you might think, but “SQL-ite”; it’s the name of an imaginary mineral. There remains of course the perpetual debate over pronunciation: “S-Q-L” or “sequel”? The first is official, but I have always used the second and I ain’t gonna stop now.
For more than 20 years now, the first SQL statement I issue after establishing a connection is SET AUTO[COMMIT] OFF.
I just learned that MySQL has SET AUTO[COMMIT] = 0 or 1. There’s always a nerd peeing in the soup. If you’re gonna go that road, might as well use 24 instead of 1. Or write an equation in AUTOCOMMIT as variable, that must be solved to determine the intended value.
The cards have traditionally been stacked against false. Or so it seems. You can also look at it this way: false is unique, whereas true is a bland porridge of everything else.
Does anyone know what language is used in Luna und Sophie? The series is set in Potsdam, so I assume the characters are speaking an Umgangssprache (see above) related to Brandenburger, which is itself an East Low German variety. Unfortunately, all I can get is a few seconds of one saying “Mord?” and the other replying “Mord!”, which is the very reverse of definitive.
All the articles I can find on urban Potsdam speech are popular, and all they say (in conformity with Bag Bag of Words Theory) is that it has more nonstandard features than Berlin, and that Luna and Sophie’s boss says they would advance their careers if they learned not to speak dialect. Can anyone weigh in? Was the show broadcast with subtitles in the German-speaking lands?
Never watched it, but I checked the trailer on YouTube now and it sounds like standard German to me, with noone except one police superior even having a notable Eastern accent.
Completely unremarkable Standard German for a large part of Germany in this trailer; I don’t even notice anything about the superior. (I had never heard of the series.)
Also, in the former East Germany there’s very little left of the dialects in general. There’s a Saxon and a more northern accent, and that’s pretty much it.
There’s a Saxon and a more northern accent, and that’s pretty much it.
The latter is what the superior has – lexicon and grammar are Standard German, but the accent is recognizable. He sounds somewhat like Reiner Haseloff, prime minister of Saxony-Anhalt.
Interesting. Haseloff sounds intermediate between Saxon and Merkel’s Berlinoid accent.
using zero to represent a NULLABLE NUMBER (the Oracle type)
In the course of my present employment I have learned that Oracle, contrary to common sense and every other DBMS, cannot distinguish between NULL and the empty string. Wut.
There’s a worm in every soup.
In my DB days I worked primarily with DB2. All I remember about Oracle is that it uses snapshots instead of locks – except maybe for SERIALIZABLE isolation. That’s pretty cool.
contrary to common sense and every other DBMS
Not “every”: the System/38 and then AS/400 also didn’t make that distinction. Or to be more precise, it had no notion of NULL, so was happy for your query to make some special exception of an empty string.
And not common sense: not supporting NULL is of course the right answer [Chris Date, Hugh Darwen]. Then IBM got nervous about the success of their only-intended-as-a-prototype that turned into an abomination, SQL; and it was all down hill: iSeries supported NULL and distinguished it from empty string.
I ceased to be a database engineer at that point. (If I had a dollar for every junior I’ve had to coach about NULL fouling up their query …)
Yeah, I remember something about read-before and write-after filling up the transaction logs like nobody’s business if the developers did the wrong thing. And those were _my_ tapes they had to fit on. (On other RDBMS’s they would probably have locked all their tables and been effectively single threaded, so who wins?)
But JC, Oracle v0.01 was coded before Scott or Strachey were born.{{fact}} Backwards compatibility FTW, and I’m not reading the SQL standard just to find out if it’s allowed.
Profunctors, now. What was wrong with the pointed domains of our ancestors? But hey! Mon is a pointed category so maybe Oracle has its ass covered in a theoretical sense.
Not “every”: the System/38 and then AS/400 […] had no notion of NULL
A branch of the computing world I know very little about.
not supporting NULL is of course the right answer
Oh hell yes: I’m a Darwen and Date fanboy too. But it seems hard for contingently missing information, e.g., that birth date can be treated as an attribute of persons but death dates have to be in a linked table because so many people don’t yet have them. Darwen can do no better than to propose a domain value that is arbitrarily far in the future, which of course leads to “go to Hell, go directly to Hell” issues downstream.
But my point was that if you are going to have NULL, it makes no sense to treat it as identical to any domain element, any more than (to return to our Grumblys) it makes sense to identify numeric NULL with zero.
But JC, Oracle v0.01 was coded before Scott or Strachey were born.
Um, wait, no. What is now Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 and Oracle v2 (the first version) appeared in 1979: Strachey 1916-1975, Scott 1932-NULL. Unless of course you mean the Delphic Oracle.
Hat still hasn’t allowed superscripts, so I had to use wikimarkup for <sup>[Citation needed]</sup>.
Innit.
Of course in the nature of these things, somebody probably brought their garage project into what became Oracle and the data representation was fixed before November 1970.
Hat still hasn’t allowed superscripts
Hey, don’t point the finger at me — if I knew how to do it, I would!
Profunctors, now.
I have yet to find, in the stuff I do, a use for all that notation and those Begrifflichkeiten as they are bandied about. I want to understand type theories (in order to understand Java generics from a more basic standpoint), but I have lost interest in notation for its own sake.
My math background should be perfectly adequate to deal with type theory. I simply do not believe it is necessary to spend years on so-called basics like category theory and lambda calculus in order to move ahead. So inefficient !
The WiPe article on profunctor starts out with the usual salvos of notation, and only then explains:
# This also makes it clear that a profunctor can be thought of as a relation between the objects of C and the objects of D, where each member of the relation is associated with a set of morphisms. A functor is a special case of a profunctor in the same way that a function is a special case of a relation. #
Well, big fucking deal. What’s the cash value of this “profunctor” notion outside of categorical whiz-kid land ? [Although, writing that, I get a strange feeling that it might make sense after all … If only I knew more …]
What was wrong with the pointed domains of our ancestors?
We didn’t even call them that, but just pointed spaces. For everyday use they’re still just fine, in my irritated opinion.
I’m offering 100 Euros / hour, and contingently upwards, for a (telephonic) advisor who can give me tips on, and feedback about, reading material on type theory basics that skirts the ballast. One ideal candidate already graces these threads.
I am already familiar with Topless and Bottom.
The definition part of the WP article is next to useless because it just mentions the concepts you need to know about to grok the definition given, and offers no guidance on how to acquire the skills to follow the deductions from that definition. The properties part even more so. I think I have the books necessary to work through it all, and I think I have understood large chunks of the underpinnings in the past, but if I were working with this stuff every day the WP article would also be useless because it would tell me nothing new.and nLab would have more juicy stuff.
(I don’t think this is a case of turf-defending notation boffins refusing to let a simpler exposition stand, this is just a complex subject. I already forget how profunctors are supposed to figure in type theory, maybe there’s a specialization to that domain that would be easier to explain).
Hat: instructions. Instead of
$allowedtags['pre'] = array('class'=>array());you’d need something like$allowedtags['sup'] = array();I looked at the “PHP Inserter” plugin that he mentions, and it looks like the way to go if you don’t like messing with your actual PHP files.
I will pass that along to Songdog. I don’t dare try messing with such things myself.
I think I have the books necessary to work through it all, and I think I have understood large chunks of the underpinnings in the past … nLab would have more juicy stuff
Well then, do we have a deal ? No string theories attached ? Would PayPal be convenient ?
My knowledge has large potholes, which is why I see an advisor as Patience on an Emolument.
this is just a complex subject
Of course. That’s why it’s stupid to go it alone.
I don’t think this is a case of turf-defending notation boffins refusing to let a simpler exposition stand
I’m not looking for simple exposition, but for context/motivation wherewith to give the old intuition a workout. My math background should be adequate, I claim. If not, then Pech gehabt.
Even inaccessible cardinals are accessible to men (and women!) of good will.
Stu, I didn’t mean to ghost you on this, but my focus has been non- these past few weeks.
I don’t feel equipped to tutor anybody on type theory in general, and certainly not for money. Dirty Ansible tricks, now, I don’t mind people paying me for knowing those, but I suspect you have sysadmins for that stuff.
And I still haven’t grokked coends. However, I have been poking around in the backwaters of category land and the Haskell types do do some programming-relevant things with profunctors. Something called “optics”, where for instance you can define an abstract type “lens” over any product type, with two methods that you’d call getter and setter in other contexts — the point is that the types are constrained to make sense if it’s the same “field” you’re getting and setting, and you can set up equations for your methods so that getting a value and setting it again is a noop, and vice versa. (You could probably cheat the type system by getting one integer field and setting another, but then people are allowed to call you a liar. And they _will_ find out, just as soon as they get the proof checker working…).
But even in Haskell they can’t define the general categorical profunctor concept, only an approximation. On the other hand, there was a link to a Java analogue of the Haskell definition, used in production code. (If you can call Minecraft production code, at least it gets executed a lot).