War Room Lounge v65

[Javelina]

Damn, you old. Respect for putting up with life on a ship. There's no way I would have done that.

recently turned 49

ship wasn't so bad. being out in the middle of the ocean with all that blue/green water around was so beautiful and serene. i feel sorry for those that went out and pounded sand.

how was advancement when you were in? i think it was kind of slow from what i remember

 

[Gutter Chris]

Wait, have you guys realized that you can pretty much have garlic bread whenever you want?

Wait til you figure out that you can add toppings to it as welll. Try that shit with some bacon on it or if you wanna go all out bacon and steak

 

[Prokofievian]

Wait til you figure out that you can add toppings to it as welll. Try that shit with some bacon on it or if you wanna go all out bacon and steak

 

[Gutter Chris]

 

[Fawlty]

recently turned 49

ship wasn't so bad. being out in the middle of the ocean with all that blue/green water around was so beautiful and serene. i feel sorry for those that went out and pounded sand.

how was advancement when you were in? i think it was kind of slow from what i remember

I could see that being nice and calm on some days, just the idea of being confined to the water and a metal ship, fuuhuuuck that lol. Didn't you just get sick of the people you were with?

I didn't have to pound sand either, was fortunate not to deploy though I was on the next rotation to Iraq had I stayed in. Big "nope" to that one for me. It was easier than usual to make rank since the munitions field was way short on E-5s.

 

[waiguoren]

So, even if English orthography functions differently that doesn't mean that you might not need multiple levels of graphemes for another language.

This would be good evidence for the hypothesis that the concept of "grapheme" is sloppy and western-centric.

So at some point, which appears to be the case with chinese, you have a mixture of ideograms and other building blocks. Which of these is ''smaller''?

As I pointed out, the "ideograms" or "pictograms" are also composed of radicals. 5,000 years ago, this was not the case. Over the centuries, Chinese has undergone repeated standardization and at this point all characters are composed of radicals, even those that most resemble an image.

Thinking of @Limbo Pete , I am reminded of the word "donkey". Here is an audio recording I just made of myself saying the word in Mandarin. Here is its Chinese representation:

驢

The left-hand side is again the character for "horse",

馬

while the right-hand side is a phonetic component 盧.
Many people believe the character for horse was invented to look like a horse's hoof. 5,000 years ago, it did not consist of the neat strokes e.g.,

but was later standardized to this point. Now it is composed of individual stokes as I pasted above. Some of these strokes can change the meaning of other characters, as I showed earlier with the example of 老師長得很帥! The underlined characters differ by only one stroke and have very different meanings.

Here is another example, the character for tiger. The modern Chinese expression is 老虎. Focus on the second character. Here is a proposal for how this character came to be. On the far left, we see a 1000s-year-old oracle bone inscription of something that looks like the side profile of a tiger. After thousands of years, the tiger don't look like a tiger no more. The new character has no phonetic components at all and is composed of "radicals" such as 几and more fundamentally "strokes". The final character even includes 七, the word for "seven". So where is the alleged "grapheme" here?

Well, there obviously seem to be competing definitions. Wiki says


Graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols. A grapheme can also be construed as a graphical sign that independently represents a portion of linguistic material.

So the question would be whether the horizontal bar would *independently* already be a portion of linguistic material under that definition.

Taking the definition you presented, the definition of a grapheme would be context-dependent (the smallest unit which can alter meaning depends on context, as you demonstrated) which would make the assessment of whether something is a grapheme or not impossible to answer with a yes or no.

Spoiler

I appreciate the extreme nerdiness of this discussion btw

"A grapheme can also be construed as a graphical sign that independently represents a portion of linguistic material."

This definition seems vague. Suppose I wanted to construct the set of graphemes of the English language. Call the set S. Is 'z' in S? It's a graphical sign, but does it "independently represent a portion of linguistic material"?

 

[Limbo Pete]

This would be good evidence for the hypothesis that the concept of "grapheme" is sloppy and western-centric.


As I pointed out, the "ideograms" or "pictograms" are also composed of radicals. 5,000 years ago, this was not the case. Over the centuries, Chinese has undergone repeated standardization and at this point all characters are composed of radicals, even those that most resemble an image.

Thinking of @Limbo Pete , I am reminded of the word "donkey". Here is an audio recording I just made of myself saying the word in Mandarin. Here is its Chinese representation:

驢

The left-hand side is again the character for "horse",

馬

while the right-hand side is a phonetic component 盧.
Many people believe the character for horse was invented to look like a horse's hoof. 5,000 years ago, it did not consist of the neat strokes e.g.,

but was later standardized to this point. Now it is composed of individual stokes as I pasted above. Some of these strokes can change the meaning of other characters, as I showed earlier with the example of 老師長得很帥! The underlined characters differ by only one stroke and have very different meanings.

Here is another example, the character for tiger. The modern Chinese expression is 老虎. Focus on the second character. Here is a proposal for how this character came to be. On the far left, we see a 1000s-year-old oracle bone inscription of something that looks like the side profile of a tiger. After thousands of years, the tiger don't look like a tiger no more. The new character has no phonetic components at all and is composed of "radicals" such as 几and more fundamentally "strokes". The final character even includes 七, the word for "seven". So where is the alleged "grapheme" here?

"A grapheme can also be construed as a graphical sign that independently represents a portion of linguistic material."

This definition seems vague. Suppose I wanted to construct the set of graphemes of the English language. Call the set S. Is 'z' in S? It's a graphical sign, but does it "independently represent a portion of linguistic material"?

 

[Prokofievian]

This would be good evidence for the hypothesis that the concept of "grapheme" is sloppy and western-centric.

Nnnnno I just think you don't get it. I think that's likely given the fact that you haven't really engaged with my argument about mixed writing systems. You're insisting against everything that I can google that everything is just composed of radicals in Chinese: bully, then those are the graphemes. But there are or were mixed writing systems (everyone else thinks Chinese is an example, but that's hardly interesting), and linguistics has to explain all of it. My argument is that the concept of a grapheme does, conceptually, when one allows for context.

 

[waiguoren]

You're insisting against everything that I can google that everything is just composed of radicals in Chinese

I know the language well. That said, I made a typo. I wrote that even pictograms in Chinese are composed of "radicals", but there is at least one counter-example: turtle 龜 . That mess of a character is listed as its own 16-stroke radical in the dictionary I use.

My point stands though: even that most-pictographic existing character is broken down into individual strokes, some of which can change the meaning of other characters.

 

[JDragon]

This would be good evidence for the hypothesis that the concept of "grapheme" is sloppy and western-centric.


As I pointed out, the "ideograms" or "pictograms" are also composed of radicals. 5,000 years ago, this was not the case. Over the centuries, Chinese has undergone repeated standardization and at this point all characters are composed of radicals, even those that most resemble an image.

Thinking of @Limbo Pete , I am reminded of the word "donkey". Here is an audio recording I just made of myself saying the word in Mandarin. Here is its Chinese representation:

驢

The left-hand side is again the character for "horse",

馬

while the right-hand side is a phonetic component 盧.
Many people believe the character for horse was invented to look like a horse's hoof. 5,000 years ago, it did not consist of the neat strokes e.g.,

but was later standardized to this point. Now it is composed of individual stokes as I pasted above. Some of these strokes can change the meaning of other characters, as I showed earlier with the example of 老師長得很帥! The underlined characters differ by only one stroke and have very different meanings.

Here is another example, the character for tiger. The modern Chinese expression is 老虎. Focus on the second character. Here is a proposal for how this character came to be. On the far left, we see a 1000s-year-old oracle bone inscription of something that looks like the side profile of a tiger. After thousands of years, the tiger don't look like a tiger no more. The new character has no phonetic components at all and is composed of "radicals" such as 几and more fundamentally "strokes". The final character even includes 七, the word for "seven". So where is the alleged "grapheme" here?

I think the pictographic (?) attributes of these Chinese characters and their rich history make the discussion much more complex, so I will not comment on this part for now. Only this much: The grapheme definition seems to largely ignore the development of linguistic units and seems to take them for granted.

"A grapheme can also be construed as a graphical sign that independently represents a portion of linguistic material."

This definition seems vague. Suppose I wanted to construct the set of graphemes of the English language. Call the set S. Is 'z' in S? It's a graphical sign, but does it "independently represent a portion of linguistic material"?

If you mean the letter 'z', then yes, of course, absolutely. It even has phonetic properties.

I think the discussion gets more interesting when we think of a hyphen. Is that fulfilling the definition? I would think so. But only due to the properties of the hyphen - not due to the fact that adding a hyphen to an 'F' would yield an 'E'.

 

[Prokofievian]

I know the language well. That said, I made a typo. I wrote that even pictograms in Chinese are composed of "radicals", but there is at least one counter-example: turtle 龜 . That mess of a character is listed as its own 16-stroke radical in the dictionary I use.

My point stands though: even that most-pictographic existing character is broken down into individual strokes, some of which can change the meaning of other characters.

I don't think that was your point. I think your point was that it was sloppy, incomplete and inherently ''western.'' I don't think you've shown any of that.

 

[Rational Poster]

Too much derailing some sore ass is gonna end up reporting me for having a friendly convo about doritos @LogicalInsanity

Lately I been liking the Tapatio Doritos, have you guys tried em?

Honestly been trying to avoid this kind of junk food lately to be fair.

But something I really like that's similar to that is lime Takis

 

[JDragon]

Thinking of @Limbo Pete , I am reminded of the word "donkey". Here is an audio recording I just made of myself saying the word in Mandarin.

I think this is the second time I have heard someone from here using vocaroo.

I believe the first time was @Limbo Pete doing some freestyle rap thing

 

[Social Distance Warrior]

Too much derailing some sore ass is gonna end up reporting me for having a friendly convo about doritos @LogicalInsanity


Honestly been trying to avoid this kind of junk food lately to be fair.

But something I really like that's similar to that is lime Takis

I was down in Mexico recently, and they had this brand of Doritos I was unfamiliar with. I wish I would have taken a picture of it, but it was fucking delicious.

and LOL @ someone reporting you, or anyone.


** reports @Serenity Now

 

[JDragon]

Honestly been trying to avoid this kind of junk food lately to be fair.

Since this is now a food discussion, I have lately discovered the most awesome dessert ever:

1) Take 300 g of frozen fruit (e.g. strawberries, mango, raspberries)
2) Add about 300 ml milk
3) Use a stick blender to crush/mix this
4) Create 2-3 servings
5) Profit

Most awesome ice cream ever

 

[Rational Poster]

I was down in Mexico recently, and they had this brand of Doritos I was unfamiliar with. I wish I would have taken a picture of it, but it was fucking delicious.

and LOL @ someone reporting you, or anyone.


** reports @Serenity Now

I get reported constantly.

 

[Serenity Now]

Too much derailing some sore ass is gonna end up reporting me for having a friendly convo about doritos @LogicalInsanity


Honestly been trying to avoid this kind of junk food lately to be fair.

But something I really like that's similar to that is lime Takis

Those are good...The turbos are also awesome.


and yeah good thing you brought the conversation over here.

 

[Serenity Now]

I was down in Mexico recently, and they had this brand of Doritos I was unfamiliar with. I wish I would have taken a picture of it, but it was fucking delicious.

and LOL @ someone reporting you, or anyone.


** reports @Serenity Now

Mexico has Sabritas, I think that's there Frito Lay equivalent...Yeah they sell alot of good shit over there...They still sell the Doritos 3ds over there.

Pls don't report me thnx.

 

[Limbo Pete]

I think this is the second time I have heard someone from here using vocaroo.

I believe the first time was @Limbo Pete doing some freestyle rap thing

Alas, that was some other poor sap

 

[Javelina]

I could see that being nice and calm on some days, just the idea of being confined to the water and a metal ship, fuuhuuuck that lol. Didn't you just get sick of the people you were with?

I didn't have to pound sand either, was fortunate not to deploy though I was on the next rotation to Iraq had I stayed in. Big "nope" to that one for me. It was easier than usual to make rank since the munitions field was way short on E-5s.

that's the reason i didn't volunteer for subs. this will sound stupid but i made it a point to go topside at least once a week to see the sun. didn't really get sick of anybody. there was a certain camaraderie between us. a lot of us still in contact on fb and the ship has a reunion every couple of years for all members. we did have the stupidest/weirdest conversations while on watch tho