Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages | Hacker News Reader

Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages

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462 pointsjsnell315 comments

These translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes or references that only make sense from a certain cultural standpoint.

I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.

This is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural context that language is being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by example.

The day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the singularity.

Welcome, to the World of Tomorrow!

https://imgflip.com/ai-meme

It sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations

[0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

How would one even attempt to communicate with an octopus?

Alien intelligence: the extraordinary minds of octopuses and other cephalopods

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-in...

It's OK, Contact prepared me for this. We should use math. Have we tried strobing a 2-3-5-7 sequence at one, and see if it gives us 11?

(The above is meant in jest, of course.)

> (The above is meant in jest, of course.)

Sounds like a good idea to me. But of course one needs to be open minded, there are other functions that satisfy the same rules. :-)

More seriously, I think humans and other mammals generally can learn to share an “animal” language which uses repetition for bidirectional training (animal to human, human to animal).

Elements used for prediction include: - Predictable timing, both circadian and in relation to circumstantial events - body language - sound patterns - touch patterns - performative actions with environmental objects

It’s not so much a “universal” language, but rather that mammals seem to share some semi-universal ability to train each other in these cues and learn them. They can be used for surprisingly rich inter-species communication and over time both parties move a lot of the inference and signaling to their subconscious, no longer even taking active brain power to decipher intent and meanings.

I’ve also done this when I was working very closely with just myself and one other person and neither of us spoke the others language but we had to get the job done for 8-12 hours every day. We established a system of different grunts and cues that we used first for several weeks. Once that was fluid and we could communicate everything that we needed to, we started replacing/connecting the established grunts with our own language words and that’s how we taught eachother the others’ language. At least for the domain of our work.

I have no idea if any of these would be possible with cephalopods but I feel like if we had children and baby octopuses raised together they may find reasonably robust ways to communicate intent, feelings, and find the ability to create novel games to play with eachother.

It’s hard to say as the further you get away from a common ancestor the more the behavior of different species diverges (maybe a bit tautological, but still worth pointing out).

I played with my pet rat and we were good friends. We’d play little games and I’d tickle her Rats and humans diverged maybe 80 million years ago. Interestingly, humans and dogs diverged perhaps 100 million years ago, and we know we can communicate with dogs.

However an octopus is ~600 million years away from a mutual common ancestor, which is way back in the Precambrian. It’s an order of magnitude more time.

Humans created dogs out of the wolves best able to communicate with humans.

It's been a consistent artificial selection pressure.

Dogs even developed facial muscles to communicate with human expressions.

Dogs created civilization out of humans by consistently helping the most cooperative ones. Even today, dog “owners” live longer and attract more mates. It’s consistent selection pressure.

>learn to share an “animal” language

Aren't there a few primates that have learned sign language?

Shame cephalopods only live a couple of years, while humans typically require 30 years to achieve a basic level of intelligence

We could just agree that "to forestand" is a new word that means the same as German "verstehen", and maybe eventually it actually would.

I do not believe this would make sense. The German 'ver-' has nothing in common with the English 'fore-'.

"We would [understand the Lion]. We're flexible and can get into different perspectives, and we have been close to animal living ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years, plus we watch nature and learn about how lions live and what they do. The lion would have difficulty understanding us, as our world is a superset of its world" - coldtea

Yeah, I think we'd be just fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim_Chimpsky

> Nim's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."

One could argue that this isn't talking to a well adjusted animal living in its native habitat. It is talking to a long term research subject/victim suffering at the hands of "researchers" while trying to teach it a language that is utterly alien to it. Of course knowing how animals communicate in their natural habitat is not useful if you want to ask them deep questions like "what do you think about global warming" or "do you think god exists", to which they probably wouldn't have an answer anyway.

> The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

I would put forward "grok" as a translation. Your use of "no longer alien" evokes that word all the more.

Funny how a fictional word, ostensibly Martian, can come to have colloquial meaning in English, even to those who haven’t read the book.

Shakespeare and Aesop… and Heinlein.

I believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.

I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.

Of course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).

I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese.

I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct.

We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain.

So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.

Isn't Chinese actually a best case scenario for machine translation, with huge amounts of text available, and little if any variance (no tenses, no persons, no plural, no declinations)?

Maybe not stop completely, but certainly in some contexts, e.g. when using machine translation to produce text in a language you can passively understand but don't have a large active vocabulary in.

Which I did just yesterday by putting the text I wanted to convey into Google Translate and then tweaking it until the translation looked reasonable. In the end, I still had to postprocess the output a bit, but I ended up with something which I couldn't have written if starting from scratch, which was entirely worth the small pain of using slightly less colorful language.

SEO'd websites use "Google English".

> I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.

In general you are correct, but there is the special case of a person using machine translation as a tool to try and communicate with someone they don't share a language with.

Of course, the first approximation is the person performing all the stereotypical monolingual behaviors of speaking extra slowly and loudly, using pseudo-simplified language, accompanied with exaggerated hand gestures that don't really help.

BTW, I've seen people struggling with voice assistants in almost exactly the same way (absent the hand gestures).

But the point is that people modify their language to try and compensate for communication barriers all the time, and it is just a skill, whether it is speaking to children, or foreigners, or code switching to speak to someone in a different class or subculture. Machine translation adds a new wrinkle to the mix, but it isn't all that different.

The (very old) machine translation joke: The computer was asked to translate the phrase: "The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak" into Russian. The output was: "The vodka is great but the meat is rotten".

GPT-3 handles idioms just fine. Here I tested it on "I fell for her." https://files.catbox.moe/lp6oyg.jpeg

You're missing the point of the parent comment: GPT-3 can understand this idiom because it was trained on a corpus in which the context for this idiom already existed. If a new idiom would emerge, the system would not necessarily be able to handle it if it can not understand it from the context it was trained on. Therefore, a translating AI needs to be continuously updated.

Is that any different than a human? They can be pwnded by new idioms.

No it isn't of course, but that speaks for the argument that AGI is necessary for human-level translation :)

Or just an up-to-date GPT?

Like, for example, “to be pwned”, which I believe is not going to be understood by majority of English speakers.

And even fewer ML proggies.

Ackshually... :)

https://files.catbox.moe/yvhqwd.jpeg

I think Humans are pretty good at at least recognizing that a particular phrasing doesn't make sense as a literal statement and so must be a reference to something. Often you can get an idea of what it's meant to mean just by context. Sometimes if you see a dozen or so usages, you get the idea of what it means without ever having it explicitly explained.

One of the main differences between humans and ML is that humans learn in far fewer examples than machines.

"Poverty of the stimulus"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus

Until the models become more sophisticated than human brains. Then humans will need more examples than a machine would to learn the same thing.

Good luck accurately machine translating the infinitely growing idiom of jokey Twitter conversation, which most native speakers can pick up pretty quickly.

"The speaker became attracted to the person they are talking about" is definitely not the way I (native US English speaker) would explain falling for someone, and any person or robot using it that way is likely to sow confusion.

How does it do with "I fell for it?"

"Falling for someone" can mean both "falling in love with someone" and "to be trapped/tricked by someone" according to both my experience and my go-to dictionary [1] [2]. "Falling for something" is clearly in the realm of "being tricked" according to [3] (but that source also puts "falling for somebody" squarely on the "love" side of things [4]).

So I would say that, while you may have never heard it used that way, it certainly has that meaning in practice to many people. Don't judge the robot so harshly.

[1]: https://dict.leo.org/pages/addinfo/addInfo.php?aiid=En842ho0...

[2]: https://dict.leo.org/pages/addinfo/addInfo.php?aiid=EKHR2Car...

[3]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fall-for...

[4]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fall-for...

Passed the test: https://files.catbox.moe/f1b7ar.jpeg

It's not really a great argument. Languages are always evolving, so there's always a need to update the system by ingesting new inputs. Even natural general intelligences, aka us humans, learn by repeatedly ingesting the new inputs and perhaps supplementary data, like an explanation from a friend or maybe urbandictionary.

EDIT: As an example, how much time is dedicated in schools to explaining turns of phrase and such in Shakespeare. Who at least was writing Modern English. Go back to Chaucer and good luck...

Machine translation can take the context statistically really well.

> I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

It's actually pretty rare, at least for me when I was learning English. Usually I would understand from the context what the idiom must mean, but not necessarily what each word means.

For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs".

I think there's 2 styles of learning - breadth-first and depth-first. My wife is a depth-first learner. She would look up every definition as many levels down as needed before going to the next part. It drove me crazy when I studied with her because my stack would overflow.

I try to understand the general idea, look how it works, and only then go down into details. She was very frustrated with this because she couldn't deal with "details we ignore for now".

In language learning I think depth-first is a bad idea, because meaning of the details change with context. So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning. After encountering a word many times in different contexts you get intuition on what it means and how it's used much better than if you looked it up and took the first meaning as gospel.

> For example: "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" was pretty obvious, but "hatched" was a new word for me in this meaning, I only knew about the door thingy not "hatching from eggs".

Nearly monolingual English speaker here.

I'm very familiar with the noun "hatch" meaning a kind of door, and the verb "hatch" meaning to emerge from an egg. But until just now I had never noticed that they're spelled and pronounced the same way. (And apparently they're etymologically unrelated.)

Also native English speaker.

One thing I learned recently is the etymologies of the words for “Orange”.

The Orange Order is a fraternal order in Northern Ireland named in honour of the (Dutch) William of Orange, whose title is from the Principality of Orange (in what is now southern France), named after the city of Orange, whose name reached that after a few rounds of minor corruption from the Gaulish “Arausio” meaning cheek or temple.

The Orange Order likes the colour orange. I don’t know where on that etymological chain the connection stops, but the word for the colour is derived from the fruit, the fruit has the name “an orange” as a corruption of “a norange” (except the language this happened in varies from English, French, Spanish and Italian depending who I ask, so might have been “une norenge” but all the stories agree the “n” shifted), that from the Arabic nāranj, and that is apparently fairly close to the Dravidian root word.

Returning to William of Orange, the Dutch word for the fruit is “Sinaasappel” - Chinese Apple. And of course, “Mandarin” is the English words for both a type of orange and a branch of the Chinese language.

Interesting… in Bangalore fruit vendors call loose-skinned oranges “Nar Oranges” and apparently the first plantation of these was in Narpur, introduced from China. In South Africa these same kinds of oranges are called nartjies.

It tickles my funny bone to no end that William of Orange is known to the Spaniards as Guillermo de Naranja.

It shouldn't, somehow, Guillermo is William and Naranja is orang, it just sounds like someone is having me on.

I found that most amusing too when I lived in Madrid.

Not sure why!

It’s not, it’s Guillermo de Orange. Source: check spanish wikipedia and the ratio of google results for each term.

Sorry!

English, the magical language where you have

hatch / to hatch

fire / to fire

function / to function

form / to form

moor / to moor

...

I remember that reading bash.org 15 or so years ago was pretty hard for me, because many puns and slang was confusing or ambiguous for me. I wish I remembered specific examples.

Well actually I do have one from that time, but not from bash.org: when I started playing nethack I remember being confused because the game would describe foul foodstuffs as "tasting terrible", but in colloquial French (my native language) "terrible" is often used as a positive adjective (much like "awesome" shifted from meaning "inspiring terror" to "excellent" in the English vernacular).

So, when the game says that something "tastes terrible", does it mean that it tastes awful or awesome? I now know the answer, but back then it wasn't so obvious.

This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Pterry and the Discworld:

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.

Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

Perhaps a better example would be "he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run," vs. "he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth." The latter is easy to figure out but unless you know about baseball it's hard to figure out the first.

Idioms can be hard when they are presented in abstract like that. But if somebody said "Trump calls himself a genius businessman. He was born on third base and thought he hit a home run." I would know what it means no problem.

That's what I meant by guessing from context.

It sounds like this idiom has been comically overextended for effect, though.

Sometimes this is funny, sometimes it's aggravating.

In this case, funny and extremely apt.

   The latter is easy to figure out

That misquote would confuse even somebody who knows baseball. The actual quote is, "There are many people who don`t know what real pressure is. Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple."

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-12-14-860403...

True, though "thinking they hit a home run" is a nice extension of the same concept: not only do they think that they deserve what they got for no effort, but are actually angry that they didn't get more.

(Coincidentally, I used exactly that expression, precisely that way, earlier today. Unless somehow the OP read what I wrote, which isn't impossible.)

Haha of course.

> So when I learn a language I don't even look up unfamiliar words if I can still guess the general meaning.

This is the kind of thinking that led to a friend of mine and his entire family, touring Germany, saying the word for "apple juice" whenever they meant to say "thank you".

I'm not even kidding.

Comic example in film: in the Oliver Reed film Hannibal Brooks, a misunderstanding leads one of the major characters to believe that elephant translates into english as "we're-here".

There are several misunderstandings in translation between Australian Aboriginal languages and English.

I'm 30+ and I can't understand teenagers texting on my own mother language.

Bruh

I don't know if this is a reference to the recent South Park episode, but do teenagers really say "bruh" so much? I thought that was something people said a decade ago, although they used to ironically spell it "bra" sometimes.

I can confirm that "bruh" is very popular with at least the teens I interact with through online games, yes.

The spelling change seems to be indicative of the generation shift (and a slightly different pronunciation). From what (little) exposure I've had to teenagers in recent years "bruh" is "correct" (and "bra" is "ancient" and "bro" is "boring"). Slang usage shifts in weird ways.

I'm pretty sure it's brah, coming from Hawaiian pidgin. It's a shortening of braddah (i.e. brother).

I'm sure both still exist. Slang always is prone to regionalisms and in-group markings. What I've heard (on Xbox voice chat primarily) as commonly used today is "bruh" like much closer to how most people pronounce "duh". I don't know where it originates dialectally other than "often heard in Fortnite and Minecraft".

(Definitely the one closer to my youth came closer to "bra"/"brah", and while some of that was assumed to be surfer-originated, I can't tell you how much it was related to Hawaiian pigdin or just convergent evolutionary vowel shifts.)

yeah, 'bruh' has been a thing for the past... 7-8 years now? hit its peak around 2016 but is still going strong.

no cap frfr

No cap, there was a translation of Beowulf a few years ago that deadass translated the first word of the saga, "Hwæt", as "Bro!" (like how a drunk storyteller sitting next to you at the bar might say "Bro, listen to this shit" instead of the more staid/traditional openers like "Harken!")

Fr fr no cap that shit bussin dawg, gotta relate to the chilluns mang

Sokath, his eyes open!

>I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

I know someone who won't sympathize with this difficulty, as he insisted on an obscure abortion joke in the man page for abort(), which will come off as super confusing to anyone who doesn't know the reference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015644

RMS has been known to make the odd comment (once or twice) where raising awareness of an important idea takes priority over immediate convenience. That doesn't mean he unsympathetic to challenges of foreign languages.

If the documentation is intended to be used as a technical reference by people who won’t get the reference, that is, by its nature, unsympathetic to the people who will be using it, no matter what he claims — and I don’t think he has ever actually shown how he’s weighed such concerns.

Almost all foreign language studies I know of include a collection of stories / literature where a number of common sayings are from.

Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".

Chinese studies includes Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A Chinese Friend of mine explained the meaning of the phrase "Pour the oil", based on some Sima-Yi / Zhuge Liang story from RotTK. (Which IIRC, means something along the lines of "I'm not going to be a sore loser about this")

Japanese studies include something about an impenetrable shield and the all-penetrating spear, which apparently is the root word for contradict. Using "Google Translate" on this one, "矛盾" translates into "Contradict". But "矛" means Spear, and "盾" means shield.

So a dumb translation would translate "矛盾" into "SpearShield", which is nonsense. But the meaning is "To Contradict".

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Was just going to say, reminds me of the classic Trek HFY sequence: https://imgur.com/gallery/qSmHy

"what is the work 'fuck' for", the innocent young vulcans want to know. "surely there are more logical intensity modifiers."

"yeah, you'd think so," say the weary, jaded vulcan professors, "you'd really fucking think so."

It's not quite the same (less action for one), but if the "humans have crazy ideas" aspect is interesting, then the Starfleet Corps of Engineers (aka Star Trek: SCE) novels might be worth a look. Haven't read many of them myself, but "make things work any way you can" is basically how they function.

This quote sums up my Italian experience. The language is so full of phrases which - like everything - are regional, that Google Translate often just gives up.

My favourite is "in bocca al lupo", which roughly translates to "break a leg" - note the lack of verb.

Also that's the current meaning, which changed over the last century.

On top of that I remember three commonly used gestures two of which look the same to the uninitiated eye on photos.

Overall: his eyes red!

That's either a dog's breakfast or the cat's pajamas, but I'm not sure which, or which story holds the explanation.

A lot of slang was invented less than 1000 years ago.

Ex: English studies would not be complete without Aesop Fables. Learning the stories is the only way you can understand common phrases / idioms like "sour grapes".

Most of the vocabulary you pick up from context; idioms aren't fundamentally different from other parts of the language in that regard. You don't need to know an idiom's source material to understand its meaning, no more than you need to be aware of a word's etymology to use it. Though it doesn't hurt and it's often fascinating.

From a practical perspective, I believe the whole point is that an idiom is fundamentally different. If you are a non-native speaker, you can look up a word you don't know. But if it's an idiomatic phrase, like "waiting for the other shoe to drop," looking up each word in the phrase does you no good. Studying fables etc. is a great way to learn them.

I'm a native English speaker and I actually have no idea where "waiting for the other shoe to drop" comes from, but I know its idiomatic meaning.

Same here, and another one that irritates me is "being left high and dry", which is a bad thing. But I envision high and dry as a good thing, isn't that where you would want to be in a storm or at sea?

Truth be told I never actually looked up where a lot of these idioms come from. I just heard other people using them and then I started to use them too.

But not if you tied your boat up in a harbour, and then when the tide went out, you can't sail it because it is high and dry sitting on it's hull instead of floating.

You can look up the entire phrase or just ask someone. There’s no need to know where it came from, although it might make retention easier, or comprehension better. Nothing beats time spent immersed in the language and just asking questions or looking at context when something seems odd. Living languages aren’t static targets either, you’ll sound formal or just plain strange if you elevate dictionary definitions over experience and practice with common usage.

These days, you can easily look them up. To viz: https://dict.leo.org/german-english/waiting%20for%20the%20ot...

Interestingly, the first given translation is itself an idiom (lit. "to wait for the thick/fat end"). An idiom I understand, even though I had no idea where it's from; I looked it up, it relates to corporal punishment. The second translation is a more generic one.

The second translation is a biblical reference, where a "Hiobsbotschaft" implies receiving news of a further tragedy, invoking the Old Testament character Job (Hiob), whose faith was tested by suffering great losses.

Unfortunately neither of these help to understand the English shoe idiom which I, as a native English speaker, have no clue about.

In some cases, there's an equivalent idiom in the native language, and while the scenario may be very different, the underlying similarity is readily apparent.

These idioms are basically compound words, the meaning is barely related to the component words.

A good example of this, in English, is the meaning of the phrase "O.K.", which is "oll komplete", a funny 1700s-era meme when newspapers (at the time) would misspell words on purpose.

Most of those misspellings have been forgotten, but the most common: Oll Komplete (All Complete) was so common, it became ingrained in our language. Today, everyone knows things are Okay, despite not remembering the original story.

-------

Still, learning some degree of stories helps remind us that not all words are to be taken literally in a language. That meanings are assigned based off of shared experiencnes.

> which is "oll komplete"

There is no definitive answer for the etymology of OK - your declaration certainly isn’t a fact. And it wasn’t in the 1700’s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_etymologies_o...

Yeah this is apocryphal at best.

um, at least this is more important in Japanese and Chinese. in another way, usually people should rely on this to memorize it.

矛盾 is Chinese.

矛盾 is used the same in Japanese - 'onyomi' words use Chinese readings of hanzi, as opposed to 'kunyomi', which uses the Japanese reading.

Though, as someone who speaks a little 日本語 (though nowhere near fluent), I don't quite understand the significance being ascribed here. There are huge numbers of Jukugo ("compound kanji") [which are frequently, but not exclusively, onyomi words] where trying to understand the word as a compound of the kanji/hanzi components would be equally nonsensical, and aren't anything that requires special mention in language learning. Having multiple readings of even a single kanji is also pretty normal, and sometimes those are not all readily apparent from understanding one definition, either. Also plenty of kunyomi words where the reading would end up with a word totally different from the initial kanji/hanzi.

To my knowledge, this is no more due to idioms from culturally significant literature than the word 'novel' being used to describe books and new ideas is.

Edit: Looks like a fable is the origin for the word in Chinese, but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese, or indication that it was any different than any other word where the component hanzi/kanji (or radicals therein) would not make sense as the definition.

> but no mention of the fable when I learned it in Japanese

I personally learned of it from the Japanese game "Ace Attorney".

There's a spear/shield ornament somewhere as evidence, so the game spends a decent amount of time introducing the myth to the audience. The myth is seen again in Trigun (impenetrable shield was one of the enemies that Vash took down), and again in "Rising of the Shield Hero" where Shield-guy's biggest rival is the Spear-guy.

A lot of Japanese media talk about this spear-vs-shield story. If it was a myth borrowed from China, that still makes sense. (Aesop is Greek after all, but still influenced English).

--------

My overall point is that some words reference stories rather than the actual meaning of the word. Learning the underlying stories can help when learning those languages.

To me, it's interesting in the "Huh, neat" kind of way in the same way knowing the etymology of "sour grapes" is. At least personally, I don't find it particularly useful for actually learning the language - there's just too many words like this for it to provide me any real advantage, and I'd likely end up confusing myself more when running into the words where there isn't any similar significance. For example, irresponsible/sloppy is 'いい加減', and 加 means increase while 減 means decrease - I could see myself going 'hmm I know the word contradiction is one where the two kanji actually contradict each other... increase and decrease contradict each other, I bet this is it!"

The term comes from the ancient text Han Feizi from 3rd century AD China.

It was absorbed into Sino-Japanese vocabulary along with many other Chinese words.

kkndve English speaker checking in, I did not know that the phrase "sour grapes" comes from Aesop.

Honestly I only vaguely recall reading a few stories from Aesop when I was in second grade or something. Maybe a story about a wolf and another animal and a river? None of it really stuck.

I can easily imagine a hypothetical version of English that does not borrow words from Latin and in which 'spearshield' would be a verb.

Idioms are a part of a regular curriculum as much as just plain meanings of works.

Another example would by Troy, which was a mythological city until it’s location was discovered.

now imagine reading something from genz slang language: Big Yikes fam, Glow up! Periodt

Or imagine being autistic and taking things way too literally.

I've read that English is one of the most idiomatic languages. I believe it.

That YouTube person who learns languages and surprises native speakers discovered this when he had Chinese teachers rate him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxfTGbSfqA

It turns out there are a lot of poems, stories, etc a native speaker would learn in school and apply to their speech that a foreign learner might not even know about. One of the teachers compared this to learning Shakespeare, but I don't think it's nearly as involved in day-to-day speech the way it seems to be for native speakers of Chinese languages. I certainly don't know anything about Shakespeare other than what I picked up from Star Trek even though I'm sure I use things that came from his works all the time without knowing.

This Finnish comedian trying to makes sense of the word "shit" illustrates this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXH3HDE9Czo

That was a fun set! Thank you for posting that.

Sounds like a foreigner's take on George Carlin's old skit

Youtube is also recommending me another of his videos on the word "ass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P0Z1yq-2FQ

I used to work with a lot of Swedes. I learned literal English translations of several Swedish idioms. I don't think any relied on wordplay, so they worked fine as standalone idioms, with some having similar versions in English (holding thumbs vs. crossing fingers).

Most of the replies here kind of miss the point and talk about idioms (hatching eggs, dropping shoes, etc.). Idioms are indeed hard, but every languages has their own. So, when you meet eggs, shoes or whatever in a discussion that was not about chickens or fashion, you can at least suspect it's figurative.

Meanwhile, "To fall for someone" is not an idiom but a phrasal verb, and these are (imho) much harder than idioms because they do not "signal" their exceptionality as strongly. How am I supposed to know that "falling for someone" does not involve any actual falling, or that when you "make up with someone" you are not really making anything?

Prepositions are the bane of getting true fluency in English. Making up and making out are both options, but very different ones.

"First you cut the tree down, then you cut the tree up."

One of my biggest epiphanies was realizing how much dumb hit music was actually partially catering to English as a second language speakers for broader appeal.

sort of like the opposite of hip-hop/rap (think of all the new words meaning "the police" for example)

its just evolved, it's prevalent in hip-hop and rap too, at least what gets on top of the billboards

> For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.

This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there are three words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I", "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the sentence; nothing tricky is going on.

(The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".)

[1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard sense of the preposition "for". ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them work.

Imagine stumbling upon a "Yes." meme

I always had this problem with Mexican food.

  - Burrito... ew
  - Alambre. huh?
  - "al Pastor" ok, that must be lamb... it's PORK??? WTF???

And then I order "papas con cuero" thinking this must be yet another poetic name for food, and find that it's exactly what it says on the tin[1]. /facepalm

[1] "What it says on the tin" is a reference to canned food, where the label on the can is important, because you can't see inside. Of course, the cans are made out of steel these days, but we still... ugh, never mind.

> [...] you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words.

This is further exacerbated today where the contexts could be cross-cultural, due to the Internet fostering quicker and communication over borders. I recently ran across a (somewhat off-color) humorous username 「一哭二鬧三上悠亞」: it would have made no sense at all if you only know the Chinese context (first six characters) or the Japanese context (last four characters)! Even though all eight characters are intelligible independently in both Chinese and Japanese.

For anyone interested in learning Sumerian, there is really nice introduction "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian"[0] by J. Bowen and M. Lewis, which gives you rough ability to understand some grammar and also read cuneiform. It's extremely niche topic and I can guarantee that you'll have absolutely no use for this knowledge[1], but if you're into learning exotic languages, this can be fun. At least it was for me.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Read-Ancient-Sumerian-Introduct...

[1] To some extent you can see the same cuneiform symbols in later Akkadian texts, but forget about the grammar.

Do you know if the original of the joke can be seen in Sumerian writing? (some picture). Also, do you think it could have been a pun?

I don't know about original clay tablet on which this was written, but it can be found through the original publication I think: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1359157, if someone has access to JSTOR.

About the interpretation, I myself understand only the:

/igi nu-mu-un-du[8]/ - "I don't see anything"

The rest is a bit above my level. But check this alternative interpretation of this joke: https://twitter.com/abbyfheld/status/1501880993833054208

A friend of mine was taking Akkadian or Sumerian (I can’t remember which) and described the wide range of possible correct translations of a text with a story from class.

One student said it was a receipt for the sale of a cow. The prof said that was one real possibility. Another said it was a love poem. Prof agreed again. :shrug:

But my favorite translation disagreement is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, I think, where one man insists the proper translation of a line is “the lords of the land of the blazing rockets.”

> One student said it was a receipt for the sale of a cow. The prof said that was one real possibility. Another said it was a love poem. Prof agreed again.

Isn't this the plot of "Foucault's Pendulum?"

There's also a comment on that alternative interpretation here: https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/15058362781090611...

There's also a video series to go along with the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTle8uT7NEM&list=PLmXNllWcFF...

I've been warned by a Sumerologist that the book is idiosyncratic. It does seem to be the only in-print and inexpensive option aimed at amateur scholars.

More mainstream options:

Hayes, John. A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. A teaching grammar for the beginner. In print, but quite expensive.

Edzard, D.O. Sumerian Grammar. A reference grammar rather than a teaching grammar with exercises and the like. It's really good if you already have some familiarity with linguistics. It's in print and inexpensive.

Thomsen, Marie-Louise. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. A reference grammar. Out of print but available on the high seas.

All three of those are on libgen just so you know

Thanks for the suggestions! By the way, what exactly did you mean by saying that the book is idiosyncratic?

I'm sorry I can't add much more detail as I'm no expert and I'm paraphrasing an off-hand comment I heard around the time the book was published. The short of it is that Bowen & Lewis seem to take grammatical positions at odds with the rest of the field. This doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong. As you are likely aware, the Sumerian language is poorly understood and there's plenty of disagreement among Sumerologists.

> you'll have absolutely no use for this knowledge

I've heard that "bitches love Sanskrit" https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/06/we-are-only-tr...

Neil Postman: "Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.”

Every time I see a Twitter post like this, I remember this quote.

That is brilliant.

My immediate response in this context is the back button - if you haven't given much thought to the medium, you likely haven't given much thought to the content itself.

Why? I must be missing something because Native Americans definitely had philosophy, oral traditions, and the like - smoke didn't change that and a vaguely racist comment about how they wouldn't be able to form thoughts because they didn't have some special medium for doing so just comes off as that.

Socrates didn't really write stuff down...

The point has to do with Twitter, sir.

Nice Rorschach there with your quip about racism, however. You may want to think about that a bit.

137 characters - too small to be considered as thoughts as your message would fit in a tweet.

It's an analogy.

It doesn't say anything about "wouldn't be able to form thoughts", in fact it explicitly refers to smoke as a medium being insufficient.

The comment had nothing to do with forming thoughts, but instead how thoughts can be meaningfully conveyed. If the mention of a minority or Native American technique in the analogy makes you close your mind before being able to understand:

Telegrams are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a frontier philosopher would run short of either money or time long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.

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.. -. ..-. --- .-. -- .- - .. --- -. / .. ... / .--. .... -.-- ... .. -.-. .- .-.. / ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. / ... - --- .--.

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>You cannot use telegrams to do philosophy

Tell that to Wittgenstein. Tractatus would have been a twitter thread nowadays.

"I think therefore I am" doesn't take a lot of bits to say. A guy once said "brevity is the soul of wit."

It doesn't take that many leaves to make smoke.

You should keep in mind your medium, sir. All of human philosophy is encoded at your fingertips in 0's and 1's.

Literally smoke signals implemented in rocks so dumb we tricked them into thinking.

..-. .- .. .-.. ..- .-. . / - --- / --. .-. .- ... .--. / - .... .. ... / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / --. . - / -.-- --- ..- / -.. .- -... -... . -.. / --- -. / -... -.-- / . ...- . .-. -.-- / -- --- .-. ... . / ..- ... . .-. / . ...- . .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- .-. --. ..- .- -... .-.. -.-- --..-- / . ...- . .-. -.-- / -.-. --- -- .--. ..- - . .-. / ... -.-. .. . -. - .. ... - / .-- .. - .... / . ...- . -. / .- -. / .. --- - .- / --- ..-. / .--. .... .. .-.. --- ... --- .--. .... .. -.-. .- .-.. / ..- -. -.. . .-. .--. .. -. -. .. -. --. .-.-.- / --- ..-. / .-- .... .. -.-. .... / .. / .- -- / .- - / .-.. . .- ... - / .- / -.. .- -... -... .-.. . .-. / --- ..-. / - .... . / ..-. --- .-. -- . .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- / -- . -- -... . .-. / --- ..-. / - .... . / .-.. .- - - . .-. .-.-.-

You’re inserting intent that isn’t in the text - a sign of our times. It only says such thoughts can’t be transmitted via smoke signal. Here it’s used to say, “Fuck Tweet threads.”

And yet, they can be used to transmit such thoughts and the Native's communication is used as a frame - so what was that about me inserting things again?

So can Twitter threads. The bit about wood and blankets alludes to impracticality. It’s not about information theory. Why shouldn’t smoke signals be the frame? It’s an analogy. Why do you feel smoke signals are taboo for that purpose?

The problem here is you assuming that someone thinks that Natives only communicate via smoke signals.

Hahaha. As a Mexican, I find the American focus on racism so simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary.

In Mexico, we don't have clean water in our faucets. Electricity and the internet shuts off, randomly due to infrastructure problems or maintenance. And yet, we are humorous. We make fun of each other. And yes, this includes racial and cultural differences which we laugh at, in poking fun at each other, together. In England they might call it "taking the piss out of you". In Mexico, it's normal.

And yet in the US, there's not these "third world problems",

So the aspect of "simultaneously hilarious and unnecessary" I mention is regarding how people in the US, since they don't have "third world problems", they make their own problems to create drama about... I suppose so that they can feel some sort of relevance of a struggle.

In doing so, they reduce the capacity of dialogue, and they ruin and potential existence of Humor in a conversation -- because people are expected to walk on egg shells on certain topics.

It really destroys the fun in conversations when you have to worry about "oh my goodness, I am risking talking about something that's not politically correct! Someone who isn't actually related to the conversation content might pretend to be offended for the sake of some other non-existing-in-the-conversation person to show off their virtuous nature".

Yelling on a street corner is a poor medium for philosophy too, but if that’s where the audience is…

Neither is any language for that matter.

Empirical reference is central.

You don't explain the taste of a lemon. You hand them a lemon.

Everests of bullshit have been built upon merely metaphorical understanding.

It's going to be a predictably nerdy reply but I feel like the issue of smoke signals is not complexity, it's bandwidth.

Now maybe if you could put a dozen or so smoke signals in parallel and add error correction codes...

The clacks would like to have a word with you...

I have an image now of someone sky-writing Euclid's axioms.

This is a better way of expressing a thought that I've had for a couple years now. Indulge me in this thought experiment.

Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The same is true of science with its big bang. I argue that these stories perhaps tell us about the early universe, but not how it was created.

Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect?

I believe that human language has not yet reached a point where it could describe anything like that. If that has true we have debated for centuries about a question that even if an individual knew the answer they would be unable to express it to anyone else.

I could say, for example, that our universe was created when a 5th dimensional alien named Parkus Mersson ran universe.jar. But that only expands the notion of universe. I don’t think I can make the kind of statement you mean without regressing to something else that needs explaining.

IOW, why is there something rather than nothing.

404. The requested multiversal namespace was not found.

Do you wish to create it? Y/N

Consider:

There is an uncreated God who is self-existent and immutable. He has no end or beginning and contains within Himself fullness of being. From him all things derive their being. He doesn't "exist", he just *is*; that is, His being is underived. Everything else derives their existence from Him. There has never been a time when he has not been, because he is self-existent apart from time; time itself is something He has made. So there wasn't "story prior"; there was just God. This is the God that Christians worship, who added to his eternal nature the nature of a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus testified to this, saying: "Before Abraham and Isaac were, I AM."

>He doesn't "exist", he just is

This is meaningless, the verb 'is' literally means 'to be', i.e. to exist. How can someone/something/God not exist and yet 'be'?

This is a very widespread problem with the Abrahamic family of religions (and maybe other religions, but I'm most familiar with this family). When pressed, philosophers and proponents are very adamant about the fact that 'God' is not an entity comprehensible to a human, it's useless to apply plain old physical or commonsense logic to 'him' or try to derive any useful facts about 'him' or just reason about 'him' in any way other than 'he exists and he wants me to say and do things'. But doesn't this, like, invalidate the whole enterprise of worship ?

If God is so incomprehensible that you can't even explain why evil exists when he is supposedly all-good and all-capable of enforcing that good, what makes you think he wants or needs worshipping, you just said he doesn't obey any comprehensible rules. You might object that he himself told us to worship him in the $Book, this doesn't work. Even assuming $Book is true and uncorrupted, what makes you think God really means what he says, you just assumed he works by a rule that even humans don't always obey. Maybe God just made himself known to us and requested that we worship him as a joke, you might object that this makes God unacceptably 'Juvenile' for a cosmic entity, but again, this just assumes human standards and social protocols. Etc etc etc.

The distinction is that unlike everything in creation, God does not derive His being from an outside source. You and I, and (everything else) are dependent on things outside of us to cause us to be and continue being. We are, out of, something else.

Not one of us decided to be born, but through the actions of others we came to be. And we continue to be, because we have food and water and shelter and clothing, etc.

God, unlike the things He has made doesn't depend on something else to be or continue being. He has always been. He isn't out of anything but is self-existent; He doesn't exist but rather is. And because He is, everything else (all of which depends on Him to be) continues to be.

I hope I've worded that clearly.

> Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created.

I haven't seen much arguments about this. In most civilized countries, religions have stopped to make factual claims about the "antediluvian times", because all their previous claims were proven false. For many decades, scientists have almost stopped arguing with religious figures. The tendency is that scientific people are less permeable to religious beliefs, and religions are almost powerless in scientific domains. Lastly, religions don't argue, internally or with each other, over the origin of the world.

> Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that.

The religious explanations failed to satisfy you, but at least some of them provide a consistent explanation. For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world. You may dislike this "story before that", but it is clear and consistent.

> The same is true of science with its big bang.

It's not true. There are several theories about the origins before the big-bang, or at the big-bang. Science does provide the stories you long for, but at the same time science asserts that these are just hypotheses, and that it's highly probable that models in this domains are won't ever be proved.

> For instance, Genesis states that their god was there from all eternity, then at one point he created the world.

Hmmm? It doesn't state anything about what happened before the creation, or where God came from.

It starts with "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth" (or "when God began to create heaven and earth") and nothing in Genesis mentions any moment or occasion prior to that.

Are you thinking of other aspects of Jewish or Christian tradition that aren't derived from the text of Genesis?

> describe where our universe came from ... that obeys the laws of cause and effect

All you've done is ask a trick question, like "prove Fermat's Last Theorem without using any math". The problem is you used the words "where", which means "a place in the universe", and "cause and effect", which means "tracing the causes of something backward in time", with "time" again existing only within this universe. It's a little like Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. All we've found is that this particular way of asking the question or describing the question is insufficient.

Obviously in order to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, you need to use math. Obviously to talk about anything "external" to the universe, you need to use something that is not a "where" within this universe and does not follow the cause and effect defined within this universe. The question is: is it, therefore, useful to ask the question, given that we are stuck in this universe?

No. It's not.

>that obeys the laws of cause and effect

Why would it need to obey those laws? What made them "laws"?

They don’t lack the language, they lack knowledge beyond that. As anything beyond that is down the rabbit’s hole of “everything is possible” and thus the story is as boring as the 10 season of your sci-go show when they have reached beyond unifinity of galaxies and you just can’t make a proper narrative about something that no longer has any reference to the viewers

> Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect?

Mathematical realism ala Tegmark's level 4 multiverse is a concrete example; if mathematical consistency causes existence then the big bang and our universe have a definite, understandable cause.

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." - Thomas Aquinas

>Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence

Actually you just need to binary encode your mesage using puffs of smoke, something they are perfectly capable of.

I fail to see the problem. What content does the form of a sequence of tweets exclude? Run-on sentences? Does that sentence really need to be a hundred words long?

i partially disagree. I agree that formal philosophical axioms as we understand them are out of reach by puffs of smoke, since philosophy tries to begin from a place of as limited context as possible. I disagree that the lack of that formality is an appropriate litmus for the sufficiency of a medium to harbor successful communication.

pairing known ideas can create new ideas by guiding a contextualized listener to discover the essence of the idea themself. if a cloud of smoke could represent a well known idea, which it can, and about 10 different smoke shapes are possible (for example).. then after 8 puffs of smoke the shaman can create up to 100000000 distinct chains of ideas to direct his audience to whatever it is he wants to them to understand. with smoke symbols for north south east and west, and the delays between when he creates them having assumed meaning, he could give directions to any location on earth - theoretically - with just two to three puffs of smoke

since language is shorthand and referential, it can never contain all the knowledge within itself that is necessary to properly understand it - which is part of the point of the original post. within my tribe, a single word might need a novel to explain to yours, if it is explainable at all. Kind of like being at the bar and something is said and a bunch of people start laughing and all they can communicate to you about it is "you had to be there". the ability to describe details is not the same as the ability to communicate

The smoke puff might be nonsense to an outside observer, but after a few carefully selected puffs curated for the perfect audience - you can communicate literally anything.

likewise, although i have given up on twitter - i do respect that there is often a mountain of context behind popular tweets. although those tweets might not be saying much to me, there is a tribe out there who have a much deeper experience with it than i do. And timing is a huge part of it, as well as the context of mainstream news, and a bunch of other things depending on the intended audience

Copy pasting the completed translation:

"A friendly dog walks into a bar.

His eyes do not see anything.

He should open them."

4000 year old dad jokes. This is the content I come here for.

Why is it certain that this is a joke and not some kind of wisdom, charm or unknown literary category?

Because it starts with "A dog walks into a bar"

There's a similar koan with a dog, which is not intended as a joke; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)

No bar tho.

For starters, it looks, and quacks, like a joke

That's because it had a very convoluted plastic surgery to make it so.

> Why is it certain that this is a joke and not some kind of wisdom, charm or unknown literary category?

The distinction between those may not always be that well-defined.

I once read that the story of the Good Samaritan (by Jesus) follows the structure of a popular set of jokes (or possibly self-congratulatory "wisdom") of the time: something happens, a priest comes by and is useless, a Levite passes by and is useless, and finally a common Jew comes by and fixes the problem, and everybody gets to feel good about being a commoner and not some useless elitist. Except Jesus tripped up his audience by replacing the Jew with a Samaritan.

There is a famous story about Zhuangzi [if you prefer, Chuang Tzu] that goes like this:

-----

Zhuangzi and Huizi were crossing a bridge over the river Hao.

Zhuangzi said: the fish have come out to play; this makes them happy.

Huizi said: You are not a fish. How do you know what makes fish happy?

Zhuangzi said: You are not me. How do you know that I don't know what makes fish happy?

Huizi said: I am not you. Of course I do not know you. [But] you are certainly not a fish. Your non-knowledge of what makes fish happy is total.

Zhuangzi said: Please stick to your original [question]. You asked how I know what makes fish happy. You already knew that I knew this and [still] you asked me. I know it over the Hao.

-----

"I know it over the Hao" makes sense because in the original language, the word "how", 安, is also the word "where".

The story comes down to us as part of a foundational text. Is it wisdom or a cheap joke?

A lot of humour consists of buildup followed by a twist - the humour is in the contrast between the expected and the actual. This is very similar to explaining a concept that is flawed or misunderstood by building up a scenario where the expected outcome can be contrasted with an actual outcome. A smaller set replaces 'actual' with 'nonsense'.

The text may present this as wisdom, but I would say it is both wisdom and humour.

How rough is this translation? Does the "...walks into a bar" joke predate monotheism? Though we know that the Egyptian neighbours were drinking beer at the time, did either culture actually have drinking establishments?

As I understand it, Sumerian culture had drinking establishments. Though they don't seem to have been freestanding business establishments, and were often part of some larger organization (like a temple).

So "bar" would be an updated translation that preserves the essence of an idea of walking into a drinking place, but obviously a lot of the cultural nuance around the social role of a Sumerian tavern is lost. It doesn't really seem important for this joke though.

Here's a Sumerian 'drinking song' about a drinking place, the female proprietor, and the process she performs to make beer.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-sip-from-an-an...

It's well known that the Sumerians did indeed have drinking establishments. Lots of writings about them.

We had alcohol long before we invented second generation religions :-)

Does the original text really says: "walks into a bar"?

No, the original text says:

ur-gir15-re eš2-dam-še in-kur9-ma

Alternatively notated as:

/urgir-e ešdam-še i.n-kur-ma/

Oh, sure. More accurately translated as "tavern".

Depends on your definition of "tavern."

Having lived in both places, a "tavern" in New York and a "tavern" in Wisconsin can be different things, depending on a lot of factors.

Different cultures may assign different connotations to what "bar" means, but first line of the original text says "walks into a [place]" and other sources using that same word [place] involve serving beer to patrons and/or prostitution there, so "bar" or "brothel" or "inn" may be roughly decent approximations; but "bar" has the "... walks into a bar" English trope going for it.

For what it's worth, I've also seen someone interpret this joke as related to prostitutes and windows (as Sumerian bars were apparently also brothels). I think this just goes to show how much one needs to understand about a society's culture to fully understand its jokes.

For the reference, a reply to this thread [1] discusses that particular explanation.

[1] https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/15058362781090611...

The “pun” in Sumerian is centred on the fact that the verb “to see” also literally means “open (one’s) eye”.

Kinda similar to "look out" in English.

Even live languages have words, that are often used in normal speech, but cannot optimally be translated to other languages, and carry no real meaning on their own, except in some cases set the tone.

eg. "bre" in serbian is one of those words, where "nemoj da jedeš to" i "nemoj bre da jedeš to" mean basically the same thing ("don't eat that").

I always thought of it as a kind of more abstract "bro"?

Another example: ¡Vamos! It's kind of like "let's go", but carries more weight than its English translation. Some other languages have similar idioms for hurrying people up, but some languages simply don't.

Including the indispensable https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A7%D9%84%D9...

Even English has words with similar properties, compare for instance "don't eat that" and "don't fucking eat that".

I don’t know Serbo–Croatian at all, but Wiktionary suggests colloquial English interjections like ‘man’, ‘the hell’ as adequate translations: ‘don’t eat that, man!’.

It sounds like what's called an 'emphatic particle', in Hindi at least (तो, 'to') which marks the topic or shifts emphasis in a sentence.

> "bre"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bre#Serbo-Croatian

Forget language, I once asked a Taiwanese colleague to tell me joke that is really considered funny in Taiwan, his response: "For example this is funny, a Polar bear that is cold on the North pole." Ok... I wonder what our jokes sound like to him...

Or some places on the internet where a joke can be the same meaningless word spammed for more that a decade. Jokes are weird desu.

If you're referring to people spamming "desu" with a picture of Suiseiseki from Rozen Maiden, that's not meaningless. The original joke is that the character uses "desu" at the end of her sentences way more than is required by normal Japanese grammar. Other characters have similar verbal ticks, e.g. Kanaria with "de kashira".

I once played Taboo with a Taiwanese colleague. I still remember when he gave the clue "you get this if you're really lazy". The word was "beard".

(BTW I had a beard at the time.)

Let's be honest -- that's part of why I have my beard. The other reason is because I'm bald and it helps balance things out. But mostly lazy.

I'm still undecided whether I'm saving time having a beard or have created more grooming work than a quick shave took.

Every couple of weeks I decide that the current state of affairs simply takes too long and switch things around, only to keep that going as an infinite loop :/

Haha, well, I hate shaving and that's why I often have a beard, you could call me lazy. My Taiwanese colleague was usually not so direct by the way, I'd call him shy but a very nice, warm person.

There's a joke in French about two horses that go to the movies, I usually can't finish telling it from laughing too hard, yet people often find it extremely lame and unfunny. You can't explain humor I guess.

By the unwritten rule of jokes, you must now tell us the joke.

A priest, a rabbi and a horse walk into a bar.

Weren't they two horses?

Exactly.

The horse says, okay I absolutely fucked up that jump, but what the hell are you two doing here in the middle of a hurdle track?

OK, I'll try. Keep in mind that English is not my first language.

Two horses go on a date. First they go and have a few drinks, and then they go to the restaurant. After that, they decide to go to the movies, and they go in one of those theaters with a big balcony in addition to the floor seats. They sit on the balcony and the movie starts.

After a while, one of the horses gets bored and decides to stretch its legs a little and walk around. It approaches the balcony railing and has a look around, at the people down on the floor seats, because it's more interesting than the movie itself. But suddenly, from leaning too hard against the railing, the horse falls down the balcony onto the people below.

The other horse doesn't notice at first. But after a while, it realizes the first horse is missing, so it looks around, looking for it. It approaches the railing, looks at the floor seats, and suddenly trips and falls down on the people below.

At this point, a very annoyed gentleman shouts: "hey, up there! Would you stop throwing horses??"

There you go.

Modern version of an E.B. White quote: "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. Sure, you learn something but the frog dies in the end."

Original version:

"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." - E.B. White

I think a polar bear that is cold on the north pole would be funny as a visual gag most places if executed well, because it breaks assumptions about polar bears. But for some reason when written down it's harder to make it fit the assumptions of the structure of a written joke in many cultures that seems to expect an action. To make it funny in writing, I think many place you'd need a more complex delivery wrapping creating a story around how you ran into this polar bear and it terrified you, but it turned out it was just cold and looking for some way to stay warm.

Good to know one-liners are a universal concept. My favorite English one:

"A cannibal passed his brother in the woods."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

My favorite: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

A cannibal refused to eat clown soup, claiming it tasted funny.

It's tasteless, but I like this one for the unusually intricate ambiguity:

Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?

He worked it out with a pencil.

worked the logs out with a pencil.

I'm not sure if he is trying to tell some version of this joke, but here it goes: (for context, dad jokes are often categorized as "cold jokes" here in China/Taiwan, since often its humor is not appreciated by the audience and thus making the vibe "cold") So a polar bear become bored one day and had nothing to do. So he started to pull off his own hair. One, two, three. One by one the hairs were pulled off. After a while, the polar bear suddenly said: It's pretty cold out here!

Reminds me of a Starcraft joke:

> A marine walks into a bar. He looks around and is confused, says "where is the counter?".

I wonder if, in 3000 years, they'll be trying to figure that one out as well.

Please, do explain the joke for the rest of us.

Wordplay on counter. It’s a PVP game where players are constantly complaining about balance and or counters.

It's not a PvP game, there's marines. (Now imagine 3000 years from now trying to unravel this joke without a bunch of cultural knowledge haha)

You pretty much get balance whine in any competitive game. Sometimes the communities mature out of it, but the scrub mentality comes very natural to a lot of people.

I think it's a funny joke, though. Even though, when I've played Stacraft, I've been the one making marines.

Marines are the basic unit of Terran. Terran will build marines throughout the game (unless they go mech, but bio is the primary composition for all matchups). With upgrades marines have high dps & speed. They're a small unit which means you can fit more dps within a small area. They're ranged, unlike zerglings & zealots. Terran's drop ship, medivacs, can ferry around 8 marines while healing them on the ground

In reality the counter to them is splash damage, though good micro can mitigate that somewhat, & Terran isn't going to stop building marines just because the opponent built some splash damage

In some regards this can be rooted in people expecting StarCraft to be like Age of Empires, where as you climb the tech tree you discard previous tech. StarCraft instead prefers tech to fill out a composition & late tech often provides a support role to earlier tech

https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/174912-the-problem-with-mar... (2010)

A counter is the play that beats a specific strategy. Rock is the counter to Scissors in Rock Paper Scissors.

In the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, each choice has a counter choice that thoroughly defeats it. If you knew that your opponent was going to reveal a scissors, you would counter with a rock.

In Star Craft, each unit has opposing units that are extra effective against it, so if your opponent had a bunch of marines, you might build a bunch of siege tanks.

Here's a whole article on counters to the marine unit: https://osirissc2guide.com/marine-counter.html

There’s no counter to marines

To throw a wrinkle into that, the joke was lost on me, despite being someone who logged several hundred (if not thousand) hours into the original Starcraft between 1998-2003 or so.

However, the distinction is my idea of "online play" back in the day was either playing with friends whom I knew personally, or playing an "All vs Comp" match where several human players would play against a single computer component. And we'd still lose about half the time.

But point being, I never really played PvP, and I don't think that term "counter" came from the original Starcraft manual or strategy guides. It was a term that evolved into the meta community. And if you weren't sufficiently plugged into that community, you wouldn't encounter the term.

There's probably tons of other examples of this, e.g. in the fighting game community.

Yeah, it's definitely in the sliver of the venn diagram where Starcraft and competitive gaming overlaps.

Here is another Starcraft joke you may appreciate:

> A dragoon walks into a bar. No, not around to the bar. A dragoon walks next to the entrance of a bar. A dragoon takes a step toward the bar. A dragoon walks into a bar. Nooo! Not that way!

& this joke explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0G3Gm-1G2Y

& this behavior explained: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/ewsj2o/brood_war... https://old.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/ewsj2o/comment/f...

Further comments say that the reason given is wrong, and that it's a change in (animation?) speed instead that causes this.

Change in movement speed, where movement speed is based on animation frame

Notice how the zerglings don't smoothly move: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOMzUw2GSSk&t=144s

I suppose the assumption is that the path is calculated based on a constant (I assume either average or current) speed, when in reality the speed varies?

I have a similar experience with Age of Empires 2. I played it a lot as a kid and only recently realised there's a pretty active multiplayer community with a few popular streamers like T90 on YouTube commentating on matches. They have a lot of custom lingo, so you'll hear something like "looks like he's going for fast imp" (meaning the commentator thinks a player is following a strategy whereby they prioritise advancing their civilization to the Imperial Age).

Wait, that game is still around!? I played it so much as a kid. I actually logged a lot in the original AOE. That is fantastic and a testament to what is lost with modern games requiring a server to be continually provided.

AOE2 has actually had a great renaissance fairly recently due to a remastered version being released.

Yep. In case you're curious, here's a funny example of a match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTRwNlRaw9Y

I find the "nothing" maps like that to be quite entertaining, but there are a number of good ones out there, and there's plenty of creative strategies and personalities. My favourite was a player called "WALL" who ... well maybe easier if I show you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ecZEs2Y0o

The joke is about StarCraft 2, marines aren't a core unit in every matchup in Broodwar

I can't view this tweet. It seems this guy made his account private.

I could view them before dinner, but it's indeed gone now: "Only approved followers". Guess this relatively "obscure" account got some attention he didn't expect/desired(?)

Anyway, can still read: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html

Put it here as well https://archive.ph/yuQyu

A healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these include:

"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"

"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"

"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"

Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way that medieval England still used Latin.

On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity) This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet

Source: Jon Taylor, "The First Scribes"

This recently also had a post on the AskHistorians subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tbgetc/this_...

From the linked set of proverbs: [1]

"81-82. (cf. 6.2.3: UET 6/2 225) The dog understands "Take it!", but it does not understand Put it down!"

This is ancient form of the modern "No take, only throw" meme! [2]

[1]: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p...

[2]: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/433/498/10e...

Translation is hard, for mostly-dead languages too. I recall this essay by Tolkien on translating Beowulf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Translating_Beowulf

For refference, here is the opening of Beowulf written in English about a thousand years ago: "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning. ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned, geong in geardum, þone god sende folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat þe hie ær drugon aldorlease lange hwile." While you can kind of guess at some of the words and sounds, it's basically unreadable to a modern speaker.

Now here is the beginning of Canterbury Tales, written about 600 years ago: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, owthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." Still very difficult, but you can probably understand the gist of it.

Reading this thread and seeing the author complain about how ambiguous Sumerian is, I find it all the more incredible that we're able to figure out how to translate dead languages like this...

Generally speaking, translation of dead languages is done via means of bilingual texts. The Rosetta Stone is the most famous of these; for cuneiform, the key was apparently a trilingual Old Persian/Elamite/Akkadian inscription (the ‘Behistun inscription’). In this case, Old Persian is an Indo–European language, and Akkadian is Semitic, so those languages have plenty of modern-day relatives with very similar structures, which helps decipherment. Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian: again, the Semitic nature of Akkadian helped a lot here.

It also helps that most languages use more or less similar techniques to express certain concepts and relations. The elaborate case system and verbal morphology, though ‘exotic’ for Europeans, aren’t necessarily all that different to those found in languages elsewhere.

As for ambiguity… I’m not entirely sure how that particular problem is overcome, but the author mentioned duplicate manuscripts which together can remove some of the ambiguity. Beyond that, we just need to infer the missing pieces from the fact that languages are usually self-consistent to a large extent.

(Disclaimer: I know very little about this area, though I do enjoy reading about linguistics!)

> Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian

This isn't quite right; we didn't just find bilingual texts. We found curricular texts that were intended to train Akkadian speakers to be literate in Sumerian, which is obviously much better.

Huh, I had no idea! As I said, I’m not an expert.

Sumerian was a dead prestige language used by scribes in ancient Mesopotamia. As such, there are parallel word lists and other such texts written in Akkadian (which is fairly well understood by modern scholars) meant for scribes learning the language.

It's wild to consider that, thousands of years ago, there were already languages that were considered old and dead.

Here[1] is a video covering how cuneiform (the writing system) was deciphered, most of it was solved after they found an inscription in three different languages.

[1] https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA?t=1542

This isn't just a problem for ancient languages and modern foreign languages. It's a problem for languages you speak fluently. And the implications are a lot bigger than understanding a joke.

Consdier a sentence like "Tim just squealed like a pig low key, actual" [1]. Throw in a few more choice phrases like "L plus ratio", "copium" and "dead ass" and someone from a few yers ago will have issues decoding all that. Many current people will be lost.

Words also disappear (eg [2]). Old English is essentially a different language. Middle English can be hars to parse.

~230 years ago the Bill of Rights became part of the US Constitution. The Firs Amendment [3] includes this text:

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ...

"Establish" here at that time had a very specific meaning that differs from the current vernacular. This sprung from Britain where the Anglican Church was the Established church. That means it was responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages. Catholics, for example, would often get married twice: once in a Catholic church and a second time in an Anglican ceremony so it was official.

The framers here wanted to guard against there being an "official" religion in the nascent United States. All such official institutions were to be civil not religious.

Knowing this history makes this language more understandable yet an established religion is not something we in the West have dealt with in some time so the meaning has changed to the more general sense.

You can also have this discussion about the phrase "well-regulated militia" with respect to the Second Amendment too but that's a whole other topic.

The point remains: language drift has and will affect legal meanings and interpretations.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DrDisrespectLive/comments/sy26j7/ti...

[2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-30-lost-english-...

[3]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment

"You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets". Unfortunately my Twitter account was deleted for no stated reason a couple of days ago (maybe I expressed a thought crime, though I never discuss politics there...)

I love this. Too bad it will be lost forever to the world when the guy deletes his twitter account.

Fortunately IA also archives Twitter. https://web.archive.org/web/20220321161743/https://twitter.c...

I love non-sequitur humor, so the idea of a Sumerian dog joke that (initially) makes no sense is already pretty hysterical.

> Sumerian doesn't really have "tense" as such. Instead, it has two "tense/aspects" (because Sumerologists don't like to overcommit)

The author himself has a pretty dry sense of humor as well. LOL.

Edit: After reading some of the author's other threads, I actually wonder now if anything he said in this thread is true. He seems to be an overly cynical know-it-all and not particularly accurate in what he talks about (for the subjects I recognize). Oh well.

One of my favorites in East Asia, well-known to everyone in China and Korea

四面楚歌 = 사면초가

"Four sides, Chu songs"

Refers to the conclusion of a bitter campaign in the 3rd century BCE for dominion in China. The famed general Xiang Yu (項羽) heard the singing of enemy soldiers of the enemy state of Chu and instantly grasped that he was doomed.

The phrase, used with cheerful irony, is very useful in many contemporary situations!

A man walks into a bar, the second ducks.

I would imagine this would be difficult to translate, unless "bar" has the two same meanings in language it is translated to. There might also be confusion where aquatic birds fit in, or if there a reference to the passage of time?

I first interpreted that as "...the second walks into ducks".

I'm amazed that "An X walks into a bar..." jokes have been around for over 4,000 years.

I thought the joke was quite funny, the barman opening one for the blind dog. Open an eye, see?

Whereas I would have taken the choice of location and animal to be an ancient root of, e.g.: "They sent a sample of [SomeBeer] off to the state lab for analysis. The report came back: 'Shoot that horse, it suffers from diabetes.'"

The variant I'm familiar with is "Congratulations, your rabbit is pregnant!"

Off topic to this interesting and really nerdy thread, but does anyone happen to know why, or does this show for anyone else, the "more tweets" segment below this one is a bunch of anti-trans rhetoric? I'm signed in but I only follow some software engineers, I don't follow these people, I've never interacted or liked any anti-trans sentiments. These are the tweets I'm seeing below the linked thread (TW: anti-trans sentiments):

https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1505663712266493958 (Babylon Bee complaining about getting suspended after calling Rachel Levine "man of the year")

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1505670109809070102?s=... JK Rowling pushing her "trans kids regret their choices" rhetoric

https://twitter.com/RevengOfTheFlex/status/15055563131237908... Man going "May transition join a women's MMA league & win it all."

etc etc etc; it's a heap of right-wing nonsense talking points, anti-Ukrainian sentiments crossed with anti-vaxxer posts, a comic claiming BLM embezzled money, a woman saying that if she cheated on a man it's the man's fault, Stonetoss, and even one claiming technology has made us all gay.

What the fuck Twitter? This is not what I signed up for, this is not relevant to my interests, this is not in any way related to anything I've interacted with Twitter for. Is this what you're earning money from these days? If this happens again I'll close my account. That'll teach 'em.

I got the same results. (Not logged in) I'd guess that these things are "trending" in "engagement" today because they are controversial and antagonistic.

My thinking is it is a problem of misaligned incentives. Twitter benefits from outrage through engagement. The perpetrators of hatred benefit from outrage through division. You and I, we do not benefit from this alignment.

That's exactly what I'm thinking; these agitators generate tons of 'engagement' on twitter from both pro- and anti- whatever they're up for, which for Twitter translates to revenue.

It's why they didn't ban Trump for all this time until he was no longer president. I mean sure, as president of the US he would get special treatment, but he didn't use the official twitter account of the US presidency, and he caused a lot of issues. But also a lot of engagement for Twitter; I wouldn't be surprised if all the reactions, retweets and responses to his tweets, and the fact half the world news media would jump on top of anything he tweeted, were responsible for a big chunk of Twitter's usage during that period.

This kind of discourse sort of exculpates the outraged. People have agency, however imperfect. We've gotten in a rut of blaming platforms for people's behavior -- both assholes that post in social media and brittle-porcelaine people who can't stand this torture.

Something needs to be done policy-wise about Twitter and Facebook, but we should also be telling each other to chill the frak out -- and to consider the truths (and every ideology has some truth to it, that's how it acquires verosimilitude and grows) behind the asshole's worldview. Maybe those damn transphobes are looking at some things that we've become blind to.

I am logged in and got the same results despite not following anyone close to connected to those tweets. There seems to be something specific about this thread that Twitter is connecting to the conservative side of the trans rights debate.

Probably because it's trending and the censors haven't gotten around to it yet?

"More tweets" seems specifically designed to show you content you hate. No idea why. If you followed the people you list above it would show you the most extreme left-wing talking points instead.

These things shouldn't make you this angry.

- BLM is unusually opaque about how it uses donations, particularly for something that's promoted by XKCD (usually a seal of quality).

- The current understanding of gender is very very new, and JK Rowling is 56. Also, are we saying no trans kids ever regret their choices?

- There are complaints by female athletes -- possibly just sour grapes -- that transwomen are unreachably strong. The usual rebuttal is that hormone therapy "undoes" in some sense the muscular advantage that testosterone produces, but the timeline for that is unclear, and not all of the peak male physical superiority is due to sheer muscle (bone structure and mass, etc.) These aren't talking points, it's other people's lives.

At any rate, your complaint is that someone is wrong on the internet! That does happen every once and then.

Many people are not at all pleased that this new gender identity belief system is being forced upon them. It's highly controversial to assert that men can become woman and women can become men, and this generates a lot of argument with people who recognise the biological fundamental of sex as holding primacy.

Twitter, being Twitter, is something of a battleground of opinions on this issue - so you're just seeing what are currently hot topics.

I wonder what a Sumerian bar was like. Also, they must have had pretty lax public health rules if they let dogs go in. I can't take my dog to my local coffee shop!

You're just in the wrong location -- every patio'd coffee shop and bar around me is dog friendly!

Back then dogs would probably be preferable over the kind of fauna that would impose on you, even in the city. Besides they are a walking hand-towel, are they not.

Of course, XKCD already has a comic for this: https://xkcd.com/794/

> dog jokes as an excuse to embark

I see what he did there!

It pisses me off people write long things like as a Tweet rather than a blog. I have to scroll over a dozen tweets before being hit by the "you need to login" popup.

Serious question: Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter? This looks like the textbook definition of something that should be in a blog.

I think a blog would be held to more scrutiny than a series of tweets. The latter seems to give authors a way to rant about a topic without providing much in the way of exposition.

Turn off cookies for *.twitter.com and it'll stop bothering you.

(You shouldn't have to, but take a minute to do this and Twitter links will be tolerable going forward.)

>Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter?

Easy to catch audience. Yes, you can make a blog post and tweet a link. But tweets without links get more engagement and reach. (Something that can be attributed to users or/and site's algorithm.)

People don't owe you free stuff in your preferred format. It's on Twitter presumably because the author likes to put stuff on Twitter.

Perhaps a sound-pun in there, not surviving translation.

I must of really watched a lot of trash horror films as a teenager; I will forever associate the sumerian language with summoning demons.

Can someone share the tweet here?

Unable to see it.

Readable link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html

I'm always surprised the lengths some go to write on twitter instead of a blog.

See this "thread of threads": https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/14562816316024545...

I'm always amazed that people read what is a short article broken into 25 parts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com