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mostly OFF: Re: CONLANG Digest

From:Muke Tever <alrivera@...>
Date:Sunday, May 28, 2000, 7:35
> From: Danny Wier <dawier@...> > Subject: Is Microsoft conquering the world?! (Re: Orthographies with
lotsa
> diacritics) > > Arial Unicode supplants -- by a mile and a half -- Lucida Sans Unicode.
It
> contains all Latin (Latin-1, Latin Ext. A and B, and Latin Additional), > Greek (plus Coptic!) and Greek Extended, Cyrillic and Cyrillic Extended
(now
> you're dealing with everything from Abkhaz to Yakut), Armenian, Hebrew, > Arabic, Arabic Extended and Arabic Presentation Forms(and now you got Urdu > retroflexes, Pashto letters and even the HUGE abjad used for Sindhi), > Devanagari (YES, FINALLY!!), Bengali, Gurmukhi (used for Punjabi spoken by > Sikhs as opposed to Muslim Punjabi), Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, > Kannada, Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese precomposed (see Latin
Additional),
> and Georgian (YES, FINALLY AGAIN!!). I mean, this has every single > character in the Unicode 2.1 database.
Didn't I mention that already? ;)
> From: Sylvia Sotomayor <sylvia1@...> > Subject: Re: I don't give a rat's ass. > > On Sat, 27 May 2000, you wrote: > > >In Spanish: > > > > un soto/choto (meaningless, though usu. 'penis') > Damn. That means my last name could maybe be interpreted as "The old[er]
prick" Hmm, I'm used to "mayor" meaning "larger"... Not that that's any better an interpretation, mind you...
> From: Danny Wier <dawier@...> > Subject: Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion > > Tom asked what should be the definition of a "person". It's easy to
assume
> that's synonomous with a singular human being. But in psychiatry, what if > you have the unfortunate case of multiple personalities (the disorder is
now
> called Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID; schizophrenia is in no way
a
> "split personality disorder" as it is a psychotic disorder, meaning a > disruption of one's perception and reasoning which might mimic a
personality
> change).
(Well,...) Many cases of DID had been misclassified as MPD (multiple personality disorder), but it hasn't replaced the other; MPD still "exists".
> It would then be possible for one to determine that God has DID > since he's one being with three persons, if you assume that "person" is > synonomous with "personality". After all, God relates to mankind in three > ways through His three Persons: the Father the Creator, the Son the
Savior,
> and the Holy Spirit the Sustainer.
My understanding is usually that the "three Persons -> one God" refers to their essential, ah, unity; if they were the type to disagree with one another or take sides, as gods of polytheisms often do, they might equally be referred to as three gods...
> From: Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...> > Subject: Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion > > Secondly, many denominations (notably Baptists) argue > with pseudo-logic for a much stronger definition of > the Trinity than I am comfortable with. The argument > goes: (1) God has always existed; (2) The most > important aspect of God is love; (3) It is > inconcievable that the most important aspect of God > could ever have existed only in potentia; (4) > Therefore God must be capable of a relationship with > himself; (5) This leads to the notion of Trinity.
...which chain of logic rather neatly leaves out the reason why there must be three instead of two. [This is the point where I feel like yelling "Occam's razor says there can only be one! HEEEYAA!" fnar....] (Actually, CS Lewis says something like that in _Mere Christianity_, going on to say something like that the love between the Father and the Son is what _is_ the Holy Spirit...)
> But there's an extension to this logic which I find > far _less_ credible : the idea that if God is perfect > then he must be self-sufficient and that therefore > God's ability to love and form relationships must be > fully satisfied within himself. It is impossible for > God to "need" anything, because "need" implies > incompleteness, and incompleteness implies > imperfection.
I never liked that kind of argument either. A perfection by itself becomes stagnant! Perfection has to continually become more perfect...if that makes sense. *Muke!