mostly OFF: Re: CONLANG Digest

> 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!