12-20-2017, 12:00 AM
Julio Juliopolis wrote:
I'm not sure I can come up with examples of where speaking less clearly is preferred, unless to speak more clearly requires too many words to be practical. Or in cases like you suggest, where speaking REALLY clearly is probably impossible. I know that when I feel "happy" for example, it doesn't always feel the same, yet there's no words to differentiate between the feelings. Sure I could use "overjoyed", "ecstatic", and other similar words but those merely convey an unspecific higher degree of the feeling, not differences between the varied flavors of happiness.
English is not an intelligently designed language, or if it is it wasn't designed with clarity in mind. I don't know of any that were intelligently designed, although parts of Chinese seem so and I've heard that Latin is somewhat as well. English does have one advantage though; it contains few words which look the same written down but mean different things when spoken. This can help avoid confusion which might be caused by written statements like "I resent that letter", which doesn't tell us whether the letter was sent again or found to be offensive. Of course, context in that example will almost definitely clear that up. Ancient Greek supposedly had issues with that sort of thing, and I imagine some other languages do as well.
I like the comparison of English to a higher level language. My experience fits with it. And just like in programming, you don't need to know the lower level languages to make stuff work!
You wouldn't expect a writer of tragedies to worry about speaking precisely. You'd expect him to choose the words that sound the most tragic, not the most precisely descriptive ones at all. But that's just understood.
I think more broadly he meant that math requires more perfection than chemistry, where the names are always conventional and never get to what things *really are* anyway, and then chemistry requires more accuracy than like, cooking.
I'm not sure I can come up with examples of where speaking less clearly is preferred, unless to speak more clearly requires too many words to be practical. Or in cases like you suggest, where speaking REALLY clearly is probably impossible. I know that when I feel "happy" for example, it doesn't always feel the same, yet there's no words to differentiate between the feelings. Sure I could use "overjoyed", "ecstatic", and other similar words but those merely convey an unspecific higher degree of the feeling, not differences between the varied flavors of happiness.
English is not an intelligently designed language, or if it is it wasn't designed with clarity in mind. I don't know of any that were intelligently designed, although parts of Chinese seem so and I've heard that Latin is somewhat as well. English does have one advantage though; it contains few words which look the same written down but mean different things when spoken. This can help avoid confusion which might be caused by written statements like "I resent that letter", which doesn't tell us whether the letter was sent again or found to be offensive. Of course, context in that example will almost definitely clear that up. Ancient Greek supposedly had issues with that sort of thing, and I imagine some other languages do as well.
I like the comparison of English to a higher level language. My experience fits with it. And just like in programming, you don't need to know the lower level languages to make stuff work!
You wouldn't expect a writer of tragedies to worry about speaking precisely. You'd expect him to choose the words that sound the most tragic, not the most precisely descriptive ones at all. But that's just understood.
I think more broadly he meant that math requires more perfection than chemistry, where the names are always conventional and never get to what things *really are* anyway, and then chemistry requires more accuracy than like, cooking.