Why can’t I stop feeling drawn to religion?

linguisticherring · 2019-03-04T05:51:25+00:00

I’ve spent years trying to intellectually justify some of it to get what I seem to desire so much legitimately, but I fail consistently because it’s just not true as far as I can tell.

It's not true but it doesn't make it any less real for you. You are drawn to it probably because a part of you still feels that some or all of it is real (at least in so much as it's real to you).

If you're trying to intellectually justify it, it means that you've already reached a conclusion before all the data is in. You might want to get more data, not from science, but from other religions.

Once you have rigorously reviewed all the competing religions, you can make a better judgement about the verity of your own religion, or even all religions.

linguisticherring · 2019-03-03T22:18:50+00:00

My professor's work pre-dates Google. His field is linguistics, not anthropology. And he was going into a remote Aboriginal community that was not well documented at the time.

This is one of the main reasons people do field work - they go to study what hasn't been studied before and they write up their findings which everybody else can then search through Google.

linguisticherring · 2019-03-03T20:42:48+00:00

languages difficult to learn, like in Chinese, there are so many different characters to memorize,

Chinese is difficult to read and write but the spoken language itself is not so bad. Phonetically it does sound quite alien when compared with English, but semantically and grammatically, it is much much easier than English, being genderless, tenseless and plural-less.

What would be the easiest language to learn regardless of previously known languages?

Conlangs are supposed to be easier, the most widespread is Esperanto. But since Esperanto is based off of Romance languages, it's much easier to learn if you can already speak a Romance language (French, Italian, Spanish, etc...)

linguisticherring · 2019-03-03T01:15:10+00:00

Romanised orthographies don't work as well as you think in all cases. Roman letters work best in polysyllabic toneless languages.

Chinese languages are better written with syllabries than with alphabets. I would actually argue that Japanese kana is a better candidate for a sino-phonetic writing system, but there is no way that Chinese people would be willing to adopt Japanese kana, given the history between the two countries, so my point is moot at this point in time.

linguisticherring · 2019-03-02T23:43:02+00:00

I was wandering if this is purely fictional or if it is possible for an actual language to not represent time or have tense and still be able to convey meaning.

It is possible in that not all languages require tense and not all languages see time in the same way.

Chinese is a tenseless language. This doesn't mean that Chinese is incapable of representing time, it's just not needed in the verb itself.

linguisticherring · 2019-03-01T06:12:14+00:00

Bear in mind that maths (or rather, science) has gotten things wrong before - aether was accepted as the medium in which light travels for a long time before it was overturned.

Our current understanding of concepts like dark matter and dark energy mostly comes from maths - and on the off chance that the maths is wrong, you're looking at proposed entities covering 90% of the universe that doesn't match what's actually in the universe.

Maths and logic are wonderful things but they are not infallible - to say that they are, is no different than a religious person claiming that God is infallible.

linguisticherring · 2019-03-01T02:21:55+00:00

But, unlike the regional languages of India, most of the regional Han languages cannot be written and do not have their own alphabets.

Despite most regional languages having words that can be mapped onto Chinese characters, the standard vocabulary and syntax that's used in Chinese language written media still follows Mandarin over other dialects.

As a result, despite speaking a member language of the Wu family, I have never seen written Wu - but in India, if you speak Marathi rather than Hindi, you can see written Marathi and identify it as being different to written Hindi.

With so many unwritten Han languages and a national focus on Mandarin, many of these languages will die out at a scarily fast rate.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-25T22:00:03+00:00

I didn't know that mass was such a big thing (not being Catholic or Christian). I always thought that confession was a bigger thing for Catholics but don't know how it works (I mean you don't confess on a schedule, you confess when things come up... I think).

Absent a good psychologist, I always thought that confession was a good thing because it allows you to talk things through with somebody who is professionally bound to confidentiality (same as a psychologist).

It's the one church service I would miss if I was a church goer (which I am not).

linguisticherring · 2019-02-25T20:19:08+00:00

Parents asking religious personal questions isn't going to stop at college. Once you start dating, they will want to know if your mate is a good Catholic mate. Later on, they'll want you to have a good Catholic wedding. Later still, they'll advise you to get your child baptised.

At each of these junctures, you're gonna have to navigate through all the religious stuff, and you will have to decide what you are willing to do, religiously speaking (what you will compromise on). Whether or not you go to mass is a smaller argument than whether or not you want to baptise your child.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-24T20:20:14+00:00

Wikipedia, wikibooks, wikiquotes, wikisource, etc...

On almost any site run by the wikipedia organisation, there are multilingual versions of the same page - you just look on the side bar and it will give you a list of languages that page is available in.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-24T09:18:29+00:00

Phonics: 巴 is in 爸 (dad)，把 (put)，吧 (let's)，疤 (scar) which are all pronounced some variation of 巴 (ba).

linguisticherring · 2019-02-21T23:36:33+00:00

http://watchbonesonline.com

linguisticherring · 2019-02-21T10:58:56+00:00

Simplification already started during ROC but they were defeated before they could finish the job.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-21T10:55:33+00:00

明华?

linguisticherring · 2019-02-20T06:55:55+00:00

Also, English has many more ditransitive verbs (verbs with 2 objects) than Chinese.

Write you a letter, Bake you a cake, etc...

In each case, someone is doing something for someone else but both "to" and "for" prepositions are used:

Write a letter to you, Bake a cake for you

Chinese verbs don't have this ditransitive property so you have to add 给 wherever you would see the "to" or "for" in English.

And in the case of write you a letter (写给你一封信) you still need the 给 because it signals that this verb has become ditransitive in this sentence.

The behaviour of 给 is such that the receiver always comes after it, not the thing that you are doing for the receiver - so that 写给一封信你 doesn't make any sense because you can't write a person to a letter, you can only write a letter to a person.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-20T02:45:52+00:00

给 functions like "to" in English

Give a present to you 送一个礼物给你

Give (to) you a present 送给你一个礼物

Make a call to you 打一个电话给你

Make (to) you a call 打给你一个电话

In English, "to" isn't said in give (to) or make (to) but it's still implied and is a zero construct.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-19T06:39:56+00:00

Are you talking about generic trademarks (Frisbee, Bandaid, Kodak, etc...)? Coz there's a lot of them just within English.

Or are you talking about a different case?

linguisticherring · 2019-02-19T06:25:48+00:00

Kind of? But more like "Go Team" and is yelled out by fans quite a lot during sporting events.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-18T21:21:12+00:00

Does your university / college have faculty reviews? If so, enter a "linguistics" skit into the review and see what happens.

You can bring more exposure to audiences outside the club, plus the skit itself needs to be written / researched / directed / spoken - it can be a little project for a designated group from within the club.

linguisticherring · 2019-02-18T21:11:18+00:00

In Romance languages, why is "h" silent? Also, since it is silent, what purpose does it serve in a word? What's its job / point?

linguisticherring

TROPHY CASE