April 15 [linguistic relativity]
April 15
Since my window didn't have curtains, I woke up at my normal time and then I had to make a decision. I could stay in bed and snuggle with Meghan until she woke up, but if I did I wouldn't get any morning exercise.
I could wake her up, and then tell her that if she wanted to stay around that we could take a shower together when I got back from flying. But it was kind of mean to wake someone up and then not be ready to do stuff with them.
Or I could leave her a note and hope that she read it, and then she could make her own decision when she woke up. That was probably the best—well, the best would have been if we'd talked about it last night but it was too late for that now. So I wrote a little note and left it on top of her folding computer and then went off to go flying.
When I got back, she was gone. She'd left a note for me on my desk apologizing for leaving, but that she didn't know when I was going to be back and she didn't want to be late for her classes. That was disappointing, but I understood. So I took a shower by myself.
Christine is a lot of fun at the breakfast table and she saw that I was looking a little bit down so she got a bowl of sugar cereal that she likes and she picked all the marshmallow shapes out of it and offered it to me, saying that it was unlucky charms and that it was just the thing for a pegasus who looked glum.
Even without them it was super-sugary but it was also rude to refuse food so I ate about half the bowl before I felt oversugared. I guess that's one way to wake up in the morning, but the energy just doesn't stay with you.
I brought my new calculator to Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee's class, but I didn't have to get it out. He spent the whole class talking about the Lorenz equations and drawing matrixes and equations on the markerboard, and I had to really pay attention on my notes.
During lunch I sat next to Sean and he showed me how to do a bunch of things on my calculator that the instructions hadn't said. Christine said that we were being a bunch of geeks, so Sean typed the number 58008 into my calculator and turned it upside down and showed it to Christine and she rolled her eyes and said that we weren't in middle school any more.
Joe said that since we were college students we ought to have a serious scholarly discussion over lunch, but everyone else said that was too much effort, and Sean said he'd rather steer the conversation back towards boobs. Christine said that was unfair because she had the only pair and then Joe said that he'd never thought about it before but where and then he just shut up and his face got really red.
So I wasn't sure what to make of that, and Sean went to say something and then just clamped his mouth right back shut when Christine gave him a death stare. Then she said that since he wanted to talk about boobs she knew someone who didn’t use letters for cup size but measured them in Hermans, which was a measure of handfuls. I asked if the different shapes had names, too, and she nodded and started to list them off and describe them, like bell-shaped and round and asymetrical. I said mine were probably closest to athletic and not even a full Herman, but that they would get a bit bigger if I was about to foal, and that was when Joe's face got so red I thought he might catch on fire. All the while, Christine had such an innocent smile on her face, and she turned to Sean and asked him if he would like to know more.
He shook his head and suggested that we talk about anything else, so Christine said since we were on the subject anyway, she'd tell me about Mardi Gras in New Orleans and that was sort of related to boobs, since there were places where you could get necklaces for showing them off. But that wasn't the main point of it.
She explained how it was a religious festival, the carnival season starts on January 6, which is called Twelfth Night, and that Mardi Gras is the very end of it. There were groups called Krewes which organized the parades, and they started parading the week before Mardi Gras, beginning with the Druids and the Mystic Krewe of Nyx. Then on Mardi Gras there are the biggest parades and people wear elaborate costumes and masks, and they toss out all sorts of trinkets from floats. It’s the last day of celebration before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent, and that’s when some Christians fast or give up something else for the forty days leading up to Easter.
Christine wasn’t sure about all the religious parts of the festival, because she said she wasn’t a good Catholic girl. But she said it was a lot of fun and it was a shame that I probably wouldn’t get to see it. She said that I could watch videos of it on YouTube, but that wasn’t the same as being there.
As I was going to anthropology, I thought about Joe saying that we ought to have a serious discussion, and I thought that we had, even if they hadn't wanted to hear all of it. I now knew how women measured the size and shape of their boobs, and I knew about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and I hadn't known anything about either before lunch.
Professor Amy talked about linguistic relativity, which was the idea that the language reflected the culture and the worldview. She said that the two most important thinkers who had developed this philosophy were Sapir and Whorf, and right away I thought she was on to something. I kept running into places where we didn’t have words or where humans didn’t, and I’d even learned once that all the words for sky and sky-things in Equestrian came from Pegaios (which was the proper name for our old language, but a lot of ponies just called it Pegos).
But then she talked about it more and it wasn’t just the words the language had or didn’t, but the very fundamentals of how their language was arranged. Concepts that meant something to one group of people might not be important enough to another to mention. She explained how some cultures had different words for water if it was in a jug than if it was in a lake, or how people sorted the most basic things, like kinds of animals. She asked a couple of people in class who weren’t native Americans if they could think of examples from their own culture, and I raised my hoof and said that we had three different classifications for birds, but as far as I knew on Earth there was only one.
Well, that raised a bit of debate in class until I explained that we had different names for the different types of birds, but that ‘bird’ had three separate forms, and that wasn’t even counting hybrids that they didn’t have on earth.
When I was eating dinner it suddenly occurred to me that I would have all weekend without any of my closest friends around. In one way that was an opportunity, but in another it was a kind of terrifying feeling. So I asked at dinner what people were doing and Christine said that they were LARPing again and everyone wanted to know when I was going to come back because they all missed me.
So I put on the caparison that Kathleen had made for me, and my necklace and my glaive, too, and went to Hoben and met up with everybody. They said that I wasn’t supposed to use my real name, but they liked how I said that I was in the second ile of Commander Hurricane's hipparchy, because that sounded really official. Since I wasn’t very good at coming up with a fake name I had to ask for help and everyone tossed out different names until someone suggested Sapphire Frost and I thought that was a very good name, so that’s what I called myself all night long.
We played until it was really late, and I had a lot of fun, but by the end I was nodding my head with sleepiness. The chairs in the lounge were really tempting, and it was all I could do to not just lie in one of them and fall asleep right there, but I managed to make my way back to my room and get undressed before crawling up into bed.
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Given what we've seen of pony cuisine, it says a lot that it's this easy for human cereal to oversugar a pony. Of course, Silver probably has a much different diet than most Ponyvillians.
Silver trying to get beads at Mardi Gras presents some logistical difficulties, not least because I'm not sure whether she'd be able to hover in the necessary position.
Heh. I thought about bringing up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with the carrion tubes. It's not like a generally herbivorous species is going to have a lot of words for meat.
...Sean, this is why Christine punches you in the shoulder so much.
I can't even tell if the Herman thing is her/you screwing with them/us or not
Are the classifications raptors, seabirds and songbirds?
This whole segment was hilarious!
7299311 Earlier she turns the lights on accompanied by a lightswitch clicking. This isn't the only time this occurs.
7299164 Working knowledge of the atom and internal combustion. No electricity. Seems legit.
Sorry d00d. Evidence is stacked against the "no electricity" bit.
This is ridiculous.
7300065
Thanks to Pinkie Pie, I'd think that most of Equestria has a different diet than that of Ponyville.
Holy shit we just witnessed a murder
And may be about to witness another one
I had trouble parsing this before remembering the difference between native Americans and Native Americans.
Back in the '60s, I remember reading The Languages of Pau à subplot of which is using language for thought control. I also remember reading that you haven't mastered a language until you dream in it.
I also vaguely remember an alien race that used a special verb tense & different nouns for dead things. ,(Star Trek?)
Silver needs to see this
at some point...
Someone has been ogling Silver's goods.
7300186 Is it really? I mean we had trains pulled by ponies in season 1, but not since then. Because right there is THE SHOW doing exactly what he's talking about.
The show is not consistent, trying to make anything related to it (show or fanfic) requires you to pick which facts you are going to utilize and which are going to be ignored.
You can even look to "based on a true story" movies or tv and see this happen too, they pick and choose what facts to present, exaggerate or omit in order to tell a story.
Admiral: Are you familiar with the Owed to a Spell Chequer? It strikes me as the sort of poem that'll be great fun to introduce into this tale...
soon its going to klick inside silvers mind, and she can do lewd jokes too !
good that she didn't stood up on the table to show hers ...
My favorite exemple of linguistic relativity is the Innu-aimun with around 50 variation of snow.
Well, sine recently this fic ended up popping up in my mind whenever I'm pondering about cultural differences.
I think that with how advanced modern taxonomy is, we most likely have more then just 3 words for the various type of bird, we just don't use (and know) them much.
If Silver wanted to collect Mardi Gras bead necklaces, she'd probably have to draw people a diagram.
7300716 Easily explainable by conserving coal and water for the locomotive during travel through an undeveloped desert.
*presses on the 'learn more' button repeatedly*
7300716
I think this is more of a philosophical position, though. You can treat these things as inconsistencies, or you can treat them as things that are somehow consistent, but the 'how' isn't obvious or clear to us, who only get short snippets of the world in question.
With the train example, surely there has to be something more going on here, considering the ponies are pulling the train with a locomotive attached to it. Perhaps the locomotive is broken, for example... otherwise the ponies just look like idiots for lugging something that's super heavy but doesn't actually do anything.
I've suggested before that ponies might be at least as advanced, in terms of knowledge, as us--they just don't express that knowledge in ways we would see as an 'advanced society' such as having television or personal computers.
7300182 You are forgetting the extremely important thing. Magic. Maybe they have no reason to use electricity as we know it. What's to say their stuff does not run off of some type of magic infused crystal that they just replace or get recharged when they run out? Or that their devices don't have something in them that pulls the ambient magic from the air to run?
Maybe they have the ability to make electricity as we know it, but just don't want to do anything that produces air toxins like burn coal to make it, or other ways that pollute the environment.
Or maybe they like their lifestyles and see no reason to go all electric technology, or even full magic powered technology.
7300868
"I circled the fun parts for you!"
7301040
Pssh. A Herman is a measure of the amount of breast that fits in your mouth, not your hand.
Whether it melts there is irrelevant to the measurement. :)
7300145 Seabirds seem fairly close to raptors. I'm thinking birds of prey, songbirds, and fowl myself.
7301216 Except what you're saying doesn't touch the show at all.
Im curious of what is on Joe's mind. There is something he is not quite revealing....
7300186
Than how do you deal with Minuette being an adult in Ponyville in Cheese Sandwich's flashback scene, but a filly in Canterlot at the same time? Or in that same song, Derpy is a filly, but she was an adult when she watch the schoolfoals perform when the Mane Six got their cutie marks? (Minuette was there, too, but left her cutie mark at home)
7301479 This just raises further questions!
7301954 Time travel.
... In seriousness, same as I do with multiples of the same pony appearing in the background. There's a difference between the two. Deliberate placement of objects involves making an art asset just for that, and if it makes a sound, foley artists. Going "This scene needs X randomized characters" and having a greater number of slots than assets leads to repetition.
Simple answer, the assets I'm talking about were consciously placed or used. Background ponies are literally copied and pasted at random. When constructing a scene they have names like unicorn_filly_#1 and etc.
7301208
Hell, Starlight Glimmer has electric lights in her house in the middle of nowhere.
7302013 Why do characters get a free pass as lazy asset reuse when animators and/or writers don't get free passes for lazy prop development? Coming up with period-relevant props is a lot more work than just grabbing the modern, recognized equivalent.
7302096
Because regardless of what Dictator Faust wanted, all this shit does fit the setting.
7301954 I remember seeing messages from show staff on EQD explaining this way back in season 2/3 times. Those are just background ponies, and they use them for filler whenever. It has only been in more recent seasons that they have been anything more than background ponies in show canon. Secondary and main characters were never used in that way, unless they were in the background occasionally as an Easter egg of sorts.
I'm so sorry, I feel just awful.
7301666 Explain why it does not? MLP has magic. There is no evidence for your electricity, but there is more evidence on my side that stuff can, or at least partially can, run on magic. It is knows that unicorns can make light with magic, so why can't they make items with spell inscriptions on them to use ambient magic from the air to light up for ponies? We know spells can be written down, Twilight is reading books about them all the time.
Even though it was one of the movies, Twilight powered an entire portal making machine by channeling magic to it. What's to say that crazy stuff in her basement is now powered by both magic and steam, as its definitely powered by at least steam some.
Yes they have that building at the bottom of the damn, which I say can still be used as a charging station for magic power-crystals for use in ponies homes, but maybe its a radio station, maybe its some type of pumphouse, or a unicorns laboratory. The antenna on the roof does not need to be for transmission, it can be for receiving.
7302033 And how do you know that light hanging from the ceiling is not powered by magic? Or how its not a glowing magic crystal that all Starlight does is flip its ability to run whatever spell is inscribed in it to glow off with a switch?
You don't and neither do I, or any other reader. So it does not HAVE to be electricity based, it could be that, or it could be magic, or it could be something completely different. There is no wrong answer as it open to interpretation within the show.
I however go with the magic that powers stuff because I personally believe it fits the show better.
7299094
I guess i'm not understanding exactly what this language is and how magic operates for this story. You initially said it was only a separate script. But if it's only a script, it can't convey information that the other language can't because it doesn't have words of it's own. However you're also saying it can describe complex relationships. If it is a script, then it can't do this because it doesn't have separate words. They'd have to have a third language (math) that lets them do this. The big mental hurdle is that math is it's own language although it does depend on a base. For example, math in german
i.stack.imgur.com/hyE2B.png
it has the exact same mathematical symbols (the random writing is a function called cosh and changes from language to language).
So unicorns have two languages they use. They have a separate script for regular equestrian, and mathematical language for expressing the relationships. variables (we tend to use greek letters) are completely arbitrary. They could be in regular equestrian, or the unicorn script.
I'm a few chapters behind, so if you've clarified more sorry.
I think there might be some grammar or punctuation missing here. And was he going to ask where Silver's boobs are? That kind of fits but...
7301329
As a dad I can say: every now and then... tempting.
7302854
Your misunderstanding seems to be because the problem isn't being able to convey information. The problem is conveying unambiguous information. You keep coming back to the idea of the language being used for magic itself (and of course, since it's the same language in either script that shouldn't make a difference), but the question is instead whether an ambiguous word pronounced incorrectly in the middle of a spell would cause a spell to fail entirely, or possibly to fail catastrophically.
The unicorn script, with its well-defined orthography doesn't give you problem words like "lead" in English, which is pronounced completely differently, and with the different words meaning different things, dependent only on context. Everyday pony script has many words like that, which Silver got a list of from Gusty earlier in the story. If you read a written spell incorrectly because the script it's written in is imprecise, maybe it fails like Twilight's cutie-mark switching spell failure, doing something you didn't intend.
There seems to be enough possibility of disasters for mages to far prefer the exact unicorn script for that reason alone.
7302854
Yeah, that sounds right. I'd guess that pegasi and unicorns both have their mathematical languages (each based on the alphabet they use). Those notations are probably suited for different kinds of concepts, with some overlap like calculus (since both use physics, with pegasi working more with fluid mechanics and turbulence, and unicorns more with fundamental forces and particles). Maybe unicorns have more notation for discrete math and logic, since that wouldn't come up in weather management.
7302854
I think math actually is relatively ambiguous; when you encounter a new symbol in math, you usually need it explained to you. I think the idea here is that you wouldn't need the new concept explained.
Suppose you were going to teach someone derivatives, but rather than sitting down and explaining F(x)` or whatever the word 'derivative' contained letters that were essentially the individual rules for deriving something (like the power rule or similar) in the word itself.
edit: words are hard, apparently.
On Earth we also have three kinds of birds: Raptors, songbirds, and "tastes like chicken."
7305571 img00.deviantart.net/2539/i/2012/352/f/5/scootaloo_oh_no_by_myardius-d5oe9t9.png
7300065
And we don't know how much sugar is actually in Pinkie Pie's treats. Hopefully not too much or else she'll be the first pony with diabetes.
I think that most ponies eat occasional sugary treats, but not nearly as much as a normal Westerner eats. There's freaking sugar added to everything.
In canon, they can. For maximum realism, they couldn't (probably couldn't fly, either).
vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/3/3c/Happy_Fluttershy_hovers_near_Spike_S01E01.png
No, they wouldn't. No reason to.
7300128
That's exactly why.
7300141
Back in my college days, we had a very serious discussion over dinner about Hermans. And just you wait for the taller than it is wide conversation.
7300145
Hawky birds, ducky birds, and chirpy birds. So yes.
7310560
See, I was envisioning that, only upside down. Seems rather more complicated.
7300178
Well, that's fair, but is it possible that the lights are controlled pneumatically somehow? Shutters open so the fireflies can glow? How about gaslights? What kind of sound do they make when you turn them on and off? Or carbide lamps? Up until about 50 years ago, a lot of farms where I live were still using carbide lamps because electricity hadn't been routed to their homes yet. Would magical crystals that glow have some sort of mechanism which might click that activates/deactivates them?
Mendel figured out a lot about genetics without knowing what DNA was or having electricity; it's possible that the ponies could have inferred things about atoms or that they could see them with magic. As for internal combustion, I have not one but two diesel trucks that need no electrical system other than to turn the starter, and they could be hand-cranked if they had the appropriate attachment on the harmonic balancer. So there I don't even have to say 'magic,' it can be done with simple human tech.
I don't mind when stories have the ponies having electricity, but I'd rather work around it and recognize that a lot of what they put in the show is a visual thing that a child (their target audience) can easily recognize. And I think given the number of things they have that don't run on electricity, it's more logical to assume that they don't have it rather than that they do but they haven't figured out how to make an electrical printing press or electric stoves or any number of other things that probably would run off electricity. And it's also good for me to research how things were done back in the day when not everyone had all the electricity they wanted run right to their house and my readers mostly like learning about that old tech, too.
That's a ridiculous explanation. First off, in canon they have pegasi, so it would be easier for them to get water to the locomotive: they could just push a cloud right where they needed it and dump it out. Secondly, without running the numbers, I can say for a fact that the reason that locomotives replaced horses even though the infrastructure was expensive was that they were far more efficient at moving cargo. Unless coal or wood or literally anything else you can burn in a boiler is more expensive than gold, the train is cheaper.
I'd have to do a lot of googling to get exact numbers, but I do know that in general, stagecoaches weighed about a thousand pounds empty and let's say four times that loaded. That's being generous, but hey. It makes the math easy. They were usually pulled by a team of four horses for ten miles before the team was changed out. So four horses can pull two tons ten miles, that means one horse can pull half a ton ten miles.
The shortest train that we've seen so far in canon is I believe five passenger cars long. If we assume that each passenger car weighs no more than a stagecoach fully loaded, and just for giggles we'll assume the locomotive weighs that, too. So if it was ten miles from station to station, you'd need twenty-four ponies to pull it . . . either all together, or changing out very frequently. And of course you have to feed those ponies and give them water . . . and I'm assuming that the train is far, far lighter than an actual train (even of that vintage) and that the team can pull way more weight than is realistically feasible.
(FWIW, Flagg Coal #75, a 0-4-0 tank locomotive [which is a rather small steam locomotive] tips the scales at 82,000 pounds.)
I am well aware of this naming convention; I once had Incidental Background Mare #9 star in a story. With that name. But my point is that if we're willing to suspend disbelief because we're aware that the graphics artists needed a crapton of ponies for a scene and figured that nobody would really notice if there were five Berry Punches in the crowd or that Lyra was in Cloudsdale or whatever else, why aren't you willing to suspend disbelief that they made a easily-recognizable (for children) object such as an arcade game rather than drawing a mechanical Pachinko (which children probably wouldn't have recognized). [I would, and it was great, because you could play it whenever and wherever you wanted, since it didn't use electricity.]
7300199
I'm responsible for .1% of all the horsewords on this site (seriously).
Pinkie Pie herself uses .1% of all the sugar in Equestria.
Ah, who am I kidding. It's probably closer to 10%.
7300213
If Christine's glare could kill. . . .
7300222
I've heard that. I once dreamed in medical talk; does that mean I'm a doctor now? [I drifted off watching a medical talk show, and the audio from real TV bled through into my dream. When I woke up the first thing I thought was that I don't even know those words.]
7300499
I need to see that video at some point. I bet the Earth's movement is a lot more complicated than I think.
7300634
Hell, by now probably everyone on campus has seen her goods, whether they wanted to or not.
7300716
Amen to that.
Anyway, as Emerson once said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."
7300735
I've seen it before. I wonder if someone who was a native speaker of a different language would even get the joke?
Fun fact: my Katana cell phone had predictive text, and the words it most often thought I'd use next were "roofrack" and "ninja." I don't know why. I hardly ever used either of those words.
7300746
that almost happened
7300803
True, but what Silver meant was that every pegasus classifies them into those three groups first, and there's a different word for each. I can't really think of a good analogy for it right now, though.
7300868
Yeah, she probably would.
7301040
That's my theory. It's possible that the locomotive could supply some power, but not enough to move the train, and they called out the team of ponies as helpers, but I think it was broken.
I think they are, just in different fields than we are. And there's always the factor that just because you can build it doesn't mean anybody wants one.
7301216
It would be kind of fun to write a short HiE where Ponyville is a pony Mennonite community, and when the human goes to Vanhoofer or whatever, they've got flying cars and spaceships and holograms and all that other completely sci-fi shit.
7301277
7301479
I heard hand back in the day. Maybe they've refined the scale since I was in college.
7301632
The traditional three classifications are hawky birds, chirpy birds, and ducky birds. So basically what you said.
7301950
He was about to say 'where are your nipples?' (or something to that effect) but he had second thoughts before he could say it.
7302567
But even then they're not consistent. IIRC, both the Cheese Sandwich flashback (with adult Minuette) and the Canterlot flashback (with filly Minuette) are in the same season. I agree, they're getting better, but they still get lazy sometimes. Or else they just want to aggravate people.
7302699
It's okay. Correction made, thank you!