HFQ Offical Snippet #4

fallsfromtrees wrote: English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, hits them over the head and goes through their pockets for loose words and phrases.

That sounds very Terry Pratchett-ish to me. Also very accurate.

Lazalarlives wrote:snip

Remember it took two world wars and a great deal of political capital to let women vote in the US;

snip

Dave

Two? world wars. Given that women got the vote in 1920, I can only think of one - Unless you are thinking of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War in North America) which has been referred to as World War 0.

Charles

anwi wrote:

phillies wrote:While the Sisters are not aware of foreign languages, they do know about codes. (snip)
However, the Sisters of Saint Khody may well not have enough text to work out what is going on.

Alternatively, the Sisters know exactly what the "code" is, have a translation of some segment, and have put up a trap for Merlin.

Aivah specifically mentions that the last few months of the diary are entirely in Spanish, while before it was intermingled (providing context). Thus, the amount of text should be sufficient if the Sisterhood were to actually try it.
As to codes: If the Spanish sections were written in a cipher as well as in Spanish, I don't see they'd have realistic chances of cracking that code. If it's "only" Spanish, then deciphering the text has lots of commonalities to cracking a code...
Then, it is an interesting question why Aivah would set up a test. Could be some info in the Spanish sections. I mean, she's basically confirmed she knows about Chihiro loyalist seijins and loyalists to other angels or fallen angels. She's convinced that Merlin is a seijin. Why does she assume that he's working for the good ones? Moreover, if she has some grasp of the Spanish sections, might be she's not even on the Chihiro loyalist side. Testing for that one might be a motive...
OTOH: Si Aivah realmente no sabe nada acerca la secciones en español, podemos discutir si hemos cogida el autor con las manos rojas. Y RFC no lo gusta.

Thought I'd have some fun with this...
OTOH: Si Aivah realmente no sabe nada acerca la secciones en español, podemos discutir si hemos cogida el autor con las manos 
First problem is how do you pronounce it? Thought I'd give it a try though and I know/knew spanish.
Let's see now - Si (sye, see, sih ? why “iff”) Aivah (!! name)
realmente (! safehold doesn't pronounce each letter, the ray ahl might be misprononced to reel which could be connected to real and possibly to really)
no ( !! negative, but why would you think there'd be a straight carryover?)
sabe (sayb, sabee. Sahb? Verb saber has no english carryover)
nada ( nayday, nahday no caryover) acerca (knock yourself out!! no connection to “about”)
la, las ( babytalk, why would you think of this as an article?)
secciones ( Ah Ha – sounds like secshuns, or maybe sesshuns or seasons?)
en (ean, ehn? In is a stretch) español (ah ha, but how do they know tilda adds silent y?)
podemos ( no english carryover and how would we know it's 1st person plural )
discutir (??) si (see above) hemos (what's a hemmoh plural )
cogida el autor ( owter, awter, author?!) con las (see above)
manos ( maynose, mahnose, manose – mayonaise? Big stretch to manual)

CSB wrote: SNIP

Muscle-powered civilizations are always male-dominated. The relatively high levels of nutrition and health care enforced by the Order of Pasquale would have lessened this effect compared to the feudal civilizations of Earth's history, since Safehold would have a *much* lower incidence of death in childbirth, and therefore somewhat less cultural pressure to protect women at all costs, but when muscle is what's required to get things done, what matters is how many men you have.[/quote]

Spoken like a true sexist. I would submit Bedard as the culprit here. Langhorne probably didn't help. Safehold is not "muscle-powered. There are numerous draft animals. The Dragon's pretty impressive. There is water power and some pretty sophisticated power transmission systems with shafts, belts and gears.
Women have better social and language skills and greater manual dexterity because of better fine motor control. This society could just as well have been set up as a matriarchy.
A recent study showed 60+ percent of 4th grade girls liked math and science. Only 5 percent become scientists or engineers. The absence of women in scientific/engineering work is not because of any inherent male superiority, but rather the result of social and cultural biases.

anwi wrote:
OTOH: Si Aivah realmente no sabe nada acerca la secciones en español, podemos discutir si hemos cogida el autor con las manos rojas. Y RFC no lo gusta.

phillies wrote:
Thought I'd have some fun with this...
OTOH: Si Aivah realmente no sabe nada acerca la secciones en español, podemos discutir si hemos cogida el autor con las manos 
First problem is how do you pronounce it? Thought I'd give it a try though and I know/knew spanish.
Let's see now - Si (sye, see, sih ? why “iff”) Aivah (!! name)
realmente (! safehold doesn't pronounce each letter, the ray ahl might be misprononced to reel which could be connected to real and possibly to really)
no ( !! negative, but why would you think there'd be a straight carryover?)
sabe (sayb, sabee. Sahb? Verb saber has no english carryover)
nada ( nayday, nahday no caryover) acerca (knock yourself out!! no connection to “about”)
la, las ( babytalk, why would you think of this as an article?)
secciones ( Ah Ha – sounds like secshuns, or maybe sesshuns or seasons?)
en (ean, ehn? In is a stretch) español (ah ha, but how do they know tilda adds silent y?)
podemos ( no english carryover and how would we know it's 1st person plural )
discutir (??) si (see above) hemos (what's a hemmoh plural )
cogida el autor ( owter, awter, author?!) con las (see above) manos
manos ( maynose, mahnose, manose – mayonaise? Big stretch to manual)

EdThomas: Interesting analysis... I really enjoyed it!

Phillies: is it safe to assume your Spanish section came out out of Google Translate or something similar? I ask because I see some typical automated translation problems in the section.

Both of these posts illustrate why I think the SSK would have trouble translating Seijin Khody's Spanish sections without any other context.

For example, the phrase "cogida el autor" is incorrect. The verb "coger" should be conjugated as "cogido" in this case. However! "coger" means to pick up or lift in Spanish, but in some South American countries, it is also a rather rude euphemism for, please forgive me here, "having sex", which rather makes the sentence very disturbing ! The meaning of the sentence in Spain vs. Argentina for example, would be very different.

And then the phrase "con las manos rojas" is a direct translation of the English expression "red handed". However, in Spanish, that phrase is meaningless, and only makes sense in English if you know the context. In Spanish, it literally means the author's hands were red... Why? did he paint them? Did he burn them? Does he have a skin condition??

If Khody was using Spanish colloquialisms and phrases, which have inherent meaning only to native speakers, the chances of successfully translating those sections of the journal would be very low. It's not enough to be able to map words from one language to the other. There are other considerations when assigning meaning and context.

Bingo, AncientMariner, right on. The basic difficulty is that people think that translating is a matter of vocabulary equivalants from dictionaries.

Don

Ed, "muscle-powered civilizations" refers to animal power as much as human power.

Second, watch it with the "name calling" (ie sexist). Nobody here doubts the intelligence of women.

Third, when the majority of tasks down require a certain level of upper-body strength, men will always have the advantage. If a given task could be done by one man but would take two women, then the likelihood is that the employer would want to hire one man instead of two women.

Even with "water power", the majority of non-household jobs on Safehold require a certain level of upper-body strength.

Also in spite of stories of "Amazons", warfare has mainly been a "man's job" because of the need of upper-body strength.

It's only been recently on Earth where a leader didn't have to be a warrior. It's safe to say that on Safehold, the time leaders had to be warriors is even more recent.

EdThomas wrote:
Muscle-powered civilizations are always male-dominated. The relatively high levels of nutrition and health care enforced by the Order of Pasquale would have lessened this effect compared to the feudal civilizations of Earth's history, since Safehold would have a *much* lower incidence of death in childbirth, and therefore somewhat less cultural pressure to protect women at all costs, but when muscle is what's required to get things done, what matters is how many men you have.

Spoken like a true sexist. I would submit Bedard as the culprit here. Langhorne probably didn't help. Safehold is not "muscle-powered. There are numerous draft animals. The Dragon's pretty impressive. There is water power and some pretty sophisticated power transmission systems with shafts, belts and gears.
Women have better social and language skills and greater manual dexterity because of better fine motor control. This society could just as well have been set up as a matriarchy.
A recent study showed 60+ percent of 4th grade girls liked math and science. Only 5 percent become scientists or engineers. The absence of women in scientific/engineering work is not because of any inherent male superiority, but rather the result of social and cultural biases.[/quote]

phillies wrote:
Thought I'd have some fun with this...
(snip)

And it was good fun. But: Pronunciation is irrelevant for translating a written text in an unknown language.
More below.

AncientMariner wrote:
Phillies: is it safe to assume your Spanish section came out out of Google Translate or something similar? I ask because I see some typical automated translation problems in the section.

I confirm. My active command of Spanish is dismal. But I couldn't resist using that specific (English) phrase, even though I figured that it might not work out in Spanish. Anyways, it was intended as a demonstration, only.

AncientMariner wrote:
Both of these posts illustrate why I think the SSK would have trouble translating Seijin Khody's Spanish sections without any other context.
(snip)
If Khody was using Spanish colloquialisms and phrases, which have inherent meaning only to native speakers, the chances of successfully translating those sections of the journal would be very low. It's not enough to be able to map words from one language to the other. There are other considerations when assigning meaning and context.

I agree that it's difficult, but they have several centuries, likely a rather large body of text from one writer, and context from the English parts. So, while I acknowledge that can't come up with a full translation (e.g. for figures of speech), they should be able to figure out quite a lot about the content.

If the SSK would have a go at translating the Spanish sections, the following points should be relevant.
- Spanish is quite strict in terms of syntax. Usually, it's subject verb object (similar to English). Grammatical analysis allows for identifying verb forms.
- Both Spanish and English use conjugation with auxiliaries. You can then identify those composite forms. Assigning tempus requires context. But often simply knowing that it's a verb helps a lot...
- You can rather easily spot most adverbs (realmente, actualmente, ...) by equating “-mente” to “-ly”
- For adjectives, you have a sufficient number that end on -(c)al and are partly written quite similarly to their English counterparts like e.g. similar (only with pronunciation you could identify the Language I'm writing that word in...). Then you will recognize that adjectives usually go after their nouns, which helps a lot.
- Regarding articles, "la", "las", "el", and "los" you can equate to "the" by frequency sampling and word order. After that, you can identify a lot of nouns.

I could continue with more examples. Grammatical analysis will allow for identifying a lot of the actual Spanish grammar even if you don't know the meaning of all the words. And I posited that grammar is known on Safehold and should be accessible to the Sisterhood as well.

Now, for the meaning of words, you will build an ordered list of words. Spanish and English are based on using stems, and the respective rules are comparable. Thus, you can analyse the word list for stems, being aware that stems have (partially widely) different meanings (e.g. "set").
And then you will start to notice that stems in English and Spanish are partly identical (apart from a somewhat different spelling). For instance "realmente", you've just reduced to "real" and “-mente” and tentatively trying "really" will bring you a long way. Then, if you run into "la realidad" going for "the reality" is quite simple as you know it's a noun. Then, equating "realizar" to "to realize" is obvious.
That way you get further insights into word generation in Spanish.
Equating things like "seccion" and "section" after identifying the plural "-es" opens up more easy matches.
Then, there are prefixes. Some common prefixes ("re-") are identical or ("des-" - "dis-") similar. That'll give you access to more stems (in Spanish and in English) for comparisons.
Unless Safeholdian English was rather systematically (sistematicamente) purged from Latin stems and tailored to Germanic/Nordic roots (skin, kill, heaven, live, etc.), you have lots of roots in standard English to reconstruct (reconstruir) those Spanish words. Actually, the largest problems will be some arabic leanwords in Spanish, the fusion of Latin "v" and "b" to "b" in some cases, and the shift of Latin "f" to "h" (or deletion) in the basic vocabulary. And of course those irregular verbs like "ir", "ser", etc.
My experience is that word to word mapping gets you quite a long way on the basic meaning of a text (if you know possible meanings). Combined with basic grammar you get quite acceptable results. And as a bonus, you have a lot of context to draw from.
As stated above, there will be uncertainties (e.g. for figures of speech), but that should not prevent the Basic understanding of large parts of those texts.
If the SSK would try to read those texts, though, it would get funny - but not as funny as my attempts at spoken Spanish .

Hi anwi,

I don't know about your Spanish, but you have an excellent grasp of grammar

I enjoyed your analysis, and I certainly agree that it is quite possible the SSK deciphered the journal. I still believe without a basic knowledge of even the existence of other languages, doing so would have been extremely difficult.

However, what do we know? We know that Nynian said that they hadn't deciphered it. So how do we explain this... there are various possible explanations:

1) The SSK have translated, but Nynian did not want Merlin to know this. It could be she doesn't completely trust him, or she is testing to see how much she knows; or she wants to see what he says the documents say, and if it jives with their translation.

or they haven't translated it because:
2) reasons I stated earlier, it's just too difficult without knowledge of other languages, phrases and expressions etc.
3) The documents are top secret and very few people have seen them. They didn't have teams of linguists working on it; only individuals who may or may not have had the required skills to pull this off.
4) RFC says so!

Anyway, I will be very curious to see how this all works out. Only a little while longer to the next book, right?

Ya dejen de masacrar mi hermoso idioma, si necesitan una traducción basta con preguntarme por medio de un mensaje privado.