Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers

Jeff Wilson · 14 Aug 2010, 12:47 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 07:47:56 -0500
Subject: (urth) Wolfe's Attitude toward his Readers
In-Reply-To: <8959133DA9D14EF292EB71B361BAF439@jill>
References: <SNT123-W55FB1AAAD34DB1F72B1CF7CF990 at phx.gbl>
	<8959133DA9D14EF292EB71B361BAF439@jill>
Message-ID: <4C66907C.60402 at io.com>

On 8/14/2010 7:10 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> "Ora faltig teru dres, ent oru klen rebalen tafru."

> I made it to seem pronouncable.and have a plausible distribution of word lengths etc.,
> even an echo between 'ora' and 'oru'. But it means nothing!

Which is it?

I mean, it can't have zero meaning if it reflects your opinion of what 
lexical characteristics are believable by excluding sequences that fail 
to convey that sense. This includes all kinds of contextual information 
about Indo-European roots and human cognition.

The above "dres" is a fine candidate for "three", for instance. If you 
had plenty of time on your hands and a sufficient command of what had 
been actually used as words at some point, you could construct a 
notional language that included the above phrase that would regardless 
be as detailed and meaningful as a natural one. Speak friend, and enter!

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net