religion, oh god... gods!

I believe I've heard that french is less ambiguous before too...

But the problem with a language that's totally unambiguous is that it would be incredible difficult to use, because of all the rules that would be needed, not to mention a great deal more words that would be needed. Language would be so specialized in even the broadest fields, and more time would have to be spent learning the language you need rather than the material you are meant to study.

The worse thing would be the lack of puns though.

Don't worry about puns. There're plenty in those complex languages -- maybe "more" than imaginable, because of all the stylistic devices that complexity allows / makes possible. The less ambiguousness on normal mode does not imply you couldn't willingly create some wanted ambiguousness easily or subtly.

The weak point is in fact the time spent to learn such a language once adult. It's biological : you loose those childhood's skills what allow you to learn anything nearly in the blink of an eye. A child or even a baby have no trouble to learn french because their brain is like sponge toward knowledge and experiences. But I was told, the ones having the less difficulties to learn foreign languages once adult, are the slavic people. I know nothing about their languages, I just guess (?) they're might be pretty complex in phonation and maybe in grammar.

As someone who likes to play around with languages a lot, I can affirm that Slavic languages have some of the hardest phonation for non-native speakers. I had a little trouble with learning to pronounce ð and the double L sound in icelandic, but Slavic languages are just on a whole different level. Even Welsh is easier.

And with puns, I disagree, I think there would be less puns. Less people would have the language skill to create them. And they would probably need more explanation, meaning they are less funny.

I can't agree about the spuns.

I like to play with stylistic devices but it before hand very useful to explain lot of things or just to make a story more vivid. Spuns are a way to make laugh while saying something else, it's very common in french and we even invented verlan to twist more and more the words and play with them.

Spuns are all about semantic, while grammar is about syntax. And you can play on "which is the syntax I'm hearing", meanwhile it also implies the semantic. But you can also play on the unsaid part of a sentence (more in englsih than in french ?).

Example :
"il allait chez lui / il a léché(,) lui"
(he was going home / he has leaked)

In French, yes there are many puns.

But I was referring to if we invented a language with no ambiguity whatsoever (ignoring the quetion of whether or not it's actually possible). In that language, there would be very few, if any puns, because puns are based on ambiguity in the language, which by definition, our hypothetical language cannot naturally have.

There are built up languages as for example esperanto -- here come some news : there are people whose actual mother language is esperanto, which mean more and more people are speaking it.

I neither know esperanto myself, nor would know some spoker, so it's hard to evaluate such a language and its content.


I would rather say... human-to-human languages will still keep a bit of ambiguousness, and even keep room to create some more, because by nature most of humans seem to be somehow at the cross between "Homo inventor" and "Homo communicator", each of us with a bigger/smaller part of the first and the second.

It's a different matter if we speak about programming languages or logical/mathematic languages. Those last are in fact built with minimalist and rigid construction, cutting off "fantasy" in order to "purify" information. It may be odd to relate a story (at least understandable by the majority of people) in those ultra-specialized languages, even more difficult to make spuns I guess.

If I may just squeeze in here... There.

So, god and stuff... I don't think he exists...

(Just trying to bring this topic back from the linguistic discussion. I don't want this thread to die the same way god did)

Guess it's buddhism for you then.

But yeah, I was always disappointed that nature/animals were made exclusively for our sake and that animals didn't have an opportunity for a better afterlife.

Okay, I'll bite: why buddhism?

Since they don't think they're entitled to this planet. But if you want a honest answer, I just like it for not having all of that "interpretation of His will" while still having a morally rich outlook on a person's activities.

But wait, there's more!!!, though I doubt I could say it right.

I don't know much about buddhism but that wasn't what I was asking. What I was asking is what was it about my comment that made you recommend buddhism. It may not be one of the worst religions out there but, like the pious would stupidly put it, I'm offended.

Well, you decided that god is dead. And since you're still visiting this thread, it made me think that you're searching for some alternative. So I did the next best thing and recommended you a godless religion that I was familiar with. Though it was kind of half-jokingly. Sorry if I offended you.

I was joking about the offense too. I just thought it was weird because I don't think I said anything to suggest I was looking for an alternative. But on the other hand, I suppose it is reasonable to say that I (wrongly) assumed you had read more of my posts which would make suggesting me a religion something quite humorous.

I don't wanna turn this into a debate over tiny, tiny things but I only said the «god died» thing as an expression tied in with the topic, not a central philosophical view, although I do think Nietzsche had a point.

Ohsh, so you're here for the debates? Disregard me then.

I almost became a Mormon once, that was a horrible decision...

Thank Elohim I didn't go along with that... seriously Kolob?!
I did get all of their scriptures and decided to rewrite them for kicks.
I think it needed a story of one of their characters (a woman named Sariah) to fight dragons and all sorts of stuff. Make religion fun lol

Nietzsche ^^ A good guy :-D

In a way if there is no god, then this world is really a miracle -- that is to say, not the same way as Leibniz's view but still a miracle, regarding one of the ultimate ontologic matters : "why is there something instead of nothing ?"

In that vein there are people considering "as a god" what made possible the existence of the universe. Not the same god as in bible, torah, koran... But some "power" we're originated from.

In this absolute extreme, ahteism also become a form of belief -- since it's indecidable for lack of fact/proof.

I don't know Leibniz's definition but I know Hume's. And miracles are, unless you believe in some god, impossible. You cannot define miracle as something rare or amazing in epic proportions. A miracle is a suspension of the natural order. The creation of the universe is, like me, you, the stars and Irina Shayk, part of the natural order. The ultimate ontological question is one I step back from or when I talk about it I either don't take it seriously, as in, I don't think I can find an answer or I just make conceptual corrections to others. That question is one Stephen Hawking said would like to know the answer to. I think that is enough to point out that a paragraph with three lines (and with Leibniz's name on it) is no way near the discussion seeing as you could write a 10 volume book on that note.

Before I lash out on calling atheism a form of belief, I'd like you to explain that fact/proof thing better for I could be making a misinterpretation.

I'm going to interject to ask a question here. What about unexplained scientific phenomena? As we have no idea of their cause, they seem to us to be, as it were, suspending the natural order. For instance, dark flow (I don't believe there's been any new stuff on that recently). Basically galaxies should be moving at a vector velocity predicted by some equation, plus an extra bit of speed in a random direction. But the extra bit doesn't seem to be random, it seems as if most galaxies are moving towards a common point. Nobody is sure why, and though there have been vague attempts to explain it, none of them have any significant evidence to support them.

Is this a miracle? It's not following the natural order, so why wouldn't it be?

I think your assumption that it does not follow the natural order is mistaken. People often mess up when they appeal to ignorance regarding the cosmos. First, I would say you cannot say it doesn't follow the natural order, you may say we don't know what the natural order regarding that very, very specific and complex issue is. Second, unexplained phenomena is considered paranormal, not supernatural.

It has been a while since I last read this but hopefully I have followed it correctly: http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/20/difference-between-paranormal-and-supernatural/

If I had to put forward an example, I would say this:

«A virgin woman conceived of a child» is paranormal if, and only if, human parthenogenesis is possible.

«A virgin woman conceived of a child» is supernatural if, and only if, human parthenogenesis is impossible.

Paranormal ≈ supernatural and each/both = patascience(*)

(*) Read about pataphysic for example.

As for parthenogenesis, it is just normal science and no sientist would rigourously say a parthenogenesis within human-kind would be "impossible", but rather there are lot of mechanisms preventing against such event. In that given case, just a matter of statistic and possibilities.


As for miracle, huh ! Don't think everything is already "written" somewhere along the "natural law". Casualty is a matter of statistic, which is different than determinism. That is why exist theories about parallel universes, each of these universes parting from each possibility than can occure for each event even the less significant. Some of those theories assume the way events happen in our "current" universe/dimension, may be influenced by what is happening in the "nearest" dimensions/universes. That is not as foolish as some of us here would like to make it look.

Moreover, there is a extremely unpredictable phenomenom called emergence : whatever you can know about a level of natural law or a situation, when complexity reach a certain moment or amount or both, it becomes unpredictable, also qualified as chaotic. Why ? Simply because order is only a facet from chaos.

So miracles aren't the preserve of religions and such.

And if you believe in determinism, you should learn a bit about thermodynamic laws as for example the failure of the Laplace's demon versus the Carnot's principle and the irreversibility of events.

So : no, not everything can be "explained" or rather foreseen by Science even if you were to know every-everything about our universe. But afterward (after the events), you may try to "trail backward" those events.


As for Leibniz, to summarize he was saying that if every/each event, even the less significant, happening within our universe is decided by God, then each event would be a miracle -- since it's from God's hand.


Concerning what the universe is originated from, we really lack of facts and thus "proofs". We have no way to reach anything beyond the birth point of the universe.