Bill Cosby - NAACP leaders stunned by remarks of prominent comedian

"Circe" wrote in message
news:8OIvc.38265$oi5.16594@fed1read07...
Holger Dansk wrote:
On Thu, 3 Jun 2004 08:25:52 -0700, "Circe"
wrote:

If the writer had simply accurately stated that Semitic languages
didn't have *written* vowels and that the Greeks put vowels into the
*written* language, you might not have been led so far astray. All
the Greeks invented was a method of representing a vowel sound
with a written symbol.

That's what putting vowels in a language is.

No, it isn't, but never mind. Written vowels clearly haven't improved your
capacity either to think or reason

Vowel *sounds*, OTOH, had no need to be invented, since any
month-old infant is quite capable of producing them!

Of course there was every need for vowels.

Of course there is a need for vowels. Every language *has* them. Moreover,
vowels *are* represented in syllabic writing systems: the symbol for the
syllable "ma", for example, is different than the symbol for the syllable
"mu", and therefore, the vowel *does* exist in the written language and *is*
represented.

It gave the Greeks an
advantage because they were able to create new words easier.

Again, pure nonsense. The Greeks had a very large vocabulary, that is true.
The fact that they had individuals symbols for vowels in their written
language has absolutely no relevance to the number of words in the language.
If it did, one would expect Latin, which also has vowels, to have at least
as many words in its vocabulary as Greek. This is not the case. Latin has a
*far* smaller vocabulary then Greek. Word formation has absolutely nothing
to do with written language: words are typically formed in the *spoken*
language and represented in *written* language only when their meaning and
usage becomes accepted in the spoken language. There is no point in
committing a word to paper if no one understands or recognizes that word.

In order
to communicate you have to be able to write words down.

No. To communicate, you only have to get your ideas across to another
person. To preserve and pass communication and learning on into subsequent
generation, you need writing. But communication no more requires writing
than eating requires cooking.

Moreover, languages which do not have symbols with one-to-one correspondence
to vowel and consonant sounds are perfectly capable of communication. Are
you now going to claim that the Hebrew Bible is incapable of communicating
ideas because it is written in a language that had no written vowels at the
time it was committed to paper? That ancient Sanskrit and Egyptian
hieroglyphs communicate nothing to us because they have no vowel symbols?
That modern Chinese does not "write words down" because it is a syllabic
system?

With every post, you show yourself to be several thousand times more foolish
and ignorant than the "savages" you so denigrate.

I thought you sounded like a black school teacher. Now, I know you are. :-)

You are mad because I told the truth about savages in Africa. Well, Bill Cosby
will tell you the truth about savages in America. :-)

Holger
--
Be well, Barbara

All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful.
Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its
other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a
fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman

"Holger Dansk" wrote:
---------------
Written vowels began as diacritical marks around consonantal symbols.
They were optional, as in early Greek and Hebrew.

Later the need to spread language widely to different dialects made
it necessary to spell the vowels out, to combat deviant pronunciations
in dialects. Prior to that written language was a shorthand using only
consonantal symbols.

Look in any good encyclopedia or on any reliable web site and you will
see that the Greeks were the first to put vowels in language.

I have been studying linguistics for almost 20 years now, and you are
wrong.

That's the only kind you can have when you
are speaking about the first civilization to put vowells in
language. -----------
Don't be stupid, all language has vowels, you can't even SPEAK
consonants without vowels!!

Again, we are not talking about all of the grunting and screeching and noise
that people made.

No. We are talking about the languages that people spoke.

We are talking about WRITTEN language.

Written language is a representation of spoken language.

THE ALPHABET

"Like the Arabs and the Jews, Ancient Egyptians did not have vowels. Then, they
spelled out only the consonants of their language's words. To eliminate
ambiguities, the scribes used classifiers, which would say whether a given
consonantal cluster was representing a bird, a man, a building, etc.
The Egyptian consonants were adopted by the Phoenicians, who were sailors and
merchants, with little need for writing complex narratives or documents. All
they wanted was a writing system good enough to keep their books. Besides this,
their language had consonantal roots, that would yield the meaning even in the
absence of vowels. Therefore, they eliminated the classifiers altogether.

The Greeks spoke a language where vowels were part of the root. Without vowels,
one could not figure out the meaning of a word. Therefore, they were forced to
introduce symbols for the vowels and, in doing so, invented the modern
alphabetic writing system."

http://palaia.ufu.br/aesop/alpha.html

Notice "The Greeks spoke a language where vowels were part of the
root." The vowels were there before they out the vowels in the
alphabet. And Greek was NOT the first language where vowels were part
of the root; Chinese also has this, but the Chinese chose a different
way to represent words, not involving an alphabet. In the Semitic
languages, the vowels were not part of the root (they were part of the
language, but did not need to be represented).

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org

"Holger Dansk" wrote:
It seems like you just want to argue. The Greeks were maybe the first
civilization to add vowels to their alphabet. Their language was written with their alphabet.

Hurrah. He finally makes a correct statement.

So what the hell is your problem? You just want to play around with semantics
and argue about practically nothing. Try to remain rational.

I am quite rational. I am not a racist slime.

My dad once told me, "Very few if any economist are millionaires."

And how is this relevant?

In other words, they, evidently, are unable to separate the essential things
from the unessential, or the important from the unimportant.

That is an unsupported conclusion.

They have other priorities besides becoming millionaires. Good for
them.

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org

"Holger Dansk" wrote:
Guess those people in Upper Egypt weren't reading and writing.

South of the Sahara they were running around chasing wildebeest, etc.

What do you think they were doing in Northern Europe in 3000 BC?

Well, in about 2560 BC, north of the Sahara, (We were talking about
Africa, not northern Europe.)

You were talking about "whites and Asians". I want to know what you
think all the rest of the whites and Asians were doing while the Copts
(who were mixed race and possibly black, but were certainly NOT
"Caucasian" or "Aryan" or "Indo-European" which are common alternative
names for "whites") were doing their thing.

You are saying that I said that the Copts were white? Where did I say that?
They were
definitely not the stinking, mindless, evil, do-nothings-for-thousands-of-years
savages who
were always south of the Sahara. (Often called sub saharan.)

Nor were they the stinking, mindless, evil,
do-nothings-for-thousands-of-years savages who were always north of
the Mediterranean (Often called "Europeans").

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org

"Holger Dansk" wrote:
You're right. Here in Northern Europe they were playing with stag
beetles and running away from bears.

Until the Romans brought civilisation, thousands of years later.

Most of civilized things about Roman culture came from the Greeks after the
Romans conquered Greece.

And the Greeks likely got their alphabet from Phoenicians who tried to
find ways to represent the Greek language. We don't KNOW who the
person was who first added vowel letters to the alphabet for
representing Greek. It might have been a Greek, or a Phoenician, or
even a dark-skinned Copt or Nubian.

Remember that the Russian alphabet was not invented by a Russian.

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org

"Bob LeChevalier" wrote in message
...
"Holger Dansk" wrote:
It seems like you just want to argue. The Greeks were maybe the first
civilization to add vowels to their alphabet. Their language was written
with their alphabet.

Hurrah. He finally makes a correct statement.

So what the hell is your problem? You just want to play around with
semantics
and argue about practically nothing. Try to remain rational.

I am quite rational. I am not a racist slime.

So you are black and all of this arguing has been because of the sub saharan
savages and the fact that the Greeks were not black. Give me strength. :-)
Well,
I finally know where you are coming from. You are one of these people in
America
that Bill Cosby is talking about and you are upset.

Well, I haven't told you about the American negro have I? I just told you about
the ones in Africa that are savages in every sense of the word.

Why didn't you say from the very beginning that you have a seething hatred for
white people who tell the truth about blacks? Listen to Bill Cosby. He is not
white
and he will tell you the truth about blacks and he's talking about the ones here
in America,
and not the savages in Africa. I'm sure Bill would not even want to discuss
those in Africa.

Holger

My dad once told me, "Very few if any economist are millionaires."

And how is this relevant?

In other words, they, evidently, are unable to separate the essential things
from the unessential, or the important from the unimportant.

That is an unsupported conclusion.

They have other priorities besides becoming millionaires. Good for
them.

lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org

Holger Dansk wrote:

"Bob LeChevalier" wrote in message

"Holger Dansk" wrote:

So what the hell is your problem? You just want to
play around with semantics
and argue about practically nothing. Try to remain rational.

I am quite rational. I am not a racist slime.

So you are black ...

That'z funny!

On Sun, 04 Jul 2004 12:10:50 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
wrote:

It might have been a Greek, or a Phoenician, or
even a dark-skinned Copt or Nubian.

I have always heard that the coptic written language has no vowels and
it is long dead...nobody speaks it any more. So I wonder how they
(You know they, don't you?) determined that it was Ra and not Re or
Ru. I have heard it pronounced 'Rah' and 'Ray' but still spelled in
translation as Ra.

FACE

"FACE" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 04 Jul 2004 12:10:50 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
wrote:

It might have been a Greek, or a Phoenician, or
even a dark-skinned Copt or Nubian.

I have always heard that the coptic written language has no vowels and
it is long dead...nobody speaks it any more. So I wonder how they
(You know they, don't you?) determined that it was Ra and not Re or
Ru. I have heard it pronounced 'Rah' and 'Ray' but still spelled in
translation as Ra.


Ra-Ra-Bo-Ra
Banana-Banna Ho-Ra
Fee-Fie- Foe-Ra
RA!

"Bob LeChevalier" wrote in message
...
Holger Dansk wrote:
The point remains that you made a judgement-in-ignorance about a
language you know nothing about, labeling it "primitive".

All languages are primitive compared to today if you are talking about
thousands of years prior to today.

There is no basis to conclude that.

You also
have no clue whether they have a 'noise meaning "muhfugger"'

I'm sure they would have.

Your opinion is worthless.

Well, all I would have to do is put my opinion on my web site, and since it
would
be in writing and all of you blacks who have recently learned to read seem to
think
that, if it's in writing, then it's true, you would believe my opinions.

I warn you, maybe 50% of the web sites are not reliable. There's all kinds of
doo doo out
there.

If I were you, I wouldn't let people know that you were assaociated with Logical
Language
Group. That's like saying that you went to University of Wdowee, etc., or that
you
like negro phonics or whatever that damn fool crap that the Washin



lojbab
--
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org