lvxferre

Easier: n(13-n).

Ginger with turmeric? Now that's something I need to try. Thanks for the rec!

Ginger. But only because I refuse to call yerba mate "tea".

[Just to be clear for everyone: I'm describing the issue, not judging anyone. I'm in no position to criticise the OP.]

The unfamiliar vocab is just the cherry on the cake. The main issue is that it's hard to track everything; at least, when reading it for the first time. And most people don't bother reading an excerpt enough times to understand it.

Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.

Almost nobody, I believe. And I'd go further: I don't think that most people read longer texts that would "train" them for this sort of stuff.

We're both interpreting it slightly different ways:

• you - the utterance is specific, the speaker is unspecified
• me - "utterance" is a placeholder for "discourse", the speaker is whoever answers the question

To be honest this is really cool. Now I'm curious if one of us got it right, or if we're both reading it wrong.

As you said in the other comment, the sentence is grammatically OK¹. However, it's still a huge sentence, with a few less common words (e.g. "utterance"), split into two co-ordinated clauses, and both clauses are by themselves complex.

To add injury there's quite a few ways to interpret "over the airwaves" (e.g. is this just radio, or does the internet count too?)

So people are giving up parsing the whole thing.

I also write like this, in a convoluted way², but I kind of get why people gave up.

1. I'm not sure if it's semantically OK due to the word "utterance".
2. Except when translating stuff, since I'm forced to roughly follow the "informational layout" of the original. That's usually a PITA but it helps wonder for clarity!

My most controversial discourse* can be roughly phrased as "screw intentions", "your intentions don't matter", "go pave Hell with your «intenshuns»". It isn't a single utterance*; I say stuff like this all the time, and regardless of the utterance used to convey said discourse, people will still disagree with it.

The one that I'm sometimes at fault is "people who assume are pieces of shit and deserve to be treated as such". Because sometimes it is reasonable to assume (to take something as true even if you don't know it for sure); just nowhere as much as people do.

*I'm being specific with terminology because it's a big deal for me. "Discourse" is what you say, regardless of the specific words; "utterance" is a specific chain of language usage (be it voiced, gestured, written, etc.)

wtf does this even mean

OP is asking two things:

• the most controversial shit that you say
• the shit that you say and think "mmh, maybe I'm wrong but I'll keep saying it"

...or at least that's how I interpreted it.

Ten minutes, I guess? Brazil.

Hard of hearing old lady, right before me, was struggling to vote in the 2022 elections. Apparently she typed the numbers for her candidates but they didn't go through. All five of them (governor, state deputy, president, federal deputy, senator).

Typically it takes 2~3 minutes though.

Greek and Roman mythologies are almost the same

Kind of. They're like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.

A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.

And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.

But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there's some "humanity" in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.

[Sorry for the info dump. I love this stuff.]

I also think that it's interesting. And I wonder if it's something shared by the "collective memory" of humankind, or if it's just that flooding events are so common and impactful that any culture is almost certain to develop that myth, given enough time.

Do you want to elaborate more on how politeness cant be explained by gricean maximes?

The Gricean maxims only handle the informative part of a conversation; they don't handle, for example, the emotional impact of the utterance on the hearer, or the social impact on the speaker. As such, in situations where politeness is a concern, you'll see people consistently violating those maxims.

I'll give you an example. Suppose two people in a room: Alice and Bob. Alice has a lot of cake, she's eating some, and Bob is craving cake.

If Bob were to ask Alice for some cake, Bob could simply say "gimme cake". It fits the four maxims to the letter - and yet typically people don't do this, they request things through convoluted ways, like "You wouldn't mind sharing some cake with me, would you?" (violating the maxim of manner), or even "You know, I was in a rush today, so I had no breakfast..." (implying "I'm hungry", and violating the maxims of quantity and relation).

To handle why Bob would do this, you need to backseat Grice's Logic for a moment and use another framework - such as Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, it explains stuff like this really well.

This is probably obvious for you (and for me), and yet you still see some pragmaticists shoehorning everything into Grice's logic. Or some doing the exact opposite and shoehorning it into Austin's speech acts, or B&L Politeness Theory, etc. It sounds a lot like "I got a hammer, so everything must be a nail".

To the latter point: My biggest gripe with linguistics is the tendency to boil everything down to a simple system.

Yes, yes, and yes. You can see Language (as human faculty) as a single system but, if you do so, any accurate representation of that system is so big that it's completely useless, like a map as large as the territory.

That's already a tendency in Linguistics in general, but in the case of the generativists it's their explicit goal.