Posts

Sorted by New

Wiki Contributions

Comments

Jem13y40

But physics and DI are different in this important way: physics is a classification of knowledge, and DI is a technique for communicating knowledge. It's reasonable to ask for a functional description of a technique, even though it wouldn't be reasonable to ask for a functional description of a classification of knowledge. I don't think your analogy works.

You're claiming that DI is a way of teaching people things. You'd like to teach us what DI is (or, at least, we're giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that this is your goal). However, you've currently been successful in teaching (as near as I can tell) exactly zero of us what DI is. If you've succeeded in teaching zero people the thing you're trying to teach, I suggest this is evidence that you don't have a good teaching method.

Here are some things I don't yet care about, and can't care about until I know what DI is. If your response addresses these non-concerns, my doubts about your stated goal will increase:

  • I don't care if DI is effective.
  • I don't care if DI is well thought-of by others.
  • I don't care if DI is the result of a new paradigm or an old one.

Here are two things that I do care about:

  • I'd like to know what DI is.
  • I'd like to know if you, personally, are a member of the Church of Scientology.

Sorry I have to include that last one, but your behavior so far absolutely mimics a common CoS MO of introducing a new program which is vague on details but turns out, in practice, to be Scientology (see, for example, Narconon).

Jem13y30

I think you can add Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the list. "Acathla" was the name of the demon that the big bads were attempting to summon (or reawaken) at the end of Buffy season 2.

Jem13y00

You're right about nihilitas, it seems to have shifted sense since classical times. I should have been double-checking my work with a medieval dictionary. I do like inanitas.

I agree that supernus is absolute rather than relative, but I read the English version as having the absolute meaning: "Only nothingness above [i.e., in the heavens, where you'd expect gods to be, but they aren't, so there's nothingness instead]" so it seems like it fits.

Jem13y00

Thanks for the link, that's a very nice medieval resource. I agree now that insuper here is okay, there were a couple of uses very much like yours. Interestingly, it seems that in the majority of those medieval citations, insuper wasn't related to location or being used as an adverb at all...it was being used more often as a preposition (with accusative) meaning "beyond" or "in addition to".

Jem13y10

This is also very good. I like the choice of nullus. A couple of quibbles, the first of which I'm more sure about than the second:

  • neque can't be postpositive...it doesn't have the usual word order freedom, it needs to be before whatever it's negating and joining.

  • (less sure on this one) insuper is an adverb rather than an adjective, so it can't be used as a predicate for the noun nihilum. The public-domain dictionary I checked Lewis' An Elementary Latin Dictionary has it as a qualifier for the verb in all three of the citations it gives for the relevant sense.

Jem13y00

What a great idea! I've sent you my strategy.

Jem13y60

Yes, that's grammatical (as would be "nihilum supernum"). Those are closer to English "nothing" than "nothingness", and maybe too short to fit with the preceding lines, but I don't know if that's an issue.

Jem13y80

Here are some possibilities:

nulla res curans superna -> nothing above [i.e., in the heavens] that cares
nihil nisi stellae supernum -> nothing above but stars
nihil nisi inanitas supernum -> nothing above but the void (or, nothing above but emptiness)
nihilitas inanis superna -> an empty nothingness above (maybe too redundant?)

Jem13y100

Yes, soter is a good word for savior. Google has the grammar wrong (it doesn't seem like it's even trying to decline, all the nouns were left as nominative). If you want to keep the parallelism you had in the English ("No X hath the X") it would need to be

Non est soteri soter

or

Non habet sotera soter

If you use the second, I guarantee you will get mail from well-meaning fans saying "You did that wrong! You need an accusative there, and Sotera isn't accusative!". Oddly, it is, though I would never have guessed without looking it up...apparently it was borrowed from Greek and didn't ever regularize; it kept on being declined as though it were Greek. I like the version with "est" way better anyway, and lines two and three would also need to be slightly different grammatically if you switch to "habet"

Load More