http://www.miislita.com/fractals/grammar-semantics-fractals.html

Can't imagine linguists will like this one, but it is thought provoking

Confusing. I took a linguistics class this term in the hopes of no longer being the airhead of daltai. It didn't work, I didn't understand hardly any of it and I have resigned myself to my lot here :)

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Indeed it is -I think it is more for the specialist. It references knowledge managment, like database systems that might allow for more intuitive searching of information. Talk of "documents contain fractal patterns as signatures that emulate semantic hypercubes, traced by their common vocabulary, dynamically joining documents in collections to reflect Knowledge ViewPoints called kThreads"...not something that would be flowing off my tongue either.

I want to do linguistics too, but I'm going to be careful about it, as you could get caught given it can be specialist

quote:

But the trouble was that ignorance became more interesting, especially big fascinating ignorance about huge and important things like matter and creation, and people stopped patiently building their little houses of rational sticks in the chaos of the universe and started getting interested in the chaos itself -- partly because it was a lot easier to be an expert on chaos, but mostly because it made really good patterns that you could put on a t-shirt. And instead of getting on with proper science [footnote: like finding that bloody butterfly whose flapping wings cause all these storms we've been having lately and getting it to stop] scientist suddenly went around saying how impossible it was to know anything, and that there wasn't really anything you could call reality to know anything about, and how all this was tremendously exciting, and incidentally did you know there were possibly all these little universes all over the place but no-one can see them because they are all curved in on themselves?
Incidentally, don't you think this is a rather good t-shirt?

-- Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

(Message edited by aonghus on June 14, 2007)

Sums up a lot of new age stuff!

BRN a chara,

What is this about taking linguistics, you clearly already have, do you mean you want more?

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No I'm not doing linguistics, nor have I ever. I meant I would like to in the future. I doing social science research, which is about experiments that could be used in any of the social sciences (sociology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology) and covers the like of questionaires, lab work etc. It's not so glamorous, but it will give me a grounding that I could use in the future, maybe to get into a linguistics course via building a portfolio of research, as I have no BA in linguistics

I'm taking my degree in social science as well. I'm amazed that you havn't taken linguistics the way you toss around the lingo of it.

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