Jem

Karma: 93

Jem 22 Aug 2011 17:41 UTC
32 points
0
on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
Okay, I’ll stop lurking and register, if it will help get a new HPMOR out. Here is my translation:

non est salvatori salvator

neque victori Dominus

nec pater nec mater

modo nihilitas supera

I do have confidence in my translation, which I suppose is a tiny amount of evidence in its favor. The sense is very well preserved, and it has a rhythm that flows well (admittedly subjective). I did not fit it to a classical Latin poetic form such as a hexameter or elegaic couplet; I could do this as well but I doubt I could do it while leaving the sense strictly unchanged.

(note for fellow Latinists: the construction in the first two lines is the dative of possession, which I think is very nice for this metaphorical (as opposed to physical possession) sense of “hath”)

Jem 22 Aug 2011 17:56 UTC
12 points
in reply to: Jem’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
Hmm...”victor” probably isn’t a good choice here, though. I didn’t recognize the ambiguity in the English at first, until I read Dallas’ translation. “Champion” in English can mean “winner” or “defender/fighter for a cause”, and I went with “winner”, but I think Dallas is correct in thinking that Eliezer wanted the “defender” meaning. In that case, make the second line

“nec defensori Dominus”

(propugnatori, as Dallas has it, also has roughly the same meaning (shades up the “fighting” connotation), but ugh, five syllables with a glottal stop; I’d keep it to prose)

Jem 22 Aug 2011 23:42 UTC
11 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
I went with nec because I liked the sound better with one syllable. Neque would work as well (as I understand it, the only difference is that neque slightly stresses that it is a conjuction).

As for modo/sola, I had sola but then changed it...both translations share the same issue, which is that the original English “only nothingness” doesn’t quite work for me. “Only”, to me, suggests that there’s at least something. What do you think of the following sentences?
- I listened at the window, but heard only nothing outside.
- There were only zero eggs left in the carton.
My opinion is that those are ill-formed in the same way as “Only nothingness above”; all three would be better off without “only”. Similarly, neither modo nor sola seem right when applied to nihilitas, and for the same reason: the nothingness isn’t alone, it just...isn’t. I guess my real suggestion here is to modify the English.

Thank you for making me do the research on the phonetics. I reached for a term that meant “that sound that a g makes when it’s right before an n”, and incorrectly came up with “glottal stop”. Now I know that it’s a “velar nasal”, so I learned something today!

Jem 23 Aug 2011 0:28 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
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”

Jem 23 Aug 2011 16:10 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
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?)

Jem 23 Aug 2011 21:06 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
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.

Jem 23 Aug 2011 18:55 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
Yes, works great.

Jem 2 Sep 2011 21:00 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Owen_Richardson’s comment on: Another treatment of Direct Instruction getting more into the technical details of the theory
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).

Jem 29 Aug 2011 18:17 UTC
3 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8
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.

Jem 25 Aug 2011 22:16 UTC
1 point
in reply to: NihilCredo’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
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.

Jem 26 Aug 2011 0:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NihilCredo’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
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.

Jem 25 Aug 2011 23:41 UTC
0 points
in reply to: NihilCredo’s comment on: REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR
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”.

Jem 25 Aug 2011 17:00 UTC
0 points
on: Prisoner’s Dilemma as a Game Theory Laboratory
What a great idea! I’ve sent you my strategy.