Saturday, February 16, 2013

Mathematics And Culture: "It's Beautiful"

     Russell Peters, on the kewlest thing his ancestors invented, and why:
      Yep.  What he said.  And that's why a diverse world is good -- or you'd've had to learn long division with Roman numerals.  Trust me, that you don't want.  Not even.

     (I may have posted this before.  It's timeless.)

     ETA: An interesting 40-minute interview, "India Questions Russell Peters," with a little more background on his comedy and some digressions into his take on accents -- "Everybody has an accent." -- with the surprising to me assertion that a "Indian" lilt is somehow unattractive. ...While there's as much regional variation in the Indian version of our patched-together common language as can be heard in the States, I find the entire subcontinental approach to it pleasantly musical.  Sometimes my Midwestern ears take extra effort to get in sync but oh well, it's not as if I don't have the same problem with the more-rapid subset of New England Yankee-speak and the occasional Southern word that comes out completely different than expected, too.*  --Sheesh, our various and assorted regional and individual accents are what lend flavor and impact to speech; it'd be a much poorer world without them.
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* Some years ago, on Tamara's first visit to the original location of Boogie Burgers, Tam and I looked across the street to the Shaved Ice stand along the Monon Trail and for unknown reasons, read their sign aloud in near unison, using a Hollywood "Southern" dialect and immediately broke into a helpless fit of the giggles.

9 comments:

  1. I don't think the Indians can lay claim to inventing the concept of existence without value, the very essence of the number zero as more than a mere placeholder in a decimal system.

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=history-of-zero

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  2. They make an excellent case for being the first people to put it to hard work, keeping track of measures and wealth in a decimal system.

    ...Double-entry bookkeeping had to wait several more centuries....

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  3. Agree wholeheartedly, but would also like to thank whoever it was who decided base 10 was the way to go (relating as only someone raised on British pre-decimilisation coinage can. Still, it had it's benefits in being able to watch foreigners struggle was always a hoot).

    Accents? I don't have one! Oh Ok, but a question. Do you have as much variety as we here do (consider the staggering difference between a Cumbrian and Geordie accent - caused by a distance of 75 miles) as an outsider I can tell only the broadest differences between American accents.

    I can't say I find any accent particularly 'attractive' as such, but I do find some decidedly 'unattractive' (Belfast,Geordie and Liverpudlian being the equivalent to 'fingernails on blackboard' to my delicate sensibilities).

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  4. Nobody does regional accents as well as the UK. ...People take a 30-minute bike ride over there and can't understand half the words being used, as near as I can figure.

    And yet it's all the same language and every last one of you claims to understand what they say on BBC. You are to be congratulated for that.

    ;)

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  5. Attractive accents: used to cross paths with a young woman from Brazil who spoke fluent but highly accented English and it was amusing to watch the young men just about melt to hear her speak.

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  6. Shaved WHAT?

    Now, I didn't listen to the video - is this the 'come to our casino' Indians or the dot Indians?
    (With apologies to The Big Bang Theory)
    :-P

    gfa

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  7. The Romans actually didn't use Roman Numerals to perform division. They used an abacus, which uses a variation of base 2 arithmetic to perform division.

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  8. Because of Danish influence in Northumbria, Scots a bit north of that, and Anglo-Saxon influence south of that, it is asserted that you can have a Northumbrian count to 10, and people 5 miles from his home will have no clue as to what he is doing.

    ReplyDelete

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