[Twisted-Python] OT: Languages (was Re: twisted can't find internet module)

[Yaroslav Fedevych]

On Feb 10, 2011, at 12:46 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:

> On Feb 10, 2011, at 4:52 AM, Yaroslav Fedevych wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 10, 2011, at 11:38 AM, 杨振宇 wrote:
>> 
>>> 既然用中文了。
>>> 你是以哪一种方式安装twisted的？具体的环境是？>_<
>> 
>> Sorry for dropping in, but, when the problem is ultimately solved, can you post the summary in English?
>> 
>> I don't know a word in Chinese, for example. And you certainly wouldn't feel very good if I started replying in Ukrainian or Polish, too.
> 
> I am also very curious about the nature of the "problem horse", as google translate suggests the first response is about. :-)
> 

That's why I try not to use Google translate for loosely related languages.

With languages where not only grammar and vocabulary differ, but the development of which was influenced by vastly different cultural and historical factors, producing rather unrelated sets of context-bound ambiguities, idioms, and etymologies, Mandelbrot-Zipf law and similar statistical techniques just stop working.

That is, they still work, but external forces like history and culture overwhelm their effect. To smaller effect, you can observe statistics failure on language pairs like English-Hebrew, or English-Russian, to bigger extent it would be English-Chinese or English-(some isolated nation language). The result is inevitably “problem horse” or similar unparseable thing.

Therefore, it's essential that everyone on the list sticks to its ligua franca if at all possible...

-- 
Yaroslav Fedevych
Software Developer and Consultant
jaroslaw.fedewicz at gmail.com
+380685061839, +380969783173