Wheels within Wheels

And I got to find out something interesting about Armenian over the weekend. We have an Armenian contractor who happened to be visiting the US, and was interested in a site visit while he was here. I spent most of Saturday driving him around in the mountains for sightseeing, after we finished our business meeting.

Toward the end of the day, as I was returning him to the airport, I asked if he was interested in having dinner before I dropped him off, or if perhaps he wanted to get some good food to take on the flight with him. He started to answer, then stopped and looked in his Armenian-English dictionary. He then said that he was not hungry, and asked, “Not hungry is negative; how do you say positive?”

I told him that “not hungry” was the normal way of saying it in English, but, really, that’s an interesting point. Apparently, in Armenian, the normal way of saying it is the equivalent of something like, “My hunger is satisfied.” In English, though, if that were used at all, it would be at or shortly after the prior meal, to indicate that you are finished.

It’s just a different way of looking at things, which is one of the reasons I like languages. I don’t speak anything other than English and a little Japanese, really, but I’ve acquired bits and pieces in and about various other languages.

I have a book that gives a few interesting examples of the way languages can differ. For one, the Hopi language doesn’t “bind time” the way that most languages do – it doesn’t really have tenses the way we know them. For another, the language of the Tobriand Islands doesn’t separate out individual things; it deals with them in aggregate. Where we would say, “That is a book,” their equivalent would have more the sense of, “That is an instance of EveryBook.”

An interesting place to start looking for more about languages is Tenser, said the Tensor and its linked sites.

Seeing this reminds me of the time some years ago when a customer wanted to patent something we developed for him. I had to sign away my patent rights for $1.00, which must have been included in my standard pay, because I never saw it.

In any case, while there were a few things about the project that perhaps could have been worthy of patent protection, the lawyers involved basically copied the engineering design documents as the patent application. If the patent had made it through the process and been granted (and I’ve never checked to see if it was granted), then our customer would have had a patent that included as a claim Euclid’s algorithm for calculating GCD.

We had to go through the application and comment on it for the lawyers. I don’t think I made any friends there when I described the application as ignoring the big picture and concentrating on irrelevant details, similar to trying to patent a spoon using detailed descriptions primarily about the exact curvature of the bowl and the filigree on the handle.

I’ll have to go through my old website now, so I can find and re-post the poem I wrote in honor of the patent for playing with a cat using a laser pointer.

UPDATE: Ah, here it is!