{"id":1545,"date":"2024-08-30T13:22:47","date_gmt":"2024-08-30T11:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/?p=1545"},"modified":"2025-12-03T21:13:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T20:13:34","slug":"churchs-possibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/?p=1545","title":{"rendered":"Church’s Possibility"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jeg er ved at l\u00e6se Daniel C. Dennets selvbiografi I’ve Been Thinking<\/em>. Dennett, som d\u00f8de for nylig, var en amerikansk t\u00e6nker, der har skrevet mange fascinerende b\u00f8ger om “the philosophy of mind” – bevidsthed, fri vilje og lignende dybe emner. Han fortjener et l\u00e6ngere blogindl\u00e6g ved lejlighed, men her vil jeg bare sl\u00e5 ned p\u00e5 en lille sproglig finurlighed fra den anekdoterige bog. I et kapitel on sin tid p\u00e5 University of California, Irvine, skriver Dennett f\u00f8lgende:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another great logician visitor from UCLA was Alonzo Church, famous for Church’s Thesis and Church’s Theorem, two of the foundational ideas of computer science. Church gave several talks at UCI, meticulously filling the blackboards with formulae. He insisted that you should never say what some term or sentence meant without subscripting the language thus: “snowEnglish<\/sub>” refers to snow, because the same ortographic symbol might possibly mean different things in different languages – “chairFrench<\/sub>” means “flesh”; “GiftGerman<\/sub>” means “poison”. I decided to call this Church’s Possibility and issued a challenge to one and all to come up with a sentence that was grammatical in two different languages and had two very different meanings, with high points for length and naturalness. Donald Davidson had an oral candidate: “Empedocles leaped” and “Empedocles liebt” (“loves” in German). The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles is fabled to have committed suicide by leaping into Mount Etna. My sailing shipmate Don Heiney came up with “Grand legs? Seize ours!” (French for “Large legacy? Sixteen bears!”). I wrote a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, my favorite novelist, polyglot and wordsmith; his wife, Vera, wrote me a nice reply saying that she asked him and he said he hadn’t ever considered the exercise and was sorry to say he had no examples. The challenge remains. I have wasted many hours trying to improve on Don Heiney’s terse example without success, and I will gratefully consider any examples longer and better than his and duly announce prizes for any good candidates.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Efter at have l\u00e6st det t\u00e6nkte jeg straks, at det da for pokker ikke kunne v\u00e6re s\u00e5 sv\u00e6rt at finde l\u00e6ngere eksempler! I g\u00e5r aftes, da jeg ikke kunne sove, begyndte min hjerne at tumle med udfordringen. “Fast and faster” meldte sig hurtigt – p\u00e5 dansk kan det v\u00e6re en kompliment til et familiemedlems glimrende indk\u00f8b til julemiddagen: “Fast and, faster!”. Ret hurtigt fandt jeg p\u00e5 en udvidelse til syv ord: p\u00e5 dansk et kryptisk sp\u00f8rgsm\u00e5l om samme familiemedlems s\u00e6rt k\u00f8lige fremtoning:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sad dog is fast i dig, faster?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

og p\u00e5 engelsk en konkurrence med en trist vovse om hvem der kan grave hurtigst:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sad dog is fast, I dig faster!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Det fremg\u00e5r ikke helt hvor meget v\u00e6gt Dennett l\u00e6gger p\u00e5, at tegns\u00e6tningen ogs\u00e5 skal v\u00e6re den samme p\u00e5 begge sprog. Skal den det, bliver det naturligvis sv\u00e6rere. Skriver man med lutter store bogstaver, slipper man for sk\u00f8nhedspletten at “I” er med stort p\u00e5 engelsk, men ikke p\u00e5 dansk. Tegns\u00e6tningen bliver straks v\u00e6rre at homogenisere. M\u00e5ske “SAD DOG IS FAST, I DIG, FASTER?”<\/em> er det bedste kompromis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway – udfordringen er hermed givet videre, og jeg kommer sikkert ogs\u00e5 selv til at lede efter bedre eksempler.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeg er ved at l\u00e6se Daniel C. Dennets selvbiografi I’ve Been Thinking. Dennett, som d\u00f8de for nylig, var en amerikansk t\u00e6nker, der har skrevet mange fascinerende b\u00f8ger om “the philosophy of mind” – bevidsthed, fri vilje og lignende dybe emner. Han fortjener et l\u00e6ngere blogindl\u00e6g ved lejlighed, men her vil jeg bare sl\u00e5 ned p\u00e5 … <\/p>\n

L\u00e6s videre “Church’s Possibility”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[164,165],"class_list":["post-1545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-daniel-c-dennett","tag-vladimir-nabokov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1545"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1699,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions\/1699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogbogstaveligt.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}