May 28, 2006
Mondegreens in a language other than English
The only lists of examples I have seen of Mondegreens have been in English. Surely songs in other languages can have lyrics that are commonly misheard. But a cursory web search yielded no such lists in any other language. A note of clarification: I define mondegreens in stricter sense than the definition in wikipedia, which I think is too broad. I consider it to be a mondegreen if it is in the original language itself (i.e. not because of a bad translation) and if it occurs in song lyrics (i.e. no speech recognition or closed captioning errors).
Recently I stumbled upon what I consider to be a prime example of a Mondegreen in a Korean song. In the song "Little Baby" by 노 브레인 (No Brain) from the album "안녕, Mary Poppins" (Hello, Mary Poppins) is a line that I always hear as:
오징어만을 사랑해
ojing-oe-man-eul sarang-hae
I love only squid
I mean, come on, who doesn't ... love squid, I mean. But the original lyrics are:
오직 너만을 사랑해
ojik noe-man-eul sarang-hae
I love only you
The Mondeviridity is enhanced quite spectularly by the assimilation of the kieuk in 오직 ojik in the context of the following nieun in 너 noe making it sound like ojing which makes it a perfect match.
The only thing consipiring against it is that 사랑 love in Korean seems to have a strong selectional preference for +human, the verb usually used to express the proposition of loving squid happens to be 좋다 to like. But for me, the love of devouring squid knows no such bounds. I think I need to get me some 오징어 볶음 ojing-oe bokk-eum right away.
PS: the romanization is my illiterate effort at following the official Revised Romanization.
Update 5/30/2006: Balaji has a post about Mondegreens in Tamil songs.
May 18, 2006
`I don't believe in natural science.'
From Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, by Rebecca Goldstein. 2006. Norton paperback, ISBN 0-393-32760-4.
Though Princeton's population is well accustomed to eccentricity, trained not to look askance at rumpled speciments staring vacantly (or seeminly vacantly) off into space-time, Kurt Gödel struck almost everyone as seriously strange, presenting a formidable challenge to conversational exchange. A reticent person, Gödel, when he did speak, was more than likely to say something to which no possible response seemed forthcoming:
John Bahcall was a promising young astrophysicist when he was introduced to Gödel at a small Institute dinner. He identified himself as a physicist, to which Gödel's curt response was `I don't believe in natural science.'
The philosopher Thomas Nagel recalled also being seated next to Gödel at a small gathering for dinner at the Institute and discussing the mind-body problem with him, a philosophical chestnut that both men had tried to crack. Nagel pointed out to Gödel that Gödel's extreme dualist view (according to which souls and bodies have quite separate existences, linking up with one another at birth to conjoin in a sort of partnership that is severed upon death) seems hard to reconcile with the theory of evolution. Gödel professed himself a nonbeliever in evolution and topped this off by pointing out, as if this were additional corroboration for his own rejection of Darwinism: `You know Stalin didn't believe in evolution either, and he was a very intelligent man.'
`After that,' Nagel told me with a small laugh, `I just gave up.'
The linguist Noam Chomsky, too, reported being stopped dead in his linguistic tracks by the logician. Chomsky asked him what he was currently working on, and received an answer that probably nobody since the seventeenth-century's Leibniz had given: `I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori.'
Three magnificent minds, as at home in the world of pure ideas as anyone on this planet, yet they (and there are more) reported hitting an insurmountable impasse in discussing ideas with Gödel.
Leave aside the comment about natural selection, and consider the other two anecdotal quotes attributed to Gödel. They are entirely consistent with Gödel's version of Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason; Gödel's so-called `interesting axiom' which is talked about earlier in Goldstein's book:
All of his thinking is governed by an `interesting axiom,' as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein's assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it. For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact; why it has to be a fact. This conviction amounts to the assertion that there is no brute contingency in this world, no givens that need not have been given. In other words, the world will never, not even once, speak to us in the way that an exasperated parent will speak to her fractious adolescent: `Why, I'll tell you why. Because I said so!' The world always has an explanation for itself, or as (Gödel) puts it, Die Welt ist vernünftig, the world is intelligible.
About Gödel's comments on natural selection, I find it hard to say anything remotely reasonable. Rebecca Goldstein cites an explanation about Gödel's intuitions about Darwinism by Steven Pinker, which essentially states that being a logician, Gödel disliked the non-determinism inherent in the Darwinian explanation. It comes across more as an apology than an explanation. But we do not need any explanation, of course. There is little doubt about Gödel's accomplishments, but like Einstein, the public, and even other scientists, expected these geniuses to provide deep insights (purely intuitive or a priori, by their very nature) on topics outside their expertise. The fault is not with them, but with us in taking everything they said all too seriously.
Update 5/29/2006: This update is meant to clarify one point that might be misunderstood. Unlike natural selection, Gödel's interests did in fact extend quite clearly into physics and even astrophysics. For a Festschrift in Einstein's honor, Gödel reluctantly published a paper that laid out a completely new model for the famous Einstein equations of General Relativity. In Gödel's interpretation so-called "Closed Timelike Curves" could exist, in which time can have cycles and you could revisit the past cyclically (perhaps this is also related to Gödel's interest in the existence of non-standard models in logic). For reasons not entirely clear to me, this interpretation has some link to observations of galaxies where if a significant number of them had a strong preference for spinning in one direction vs. another this would be a relevant finding. In a story that appears much later in Goldstein's book, some astrophysicists who were involved in such observations were asked to confer with Gödel and were taken aback at the sharp penetrating questions he had for them. `I wish we had talked to Gödel before doing our work.' was their comment after this conversation. It still does not explain to me his mysterious statement to John Bahcall above, but I suspect it does not mean what it appears to at first glance.
May 09, 2006
Vladimir the Able
As if Vladimir Vapnik was not cool enough, it turns out according to Vapnik's wikipedia entry that he did his Master's degree in math in 1958 from Uzbek State University in Samarkand.
It's not so cool to explain a joke: but the title of this entry is supposed to be an antonym of Timur the Lame, who is certainly one of the other famous residents of Samarkand.
Update: Thanks to cosma for the new title (originally was "Vapnik the Able").