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From: "Piorokrat" <piorokrat@autograf.pl>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.uncle-davey
Subject: Re: mandrake juice (was: enamel-dissolving Esperanto)
Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 13:29:53 +0200
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Uzytkownik "Jacques Guy" <jguy@alphalink.com.au> napisal w wiadomosci
news:3F5E45E7.53E3@alphalink.com.au...
> What I just wrote about Chomsky and his water with
> impurities just reminded me of an article I read
> long ago (I must have been ten) in a science monthly.
>
> It was about witchcraft and its silly superstitions.
> The mandrake figured prominently. I will just bore
> you with how the mandrake comes into being:
> the dripping juices from the corpse of a hanged
> man fertilize the ground and a mandrake is born.
> I'll skip the wonderful properties of the mandrake
> root.
>
> Well, to debunk this crap, the worthies quoted by
> this magazine had simply done a chemical analysis
> of a mandrake root. And come up with so much carbon,
> so much hydrogen, and so on. Even though I was
> barely out of primary school I smelt a ... rat.
> (Rats, by the way, are ultimately carbon, hydrogen...,
> in short, made up of the very same elements as
> a mandrake, like you, like me, like the earthworms in
> my backyard, and in approximately the same proportions
> too).
>
> In fact, we can successfully apply this wonderful
> analytical method to language. Spoken languages
> are ultimately composed of punctual bursts of
> sounds, further analyzable into subunits which,
> to sound scientific, I will call "quarks".
>
> I strongly suspect that, if you play your quarks
> right, Kabardian is to English what a mandrake
> root is to a rat. In other words, there is nothing
> to tell one from the other. Which does prove
> that languages are equally complex or whatever
> strikes your fancy.
The finest music is only vibrations in the air, like a baby farting.
They must therefore be equally complex.
Uncle Davey
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