The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Idioms, ambiguity, and machine translation

  • Several comments note that native speakers often don’t notice idioms, making them especially hard for translation and early MT systems.
  • Examples span German, Danish, English, Spanish, and Japanese, showing how literal word-by-word readings (“pull weather” for “breathe”, “used to”, “eats meat and fish”) can mislead learners and machines.
  • Some see modern LLMs as much better at capturing idiomatic usage; others doubt that they truly “understand” what they generate.

What “the wind, a pole, and the dragon” might be

  • Multiple commenters attempt to reverse-engineer the phrase from Japanese or Chinese:
    • As mis-parsed suffixes like “-style / -method / -flow” turned into “wind / pole / dragon.”
    • As mis-translation of platform/runtime terms (e.g., Windows, runtime flags, JSP error handlers).
    • As possibly relating to flags, daemons, or polling.
  • Others argue that without solid Japanese knowledge this is mostly wild speculation, and suggest the original might even be a multi-pass machine-translation joke or prank.

Philosophical disputes about language and meaning

  • One long subthread claims all words are arbitrary metaphors, language doesn’t truly “mean” anything, and LLMs merely babble without grounding.
  • Respondents push back, distinguishing arbitrariness of signs from meaningless conversation, and arguing that intent and communicative goals give language functional meaning.
  • There is debate over whether appeals to linguistics and neuroscience here are insightful or incoherent “word salad,” with citations and counter-citations but little consensus.

Meta-discussion and forum norms

  • Several comments question whether a particularly opaque participant is a bot, troll, or just an over-jargoned academic; others criticize this as uncharitable.
  • There’s a side debate about clarity vs. jargon, “plain English” expectations, and whether writing on a public forum should prioritize being understood.

Linguistic and cultural tangents

  • Etymological riffs on “spirare” (respire, inspire, expire, spirit) and related religious imagery.
  • Connections to Sanskrit “atman,” biblical breath/wind metaphors, and broader cross-linguistic links between air, life, and spirit.
  • References to “English as She Is Spoke” and Star Trek’s “Darmok” as classic illustrations of translation and idiom failure.