BenCrowder.net

And yet so many of us Mormons, at least in the United States, are rabidly capitalist. Like you said, we’re not perfect :)

I don’t think Mormons are much better than the rest of Christianity, we’re just not obsessed with the same issues, nor are we as fanatical about the ones we are obsessed with.

Oh, and speaking of capitalist Mormons, the dad of a friend of mine from back east is a venture capitalist, and he said Utah has a reputation for shady get-rich-quick schemes and kooky business ideas in general. So if you’re trying to get VC funding, moving out of Utah first might give you a leg up.

Could it be that the Book of Mormon’s promises of prosperity lead people to justify the means with the end, or to general business irresponsibility, gullibility, recklessness, shadiness, etc? *cough*cough* Tahitian Noni* cough*cough* Synergy *cough*cough* MLM in general *cough*cough*

I really need to get this cough looked at. But it’s an interesting question…

Hiya-
I found your blog while searching for square watermelons.
I enjoyed several of your posts. It’s nice to stumble on another LDS blogger now and then.
-Della

Haley: Haha, rather true. That could be a post in itself. :P

rikker: I know a throat doctor. :P No, really, it’s true about get-rich-quick schemes and all. Sad that Utah seems to be so gullible and fixated on money. It actually makes me feel kind of sick to my stomach.

Della: Hey, thanks for your comment, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the posts. :)

Good post, great points. Sometimes we need to wake ourselves up and say “hey, why don’t you go do some service today?” Random anonymous acts of kindness (RAAK) are a great first step.

On Utah: It’s indeed very true, but it extends outside of Utah as well. There seems to be something about LDS culture that some people take too far, it’s clearly not doctrinally supported yet somehow it still slips in there. Things will be interesting when I move back out for BYU.

A funny coincidence is that if you take “RAK” (trimming it to Random Acts of Kindness), that’s the word for “love” in Thai.

I’m not sure why LDS culture (and as you said, it’s the culture and not the doctrine) tends in that direction. That’d be an interesting subject to look into…

Egads, I hate MLM. Amway and the traditional big guns in that area are bad enough. They turn friends into parasites. The one I really hate is Tahitian Noni, because if it were on a Venn diagram its would almost entirely overlap with the circle for Latter-day Saints. So it’s like a disease tailored (by Mormons) to affect greedy and gullible Mormons.

From the Wikipedia article for noni:
“Although noni’s reputation for uses in folk medicine extends over centuries, no medical applications as those discussed below have been verified by modern science.

From the Wikipedia article for noni juice:
“The FDA letter also cited 1) absent scientific evidence for health benefits of noni phytochemicals, scopoletin and damnacanthal, neither of which has been confirmed with biological activity in humans, and 2) lack of scientific foundation for health claims made by two proponents of noni juice, Dr. Isabella Abbot and Dr. Ralph Heinicke.

Two other FDA letters have been issued for the same types of violations.”

And from the Wikipedia article for Tahitian Noni:

“On August 26, 1998, the Attorneys General of Arizona, California, New Jersey, and Texas announced a multi-state settlement with Morinda, Inc., the charges stating that Morinda had made “unsubstantiated claims in consumer testimonials and other promotional material that its Tahitian Noni juice could treat, cure or prevent numerous diseases, including diabetes, depression, hemorrhoids and arthritis.” Such claims rendered the beverage an unapproved new drug under state and federal food and drug laws and should not have been sold until it received approval.”

The kicker: “…the retail price of a standard 1-liter bottle of juice is $42.00 U.S.” That’s $158.99 a gallon.

Personally I think all multi-level marketing and most of the dietary supplement industry are a huge crock, but I find Tahitian Noni particularly disgusting because it’s a dangerous intersection of the two that imitates the proselyting model of the religion of its founders. Its adherents “bear their testimony” with unshakable faith about their miraculous experiences. Tahitian Noni’s healing powers: it’s the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen!

Yes, I’m a terrible cynic, but the whole thing makes me sick. Maybe I should buy a bottle of noni juice to cure that.

for the sake of inter-lingual pun possibilities only (and not to be irreverent to the subject of the post) ‘rak’ is the Russian word for ‘cancer.’ (because it is also the Russian word for ‘crab’)

That is all.

Rikker: I’m with you. The intersection of Mormons and MLM is sad and sickening. Blech. (And just for the record, noni juice tastes awful. Like, horrible awful. You’d think they’d at least sweeten it a little.)

DL: Haha, that’s totally fine. And cool. I’ve been meaning to start learning Russian… (More irrelevantly, Cancer is my zodiac sign. Not that that really has anything to do with anything. :P)

Is that the word for cancer the zodiac sign only, or also the word for cancer the disease?

If both, that raises a great cross-linguistic question: in how many languages is the word for the zodiac sign also the word for the disease? And crab, for that matter. English…

In Thai, กรกฎ /korakot/ means “crab” (but isn’t the everyday word for it), and also the zodiac sign “cancer”, but not the disease (this root is seen in the month name กรกฎาคม /karakadaakhom/, with some vowel changes). But Ben you probably know all that.

Other language speakers? Please chime in. We wouldn’t want to keep this comment thread on topic or anything…

Haha. Another interesting (and very tangential) linguistic phenomenon: the word for “tea” is strikingly similar across a handful of languages: чай (Bulgarian and Russian), čaj (Czech), chá (Portuguese), ceai (Romanian), and of course ชา /chaa/ (Thai). Most of the other languages I checked (on Google Translate) had some variant of té — which looks like it might be related as well. I haven’t looked into the I-E roots for this, though.

It’s accepted that those all come from the Chinese word. See, for example, the Etymonline summary of its origin and widespread use.

When I asked my crab/cancer question, I wasn’t thinking of cognate words, but rather cognate concepts (for lack of a better term). That is, two concepts, same word, but the word wouldn’t necessarily be cognate between languages.

Of course, I should’ve known that where there’s smoke there’s fire. Turns out English cancer and Thai korakot are from the same PIE base, and given the similar phonetics and semantics, I’m willing to say that Russian rak is from the same source. (Again, see Etymonline).

To continue, though, there are cases where languages borrow concepts without borrowing words. Thai and Khmer are pretty striking in this way. They will have two words, both demonstrably native in their respective languages, which serve the same multiple semantic functions.

For example:
The meanings of Khmer ដើម /daəm/ include:
trunk (i.e. of a tree or the body)
origin, beginning
cause
initial investment
first
classifier for, e.g., trees, poles, etc.

Now compare that to Thai ต้น /ton/ and you’ll see we can easily match ต้น to all those uses:
trunk ต้นไม้ /ton (maai)/
origin, beginning ตั้งแต่ต้น /(tang tae) ton/
cause ต้นเหตุ /ton (heet)/
initial investment ต้นทุน /ton (thun)/
first เริ่มต้น /(roem) ton/
classifier for trees, etc. ต้นไม้สองต้น /ton (maai song) ton/

The overlap isn’t perfect, but it’s striking. There are lots of words like this, due to mutual influence in both directions. Granted, /daem/ and /ton/ are phonetically similar enough that some would make the case for cognates, but that’s the first one that popped to mind, and the existing literature doesn’t do that. (I specifically chose native Khmer and Thai words in this case, because obviously they have huge numbers of Sanskrit/Pali words in common. Obviously. :P)

Wow, schizo thread here.

The Russian ‘rak’ (рак) is all of the above:
cancer the disease
cancer the zodiac sign
run-of-the-mill everyday crab

I think this is kind of an example of the somewhat ‘transparent’ nature of the Russian language. That’s not an insult in any way; it’s a very specific sort of transparency that may simply have to do with the difference in borrowed words compared to English.

In English, we use the Latin or Greek or whatever (sorry, I promise I’m not an idiot…) for the Zodiac signs, but the Russian versions are frequently the same as the everyday object counterparts. Specifically: Lion (Leo), Scales (Libra), Fishes (Pisces), Maiden (Virgo), Twins (Gemini). Yeah, I guess pretty much all of them are that way.

So the transparency takes the form of a sort of absence of that linguistic remove. Instead of using borrowed Latin words, they just use their own. And who knows how the disease cancer got its name, but I’m willing to bet that the Russian language borrowed that straight over due to the cancer associations.

I don’t know if I’m making much sense, but the ‘absence of remove’ also shows up in Russian surnames, making them quite entertaining to students of the language. Whereas with most Americans’ surnames, the meaning is obscured due to an old English, Germanic, or whichever other descent, the roots in Russian names jump right out. So you have surnames like ‘Mushroom-eater’ (Griboedov), Seagull-ish (Tchaikovsky), Bear (Medvedev), etc. Even Putin is probably related to the root put’ which means ‘way, or path’.

So thanks for allowing me to hijak your thread. I do so love linguistic trivia.

That’s great stuff.

Surnames in Thai are relatively new–most families didn’t have them until the 20th Century–but the majority have that “remove” you’re talking about because they are invented from Sanskrit or Pali (Sanskrit/Pali are to Thai as Greek/Latin are to English). But every once in a while you’ll meet people with surnames from native words. Not a bunch are coming to mind, but one I can think of is กล้าทุกวัน “brave every day”. No mushroom-eaters, as far as I know.

Fascinating, all of it. Mmm. :) (And tangents are quite fine by me; they make conversations more interesting.) Thanks for sharing, both of you!

I’m proud to be both a Mormon and a Capitalist. Long live America.

I like how you capitalized Capitalist. Are we supposed to read into that? I don’t have a problem with capitalism or capitalists. But I think that shady business tactics aren’t a useful part of the system, unless you subscribe to some sort of economic Darwinism.

I dislike deceptive and deceitful business tactics. There’s a special level of the telestial kingdom for multi-level marketers, I heard from a friend who heard it from a G.A. in a BYU devotional one time a while back.

George: Haha, I think Haley’s emphasis was on the “rabidly.” :) Even so, I don’t really see capitalism having a place in heaven, so my guess is that it’s for this earth only, being the least broken of the systems thus far. (The least broken that still runs. The law of consecration isn’t of course broken, but it doesn’t run because we’re not up to snuff yet.) All that said, since we are living on earth in a very telestial condition, I don’t have much of a problem with capitalism either. But I won’t be sad to see it go. :)

rikker: LOL, it’s called the dungeon. :P