Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2000 16:10:39 -0600 (CST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Peter Lai <PeterL@resnet.uconn.edu> Cc: 'Cliff Sarginson ' <cliff@raggedclown.net>, "'questions@freebsd.org '" <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Tyr'd with all this pronunciation thread Message-ID: <14889.29535.565071.169343@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <9F36E367710D474E9806AA393FE737FB019EF3@resnetnt.resnet.uconn.edu> References: <9F36E367710D474E9806AA393FE737FB019EF3@resnetnt.resnet.uconn.edu>
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Peter Lai <PeterL@resnet.uconn.edu> types: > well with all of us being geeks, i'm sure we could elicit the help of Dr. > Noam Chomsky from MIT and help build a new international langauge that > follow precise rules (e.g. that of a computer language) in syntax and > structures. Something that makes sense to the brain. Well, that's been done at least once already - that's what Loglan is. I vaguely recall hearing about a second such language, but never chased it down. > Some of its benefits include minimal redundancy (if the context you are in > definately signifies plural, why attache plural suffixes to the words? You *don't* want minimal redundancy in a spoken (or written) language. That's the error detection/correction mechanism of those systems. Repeating the plurality information multiple times makes it more likely that it'll get there. If you don't thinks this is true, I assume your computers all ignore the checksum on network packets :-). In this case, you *have* to have a plurality indicator for those cases when the plurality isn't in the context. You then have a case where the plural version is correct - or not - depending on whether you think the context "definitely signifies plural", which is the kind of inconsistency that people complaining about to start with! Of course, making *logical* assumptions about what is and isn't usable redundancy is a value call. German provides gender information for nearly everything. English provides it for things that have gender. You seem to be advocating not providing it at all. Esperanto provides a suffix to the object of a sentence, which seems silly to me (as a native English speaker) but logical to the person who designed it. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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