From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Dec 2 14:10:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 26D8037B401 for ; Sat, 2 Dec 2000 14:10:40 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 5438 invoked by uid 100); 2 Dec 2000 22:10:39 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14889.29535.565071.169343@guru.mired.org> Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2000 16:10:39 -0600 (CST) To: Peter Lai Cc: 'Cliff Sarginson ' , "'questions@freebsd.org '" Subject: RE: Tyr'd with all this pronunciation thread In-Reply-To: <9F36E367710D474E9806AA393FE737FB019EF3@resnetnt.resnet.uconn.edu> References: <9F36E367710D474E9806AA393FE737FB019EF3@resnetnt.resnet.uconn.edu> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ X-Message: You should get a better mailer. Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Peter Lai 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. 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