Re: THEORY nouns and cases (was: Verbs derived from noun cases)

On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, at 09:02 AM, Philippe Caquant wrote:

> Once more, I was talking about making a logical
> conlang, as for ex Lojban. I know about many examples
> similar to the ones you mention, in natlangs. My point
> is that natlangs are only partly logical, which is
> quite understandable, since they are human.
Er?? Isn't Lojban human? I don't recall that it was designed by
uncompromisingly logical Vulcans or other such aliens.

I thought (one of) the bases of Lojban & Loglan is that these are designed
in accordance with Clausal Form Logic (another human concept). Thus,
because it is planned according to a model of humanly devised logic, it is
likely to be 'more logical' than a natlang that has evolved over millennia
and picked up the odd illogicality here & there. But it's only a matter of
degree IMO. Humans are not God, and I've not the slightest doubt that some
will claim that this or that feature in Lojban is not logical.

After all, the 'philosophic' conlangs of the 18th century claimed to be
'perfectly logical' (I've seen the same claim made of Esperanto, more than
once). I doubt whether anyone now considers these languages as examples of
logic. I wonder how Lojban will be viewed three centuries from now.

> My idea to figure logically an idea like "Rex is a
> dog" would be something like:
>
> Rex ---- RELATION ---- dog
[snip]

> So the point would be: what kind of conceptual
> relation is this ?
>
> And my answer is: the relation is "is-an-instance-of",
Indeed, in Prolog one would probably express it thus:
is_a( 'Rex', dog).

> which is exactly the same as when you say "Tony Blair
> is a man", or "Saturn is a planet";
is_a( 'Tony Blair', 'man').
is_a( 'Saturn', planet).

> but NOT, for ex,
> "A rose is a flower",
Why not??? A rose, i.e. an individual rose, is an instance of a flower!
Just because I haven't named my rose doesn't, as far as I see, stop it
being an instance of a flower. It is also, of course, an instance of the
class  Rose, which is a subclass of Flower.

You seem to like analogies with models used in computing. I suggest you
try thinking of these relations in terms of the classes and objects of
Object Oriented Programming (OOP). My individual rose is certainly an
object, and it is, in OOP terms, an instance of the abstract class: Rose.
That class is, in its turn, a sub-class of Flower; therefore, most
certainly, my rose is an instance of Flower.

> and yet much less, "Rex is
> brown", "Rex is dead",
Sorry, but I have to disagree. I see no a_priori reason for denying that
Rex is an instance of Things-that-are-brown, or of Dead-Things.

In Platonic logic, we would say that that Rex participates in the Form
called Brown. Plato's Forms (Ideai) are rather like the abstract classes
of OOP, except to Plato the Forms are more real that the physical world of
which they partake.

> "Rex is Lassie's son", or
> whatever.
Rex is an instance of a son of Lassie. Even if Lassie has no sons, we can
still form an abstraction Son-of-Lassie. When a son appears, we have an
instantiation of the abstract Son-of-Lassie.

> It just happens that English will use "is"
> is all these cases, just like when you have no
> screw-driver at hand, you might use a Swiss knife, or
> a usual knife, or your teeth.
I don't recommend teeth for driving screws home!

>  But it would be better
> to use the right tool if we had it.
>
> If you want to build an automatic translator between,
> say, English and Tagalog, or Hungarian and Cherokee,
[snip - I return this later]

> So, if the rules are well conceived, you might come to
> final forms like "Rex absents", which would be quite
> OK in the target language (for ex: Latin),
'Rex absents' is not satisfactory in English because you've left the
object out! It's a transitive verb in English, usually reflexive. "Rex
absents himself" would be perfectly OK in, say the context of a meeting
where most of us are expecting Rex, then someone informs us that Rex is
absenting himself frm the meeting.

I assume you mean "Rex is absent" which in Latin is "Rex abest". But the
verb in both languages is the 3rd person present indicative of "to be": is
~ est. The only difference is that English uses an adjective 'absent' and
Latin attaches the preposition 'ab' (away, away from) to the verb. (The
Latin, of course, has an ambiguity not shared by the English version: it
could mean "The King is not here"  :)

[snip]
> If you try to shunt the inner conceptual stage, so you
> just come to Google-style translations. I don't know
> about you, but I usually don't find them satisfactory,
On this I wholeheartedly agree! I remember once finding an interesting
site in French and, feeling lazy, got the translation. It was
unintelligible for the most part. It was far easier just to read the
French.

> except for very basic sentences (and close-related
> languages).
>
> Now having a verb like, say "to cat" (since "to dog"
> exists in English)
English does have a verb "to cat". It's transitive and may mean:
- to raise [the anchor] to the cathead (one of two beams projecting from
the bow of a ship through which passes the tackle used to raise the anchor)
- to vomit [something]
- to beat [someone] with a cat-o'-nine-tails (a whip with nine knotted
tails or lashes, once used in the army & navy)

> doesn't seem to help much, since it
> doesn't say anything about the type of conceptual
> relation this should be:
True of English (and probably French), as you can see the meanings of "to
dog" and "to cat" do not have the same relation to the animals concerned;
we also have in English "to fox", "to wolf" and, I'm certain, a few other
'animal verbs' as well.

But not only in Lojban, but in some natlangs, as it has been pointed out
to us, there is a consistency and we do have *'to be-a-dog', 'to be-a-cat'
  etc. I do not see why this is considered unhelpful; a language conforms
to my notion of logic if it uses such forms in a consistent & predictable
manner.

 =========================================================================
On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, at 05:30 PM, Danny Wier wrote:

> From: "Joe" <joe@...>
>
>> Ans also in the Celtic languages, I believe.  Though they call it a
>> 'noun-verb'.  It represents the infinitive, or something.
>
> Celtic languages are among the few Indo-European languages to not have
> infinitives, unless I'm mistaken.
Modern Greek doesn't have infinitives either - but 'solves the problem'
rather differently.

> There are so many instances in Irish of
> things like _táim ag teacht_ "I'm coming", lit. "I'm at a coming". In
> dictionaries, the citation form is the verbal noun instead of the
> infinitive.
WELSH.
Rydw i'n dod.
Am   I in a-coming.

Rydw i wedi dod.
Am   I after a-coming = I have come

It's usually called the verb-noun (berfenw). It has nominal functions, as
we see; and the direct object is expressed by using a _possessive_
construction, e.g.
Mae e'n fy ngweld
Is he in my being-seen = he sees me.

 From which it can be seen that with transitive verbs, the verb-noun could
be considered passive in meaning. But we do not say it is a verbal noun (a
noun derived from a verb) since, unlike nouns, these verb-nouns are
modified by adverbs (either simple or phrasal), not adjectives.
=======================================================================

On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, at 03:07 PM, Tamas Racsko wrote:
[snip]
>   Let's eat the pudding in Hungarian. It has a category called
> "nomenverba".
[The rest of the interesting nomenverba info snipped]

>   (My personal opinion is that logical language is a nonsense. It's
> true even for programming languages:
Too true.

> when you implement the square
> root functions, you have to write several separate algorithms for
> the various input. This is not logical in mathematical sense. It's
> a compromise between the etheric logic and the implementation
> tools. And every compromise is driven by subjective decisions.
> I think this is true also for the conlangs.)
Oh yes, I am sure you are correct. There's always compromise in human
endeavors between 'etheric logic' and implementation - that the nature of
our physical world. I agree that speak of a 'logical language' is a
nonsense. A loglang, as I understand it, is an attempt to create a
language that conforms to some model of logic such as Clausal Form Logic -
no more and no less.
====================================================================
On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, at 06:10 PM, Mark P. Line wrote:

> Philippe Caquant said:
> [snip]
>
>> If you want to build an automatic translator between,
>> say, English and Tagalog, or Hungarian and Cherokee,
>> so you have to proceed more or less like this:
>> 1/ Convert the source speech into an inner conceptual
>> representation, using a particular set of rules
>> 2/ Convert the inner conceptual representation into
>> the target language, using another particular set of
>> rules.
>
> I disagree.
So do I. But then IIRC you have actually been involved in attempts at
machine translation; my only involvement was in work for my dissertation
for my MSc degree. But that was enough to show that the above doesn't work.

> Whether for translation or any other purpose, source speech is
> not "converted" into anything. It has to be _understood_ to be useful.
> That's why machine translation is still so difficult: computers can't be
> made to understand very much
I'm not convinced that they _understand_ anything at all. That's the
problem. How does one map understanding for a bit-cruncher?

> (although we can make them do conversions out
> the wazoo). When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail -
> -
		:-)

> so the AI folks try to make do with conversions even though understanding
> is the only thing that will really fit the bill. That's one of the reasons
> I got out of the AI business and into the Cognitive Science business (or
> rather: I'm in AI for the business, and in CogSci for the science...).
Yep - I got involved with AI several years back but, alas, have little
opportunity to do much now. But I'm convinced that AI must take on board
the findings of Cognitive Science.
 =========================================================================
=
On Wednesday, April 28, 2004, at 05:33 PM, Mark P. Line wrote:

> Philippe Caquant said:
[snip]
>
>> "High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)
>
> I wonder how Aristophanes proposed to measure the height of language. Much
> less the height of thoughts...
More to the point: "What did Aristophanes _actually_ write?"

Ray
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
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Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
===============================================
"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760

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