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

I think the English say something like "the proof of
the pudding is when you eat it". So I'm tempted the
answer the same. Let's take, maybe not a fox
(inconvenient), but a matchbox for ex. I can put it in
my pocket. I cannot put a "red" or a "burn" in my
pocket. That's what I suppose that a matchbox doesn't
belong to the same conceptual category as "red" or "to
burn". If of course don't talk about reality, which I
ignore, but about concepts.

A fox may bite me, but I'm pretty sure no "brown" ever
will bite me, because there is no such thing as a
brown, except in language games maybe.

(When saying so, I feel like coming back to the
Ancient Greeks' dialogs)

--- Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
> Philippe Caquant wrote at 2004-04-26 23:55:13
> (-0700)
>  > I know that some natlangs partially do so, in a
> rather
>  > incomplete, ambiguous and illogical way (because
> they
>  > are natlangs). But I understand Lojban is a
> conlang,
>  > and more, a logical conlang.
>
> I see no reason to think that these languages are
> any more "illogical"
> or "ambiguous" than French or English.  (I have some
> idea why Lojban
> makes these choices, but that question is better
> left to John Cowan
> and other lojbanists)
>
>  > Let me just quote a sentence of Oracle
> documentation I
>  > came across this very morning:
>  >
>  > "A data model for any application is comprised of
>  > entities, associations among these entities, and
>  > attributes that describe both the entities and
> the
>  > associations".
>  >
>  > Well, looks to me that this is very similar to a
>  > language. We have entities (essentially, "nouns",
> at
>  > least, "real" nouns, not deverbal ones, for ex);
> we
>  > have associations (I would have said relations;
> those
>  > are essentially "verbs", but of course we have to
> me
>  > more precise about this term further), and we
> have
>  > "attributes", or "properties" (adjectives may be
>  > considered as noun properties for ex, and adverbs
> as
>  > verb or whole-predicate properties).
>  >
>
> What makes you think that it is any more logical to
> speak of "fox" as
> being an entity than a property?  The entity you
> refer to as "a fox"
> is an entity with the property of being a fox, that
> it is a member of
> the set of all foxes.  It is not the word "fox".
>
>
> To say that it is brown is to say that is a member
> of the set of
> things that are brown, to say that it jumps
> playfully over the lazy
> dog is to say that it is a member of the set of
> things that jump
> playfully over the lazy dog.  There is nothing
> logically tying
> concepts to syntactic roles.  There is no logical
> asymmetry between
> "the fox is brown" and "the brown one is a fox",
> despite your calling
> "fox" an entity and "brown" a property.

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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