Re: Computer syntax and VSO

I wonder why SOV or VSO or any other possibility would
be 'better'. The only thing we need is that it would
be non-ambiguous, so if you decide that all your
semantic sentences will be SOV, the software is
supposed to handle them as SOV, and you decided that
it will be OSV, the software will handle them as OSV.

Besides, the order of words is only one possibility,
among others, to find what is supposed to be the
subject or the object (if we talk in syntactic terms,
and for certain languages only). You can as well have
no order for word groups at all and use declensions,
like in Latin or in Russian (well, there are some
privileged orders in these languages, but it is much
more free than in French for ex).

I quite agree as to the comparison between
electronical and human brain. There is a theory, for
instance, that the brain uses some kind of
lambda-calculus (lambda-calcul), what a computer is
quite fit to handle too. Anyway, whether the support
is organic / chemical or metallic / electronical
doesn't matter to me, the important thing is: are both
kind of systems able to handle the same functions and
give the same results ? The rest is mainly theological
arguing.

--- Samuel Rivier <samuelriv@...> wrote:
> Hey everyone. It's been a while since I've posted,
> but
> I'm beginning some major-specific coursework in
> computer science, and I've noticed something in data
> structures that may be of interest.
>
> When a program reads any type of semantic structure,
> be it a string or code or math, it has to first
> reorder it in a fashion that is easiest to read. In
> the case of math, this is called postfix (VSO) or
> prefix (SOV), and, by the way, it is for these
> purposes only for functions of two arguments (add,
> multiply, etc).
> So, for instance,: (2+5)*6/(3+2)+5
> in postfix is:     5 3 2 + 6 2 5 + * / +
> which as you can see is kinda messy to look at, but
> is
> quite legible with practice.
>
> You guys may recall Bertrand Russell's
> interpretation
> of grammar through symbolic logic (the basis of
> lojban) in which verbs are seen as functions taking
> both the subject and the object indiscriminantly as
> arguments, which is admittedly flawed if one
> observes
> that 95% of languages discriminate the subject and
> object such that the subject always precedes the
> object.
>
> However, what I am proposing here is that in some
> way
> VSO or SOV sentence structure is "better", in terms
> of
> mental processing, than SVO, by virtue of the
> idealization that it is relatively unambiguous. Or
> is
> it facetious of me to compare the human brain with
> computer processing (though keep in mind that
> neurons
> do transmit in terms of signal/no-signal)? What does
> everyone here think about a mathematical or
> computational representation of language,
> particularly
> considering that even though Russell's analysis is
> severely flawed, it is certainly quite flexible in
> comparison to the subject, verb, adverb, adjective
> concepts of the Western world which, by the way, do
> not apply to, say, Mandarin.
>
> Discussion?
>
> ---------------------
>
> Samuel Rivier

=====
Philippe Caquant

"Le langage est source de malentendus."
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

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