Re: Impossible Gibberish (was Re: On the design of an ideal language)

On 5/1/06, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: And Rosta <and.rosta@...>
> >7. Principle of Semantic Conservation
> >"There should be no such thing as a "nonsense" or "incorrect" phrase."
>
> I rather suspect every language has its own colorless green ideas, and I
> rather suspect that at least some utterances will either be grammatically
> incorrect or lexically nonsense.
[...]

FWIW, what I meant by the PSC is not necessarily that every utterance
must make sense in some *pragmatic* sense (vis. colorless green ideas)
- that's impossible AFAICT - but that it must be *parsable*.

E.g. "I eat five apple yesterday." That's just "wrong", and in fact
it's wrong in a way that could only be reasonably interpreted as one
thing - "I ate five apples yesterday". That one is "correct" and the
other not is a waste of semantic space. I would have the two sentences
mean different, but both parsable (and plausible in that sense).

I am in no way AT ALL opposed to poetic use of language, including the
bizarre or extreme - just to "jibberish" in the sense of "farkol is
korp last tuesday". First, the sort where you can have sentences that
are "ungrammatical" (present-tense is vs last tues), and second, where
such relatively simple lexemes are NOT real words, but really long
complex ones are.

FWIW, the PSC and the (implied, but should be added explicitly)
Principle of Noise Resistance (per previous poster) are of course at
odds to a certain extent.

I would argue, though, that if you were going to build in redundance
for the sake of a PNR, it could take on a much more elegant/efficient
form than this sort of rule.

It's also at odds with space-reservation (i.e. to accomodate a growing
vocabulary or other needs).

As I said elsewhere, this sort of balance through opposing forces is
perfectly acceptable to me.

 - Sai

P.S. After having written this, I read:
> The Principle, in its extreme form, is that every well-formed
> phonological string corresponds to  all or part of a well-formed
> sentence. Weird lexeme combinations produce weird meanings, but remain
> meaningful and well-formed. The Principle is not about colourless green
> ideas, but about "the and but not though".
>
> --And.
... I totally concur. (Of course, I would not limit it to phonological
strings...)

P.P.S. I would like to add that I would like to find a niche for
Jabberwocky-style not-quite-nonsense... but it does conflict with this
pretty directly. Except, of course, if you carve out some way to have
the sort of onomatopaeic / associational semantics that are implicit
in Jabberwocky. It does make one think of things, after all. There
just isn't a grammar for creating that, in English, which makes it
'jibberish' rather than 'onomatopaeia'. (I'm using a very loose sense
of 'onomatopaeia' here, not necessarily to mean it sounds like a
sound, but it sounds like an idea. Hopefully that makes sense.)

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