Re: Throwing out the tree-structured grammar (SF Xenolinguistics FAQ)?

Hi!

Patrick Littell <puchitao@...> writes:
> To be needlessly picky about it, a stack language -- that is, one whose
> underlying computational implementation is a stack -- is still a
> tree-structured language. More precisely, it's the reverse Polish notation
> (postfix traversal) of a tree. If it weren't, the stack would either
> underrun or (eventually) overflow.
I was picky in the same way here a while ago, but a *true* tree or
stack structure still means the structure is sufficiently different
from human languages.  E.g. the stack modification operations of Fith
are really funny and non-human. :-)

> But the aliens might not "think tree" the way humans "think tree", so that's
> probably what he means. The aliens would "think stack" instead, and only
> their grammarians would be able to point out the underlying tree-ness of
> their sentences.
Right, something like that.  And on and alien mailing list, picky
people would argue that it's really the same. :-))))

**Henrik