Re: building from primitives (was Re: Langauge Constets)

Bravo!
Someone (I forget who) once said that "the danger is not that computers will
think like people, but people will think like computers". There are so many
wonderful differences between computer "languages" and human ones.
Human languages (or a decent conlang) have cultures and histories behind
them to which they refer and are inextricably part of, for one thing.
Mike
----- Original Message -----
>
> I'm not sure that human language has that same property of being  easily
> reconstructed from various equivalent fundamentals.  I'm  finding it very
> educational to struggle with this idea of a very small  language, and to
> see exactly what the difficulty consists of.
>
> I am coming to the conclusion that the difficulty of creating  something
> which feels anywhere near as powerful as a natural language  with a small
> set of symbols lies not in the combinative power of the  set-- which is
> naturally infinite in all cases-- but rather in the  **implicit
> knowledge** embodied in full languages.
>