Re: Language comparison

> I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to pronounce that,
> but I do know exactly what it means because all the words (save "le",
> "du", "des", "les" and "suivant") could be read as English.
And some would be false cognates. "Contient" is visually most similar
to "content" or "continent", but means "contains". Not sure it's a
good analogy to the Chinese example I gave, though.

> The fact that you have characters without phonetic information, strictly
> speaking, only means that someone has already encoded Chinese speech
> into written words for you.
I can see this. But what if I had *made* that grammar in the first
place? I could surely create an identical one without ever having done
phonetics. But this would not, then, correspond to any speech
whatsoever - known or unkown.

Interesting that you bring up the Chinese Room argument, since that's
actually partially what I was thinking of when I made the example. :-P

(If anything, I've overdiscussed that one recently, since it was the
topic of discussion in my CogSci class for about the last two weeks of
the semester...)

 - Sai