Re: OT: THEORY Fusion Grammar

--- Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

> Gary Shannon wrote:
<snip>
>
> The problem is that "mee" goes with "er", not with
> the unlit
> ("not-burning") torch. (I don't know Dutch all that
> well, but I'm fluent
> in Zelda, and I know that you use Deku sticks to
> light torches.) You
> somehow need to group "it ... with" while excluding
> "now". (Actually
> "there ... with", like the English word "therewith"
> or Mark Twain's
> favorite German word "damit", if that gives you any
> clues).
Yes, I'm familiar enough with German to recognize the
problem. (In the 1960's I was a German interpretor,
but I haven't used the language in the last 40 years,
so I'm rusty beyond belief.)

<snip>

> I had handy since I brought it up a couple of years
> ago on Conlang and
> remembered where to look for it.
Yes, I found the source while Googling for the
definition of "niet-brandende", which was not in any
online dictionary. I assume it is a different form of
the verb "branden", and looks less like an ignition
device (my first assumption) and more like
"non-burning")

What is painfully obvious is that I would need a
better feel for Dutch before I could presume to
produce a correct parse.

My approach to English has been to tag and parse
sentences by hand using only "intuition" and then
submit the tagged and parsed sentences to a computer
program I wrote that extracts the rules from the
completed parses. When I change the way I parse a
sentence I can re-run the extraction program and the
rules are changed accordingly.

Without having the necessary "intuation" in a given
language that process would be very involved.

Here's another tough non-adjacent sentence, number
379, from the corpus I'm working with:

379. John and Elizabeth are brother and sister.

I'm not sure what I'll do when I get to that one!

--gary