On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, John Saylor wrote: > ( 02.10.10 17:53 -0500 ) David Turner: > > Is, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." an English sentence > > (parsable, but semantically garbage)? What about "Fry apples the > > Stallman." (English words, unparsable). "My three-cornered hat has > > four corners." (internally inconsistent) > > I think gramatically, all but 'Fry apples ...' pass as sentences.
I think that was Dave's chomsky-ian point, now that it's been pointed out to me... > If you open up to poetic interpretation, pretty much any sequence of > words will pass. That's closer to what I was getting at :) On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, John Saylor wrote: > ( 02.10.10 17:56 -0400 ) Chris Devers: > > The bigger problem with these is all the extra letters. Look how many > > times the letter E shows up in those examples! > > That would be a property of our language. I realize that, but this kind of puzzle isn't solved by just accepting the aggregate properties of the language. :) > Also, on the side, for anyone interested in mathematical-like operations > on words, and producing text within ordered constraints, check out the > oulipo. Or the Voynich manuscript. Neato stuff. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] If I am elected, the concrete barriers around the WHITE HOUSE will be replaced by tasteful foam replicas of ANN MARGARET! _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
