[Please ignore it if you are not interested.] I have thought several times before writing this email and I apologise if someone finds it irrelevant and irritating. I just want to express *my personal opinion*, nothing more than that. I am not making any claims about anything. I have decided to write this mail as I have been on this list in some way since 2007 and have participated in some of the rare discussions that have taken place here.
On Ada's comments: - I have been trying to understand what her findings are and what implications they have. So far, I have not been able to understand how these findings can prove the non-existence of words or sentences or (p)-language. As far as I know, you can't prove the negative of anything, particularly by empirical research. In any case, modern Physics tells us that almost everything is just metaphysics and at the bottom there are only fields, nothing else. Even so, as someone said, Newtonian Physics is still extremely relevant for most of our daily purposes and it is totally unnecessary to think in terms of relativity or quantum mechanics in daily life most of the time, that is, even in scientific and engineering works. - Also, as someone pointed out, even characters are not clearly defined. I would go further and say that a byte is also an arbitrary unit, having to do with the way our computers work and the history of their development. Perhaps then we should only talk of bits, because they are the only real units? Ada is --- in my opinion (which may be wrong) --- looking at the issues from a purely, I could say purist, Information Theoretical way, where information is in the Shannon sense and has no meaning and is emphatically defined as having no meaning. Well, in that sense, life is just a random increase in entropy, nothing else, but that is neither here nor there for practical purposes. There may be some philosophical or spiritual relevance of this, but in actual life it is almost always a non sequitur. (Please note again that this is simply my personal opinion). - What her claims --- as contrasted to her findings --- basically mean is that she is basically denying the existence of metaphysics. In my opinion, humans live and breathe metaphysics and they live and die with it. It doesn't really matter if it "doesn't exist", whatever that can mean. We might as well deny the existence of species or of colours or of [__FILL_IN_THE_BLANKS__]. - About words, as pointed out in this thread, almost every linguist and even most of the experienced NLP practitioners know about the problems with the concept of 'word'. The same with the concept of 'sentence'. As for the concept of 'language', every book on sociolinguistics explains why the concept of (p)-language is unscientific. That is why the term 'variety' is preferred in sociolinguistics. I have been teaching this fact to students *in CL/NLP courses* for years without fail. - Finally, in case she really is right (although I don't think so till now), well, then there is a need to be patient with the world. As I am sure she knows, paradigm shifts even in the world of science and technology take time to happen. - I don't have anything more to say about this matter. I will try not to send any more mails on this thread. About matters related to the use of this list: - My opinion of this matter may be biased due to the fact that I use a different email id for most mailing lists, including this one, so perhaps I have much less reason to be irritated with unnecessary emails. - Having said that, I find this list to be lifeless or inert for the very long durations since 2007 when there is no discussion or argument going on. Most of the announcements I get on this email id are irrelevant for me, but I can simply ignore them as I use a different email id here. Still, sometimes the discussions can become stressful in some sense. - The discussions on this list are --- for me --- mostly interesting breaks from the commodified world of science and technology, as of everything else now. - I have never understood why people get irritated in today's world by a few and far between emails which may be irrelevant for them. Almost everyone is on one or --- usually --- more social media, where there is a deluge of such messages and posts and whatnot. BTW, I have never been on any social media, except having a personal blog for some years. This is one of the rare forums where I have participated. And again, BTW, I do regret some of the rash mail I had sent on this and other lists, mostly when I was doing PhD. - I personally think that people, including Ada, can be more tolerant. - As for *mails should not be advertisement*, I am puzzled by this. Seriously? In today's commodified science and technology, where you *have to advertise* as part of your work. You are supposed to advertise, even offensively. I think everyone will understand what I mean. If researchers, on a research forum, do not talk about their own research, what do you expect them to talk about? I think "advertising" one's research work here is more democratic than advertising in other formal or official forums. Researchers --- at least most of them --- don't earn anything from their research, apart from their salary. They publish papers, from which other people make a lot of money, but they don't get anything. They, in many places, don't even get to read a lot of the research papers by others for free, which they simply *need to read* for their same work! - And then there is social media. People like me, who are not on any social media, have no other forum to express their opinion. Why can't we simply ignore some *thread* if we don't like the discussion going on there, just as we ignore most of the announcement emails? To sum up, I think we can all be more tolerant, perhaps including myself.
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