I'd like to bend this thread (like Beckham) back to the mainframe. All natural languages, including English, are infused with ambiguity and inconsistency precisely because human beings are engineered to handle the confusion--maybe even to relish and exploit it for artistic purposes (high road) or to enforce social casting (low road). Computers, on the other hand, and linguistically dumb as rocks. They have no imagination or associative powers. You have to spell out for them exactly what you want or they will smash your ambitions like colored beads.
Take a word that we use often in our technology: free. We use it as an adjective (a free segment of storage) or as a verb (to free a control block). If we want to instruct a computer what to do, however, we dare not allow for multiple interpretations. The immediate context must absolutely determine the intended usage, and no variation in spelling is tolerated unless variation or truncation is explicitly provided for. The English word 'free', by contrast, shows in my Random House Unabridged Dictionary to have 49 distinct definitions and combinatorial variations: 41 as adjective, three as adverb, and five as verb (all transitive). Despite decades of efforts to subjugate natural language to computerized analysis and generation, the effort is at best limited and narrow in scope, descending into absurdity at the nether end. Maybe Esperanto, by virtue of its contrived regularity and uniformity, would yield more readily to computerized manipulation, but Esperanto is not a real language, let alone a natural one. . . JO.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 626-302-7535 Office 323-715-0595 Mobile [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ed Finnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> 06/26/2006 08:14 PM Please respond to IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> To [email protected] cc Subject Re: English (was Mainframe Limericks In a message dated 6/26/2006 6:32:32 P.M. Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This is very interesting when considered together with the big arguments surrounding the teaching of reading in the recent past in the UK. Actually it's probably still going on but it's not so much in the news. On one side are those who say children should learn to recognise whole words and on the other are those who say they should build their understanding of words from knowing what the letters sound like - and then apply some imagination! >> >From what little I know of cognition it doesn't matter just as long as they're exposed to the basic concepts. The human mind is so powerful at associative recognition that it can assimilate the idea from the hints of words and letters. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
