The over-generalising primate doesn't treat IT as a pronoun, the primate treats
IT as a (very) temporary holder for a value . . . which the primate has reason
to believe that that is what IT is.
That is not the problem.
The problem is that because the primate over-generalises it expects consistency
. .
The primate has experienced pain because of its over-generalising tendencies
with the use of THE in xTalk:
the vis, the backgroundColour, the shadow
but not elsewhere . . .
it seems that where over-generalisation causes the most problems is exactly
with the very short, multi-purpose terms such as IT and THE.
Human languages are never consistent and Mummy or Daddy corrects Junior when
s/he uses the subjunctive in the wrong place (!!!). However the
over-generalising primate has a definite feeling that xTalk is a bit like
Esperanto - it has been constructed, rather than having evolved from earlier
languages; or, at the very least, has been consistently built upon the
foundations of an earlier constructed language (HyperTalk). Because of the
constructed nature of xTalk the primate expects xTalk to behave both
differently to its mother tongue and consistently.
There are various ways around this:
1. develop a computer language where terms have no resemblance to any human
languages ( Z2mblk, 66yk, eee6tl, bloody hell!),
2. Make sure that the constructed language does not contain any multi-purpose
terms (such as IT) - and that each term has a one-to-one correspondence with
one 'thing'.
sincerely, Richmond Mathewson
____________________________________________________________
"Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of
meanings users attach to words and phrases."
Mathewson, 2006
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