Let me begin by saying that I have never been on a list before, so the
routine is new to me. So in this reply I will address 2 responses, first,
the one from Ken Beesley. While I do appreciate your being polite, Mr.
Beesley, I would appreciate your unsubscribing me from your list. I think
with my own mind, if people don't agree with me of course God created us as
free agents, everyone is at liberty to disagree. But I don't have to listen
to or read it. So please don't bother to answer me again, I will just
delete the e-mail, so it will be a waste. None of your information on Logos
or our community is accurate, however, I will say that in response. Regards,
Laura
Now for Alex Condori - whose English is so fine. Even tho we all know that
as a language English is better for lies than telling the truth. Example:
targeting women and small children in our NATO bombing and calling it
"collateral damage".
Thanks very much, Alex. I will take a look at these things you suggest. We
built our Logos system in the mid 60's, actually. It was interesting in
that at that time there was a US Government sponsored "Georgetown Project"
to determine the feasibility of machine translation (Georgetown Univ. has a
famous school of foreign languages) that was winding down just as we were
discovering that, yes, we really could do this thing - and the United States
Government concluded that machine translation was not feasible at that time!
Were we ever gleefully proud of ourselves. Actually, I am especially
grateful for these references to relevant studies, Guzman looks especially
interesting, because at the beginning at Logos I was assigned the job of
researching the field to get material we could use. And I didn't find any!
It was all theoretical, so we decided that our job was just to translate
sentences, and we stuck to that. I have to say, this is something I
discovered in writing, not about language as such, but about other things,
that, actually, no one else at Logos really understood overall what our
linguistic analysis was all about! Now that I think of it, no description
of what the system did was even made until I sat down and wrote what I did
for Jorge and those interested in Aymara! I was in at the very beginning so
I always knew the entire system, as it grew the work of course became more
and more departmentalized, during a period when we were facing bankruptcy
and didn't work I went on to other things and after that was only called
back when they needed someone to do a special job, since I could work on any
aspect of the system. Well, the first time I was called back on that basis,
the first job they gave me was to straighten out the write-ups of the
computer routines which were to be used by the linguists. From the
beginning this was my job; Bud Scott, who really "launched" the system,
would write the specs, I (and, also other linguists) would work with the
programmers to make sure the programs did what we wanted them to do, and
then I would update the specs so that all the linguists would know what the
programs were like at any given time - since of course we kept updating and
changing them. So after several years, during which they actually had
gotten pretty far along with developing another whole language, Pharsi, and
were working principally on German, those were Logos' best customers, and
Siemens stole our system - it seems funny to me now, I haven't thought about
these things for a long time, but I was the one who briefed Siemens'
representative on the system, and because I was told to do it! Maybe *that*
was the first time a lucid overview of the system was given, because Siemens
built a very good system (better than ours, actually, because, like IBM
compared with Apple, we still had all the meanderings and mistakes we had
made along the line in our system, whereas Siemens, like Apple, could
discern the overall logic and start from scratch) and Siemens also took away
at least one of our best customers, Nixdorf. So after this period of time
they called me back for several jobs, and the first one was updating the
programming specs that the linguists needed. You would not believe, Alex!
I went to the closet I was directed to and pulled out a huge box of pieces
of paper stashed randomly, some were regular size with a good bit of
material on them, some were the little sheets we used for "programming
requests", some of which the programmers had signed as done, some not! Bud
Scott had written a few pages on some of the most major routines (they were
numbered and at that time I think there were at least 60, and in each one
there would be about as many sub-routines) but what he wrote had nothing at
all to do with what the programs were doing (he also wrote a little
something that appeared in a box when Logos was cited by Byte magazine as
being among the best at syntactic and semantic resolution, it was a special
January issue on machine translation, several years back, but what he wrote
had little to do with the system), so when I got down to the bottom of the
pile, there was the write-up I was doing at the time we quit working, it was
still in my handwriting, the girl who did the typing hadn't get gotten
around to it! I mean, you can see the problem from an operational point of
view, because it was hit or miss whether the linguists knew what the
programs based on which they wrote their rules were doing! It took me a
while but I got the pieces of paper all sorted out, I worked with all the
programmers to make sure my write-ups reflected the actual programs, and I
put a footer on each page saying when the write-up was programmer verified,
and got the responsible programmer to initial it. Then at the next meeting
of all the linguists, I asked who would maintain the write-ups thereafter -
and everyone refused! Since it was their company and I was to have my own
system after that, so I could maintain my own write-ups, I just reported it
to the manager and went on to the next thing! I really don't think anyone
else at Logos was interested in the truth of the grammar that we were
uncovering, they just wanted the money we - didn't even *make*, but got from
venture capitalists! So hopefully now this experience will bear fruit for a
beautiful people and their native culture. Thanks again for your interest,
Alex, and I'll get on to addressing the materials you pointed me to. Much
love to all, Laura
----- Original Message -----
From: Alex Condori <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2001 7:31 PM
Subject: RE: [aymara] Aymara and Western Culture
> Wow, Laura
