There are 13 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: R A Brown
1b. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
1c. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1d. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: Puey McCleary
1e. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: Puey McCleary
1f. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1g. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: And Rosta
1h. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
From: Michael Everson
2.1. Re: Fith Texts
From: And Rosta
2.2. Re: Fith Texts
From: R A Brown
2.3. Re: Fith Texts
From: And Rosta
3a. Re: Sutton SignWriting (Was: Written Form of American Sign Language
From: And Rosta
3b. Re: Sutton SignWriting (Was: Written Form of American Sign Language
From: Adam Walker
Messages
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1a. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 8:48 am ((PDT))
On 19/04/2012 00:45, And Rosta wrote:
> Alex Fink, On 18/04/2012 15:20:
>> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:59:34 -0400,
>> Sai<s...@saizai.com>
[snip]
>> Naw. From what I understand I'm fairly sure And's
>> Livagian lacks content word classes in very much the
>> way UNLWS does, despite being spoken.
>
> Quite so. A single open class of stems, and a single
> closed class of suffixes and clitics.
Reaching a temporary impasse with Outidic, I turned again
to Brx - and what do I find on the inflexional morphology page?
"As neither nouns nor verbs in Brx will have any grammatical
inflexions, there is no formal morphological distinction
between them. There is only one class of words with lexical
meaning."
:)
[snip]
>
> I've seen mention of natlangs claimed, controversially,
> to lack the noun--verb distinction, but I reckon you know
> this section of the field better than me. All I recall is
> one such natlang was from North America; I expect some
> googling would turn up some references, but I must to bed
> now. I don't see why the question should be messy, tho
> (as opposed to just analytically taxing).
I've referred more than once in the past to Paz Buenaventura
Naylor's paper on "NOMINAL SYNTAX IN VERBAL PREDICATIONS". I
quote:
{quote}
For so long, most linguists have accepted as conventional
wisdom that "all languages must have nouns and verbs". But
while all languages have a way of referring to things and a
way of referring to actions and events, these ways of
referring are not necessarily grammaticized as noun and verb.
.......
With the �verbal word� (the term used by Givon [1979] for
the pretheoretical concept of �verb�) being syntactically a
noun in a language of this type, then the syntax of its
verbal predications cannot but be nominal in structure. Such
nominal syntax of verbal predications is made evident in a
language like Tagalog by the genitive marking of the noun
that is immediately dominated by the verbal word. (Chomsky
[1992] has in fact asserted that genitive is a nominal
relation.) As Lopez (1928:51) said of Tagalog, referring to
the verbal word as �quasi-verb�:
The quasi-verb is not a pure real verb, for it is
treated like a _nomen_ in the sentence and its
enlargements, according to their form, are
considered as _attributes_ and not as _objects_
(italics mine).
{/quote}
Check the archives ;)
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]
Messages in this topic (19)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 1:54 pm ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:48:06 +0100 R A Brown wrote:
> On 19/04/2012 00:45, And Rosta wrote:
> > Alex Fink, On 18/04/2012 15:20:
> >> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:59:34 -0400,
> >> Sai<[log in to unmask]>
> [snip]
> >> Naw. From what I understand I'm fairly sure And's
> >> Livagian lacks content word classes in very much the
> >> way UNLWS does, despite being spoken.
> >
> > Quite so. A single open class of stems, and a single
> > closed class of suffixes and clitics.
>
> Reaching a temporary impasse with Outidic, I turned again
> to Brx - and what do I find on the inflexional morphology page?
>
> "As neither nouns nor verbs in Brx will have any grammatical
> inflexions, there is no formal morphological distinction
> between them. There is only one class of words with lexical
> meaning."
This is true with many engelangs. AFAIK, Loglan and Lojban also
do not distinguish between nouns, adjectives and verbs - from the
standpoint of formal logic, they all denote predicates, and are
thus treated the same in these languages. In my abandoned
briefscript loglang X-1, there is also no distinction between
nouns, verbs and adjectives, nor is there in my dormant speedtalk
project X-3.
> [...]
>
> I've referred more than once in the past to Paz Buenaventura
> Naylor's paper on "NOMINAL SYNTAX IN VERBAL PREDICATIONS". I
> quote:
> {quote}
> For so long, most linguists have accepted as conventional
> wisdom that "all languages must have nouns and verbs". But
> while all languages have a way of referring to things and a
> way of referring to actions and events, these ways of
> referring are not necessarily grammaticized as noun and verb.
There are quite a few concepts that are denoted by nouns in
some natlangs and by verbs in others. The boundaries are fuzzy,
and logic tells us that both are predicates, which is why loglangs
do not have a noun/verb distinction.
> .......
> With the “verbal word” (the term used by Givon [1979] for
> the pretheoretical concept of “verb”) being syntactically a
> noun in a language of this type, then the syntax of its
> verbal predications cannot but be nominal in structure. Such
> nominal syntax of verbal predications is made evident in a
> language like Tagalog by the genitive marking of the noun
> that is immediately dominated by the verbal word. (Chomsky
> [1992] has in fact asserted that genitive is a nominal
> relation.) As Lopez (1928:51) said of Tagalog, referring to
> the verbal word as “quasi-verb”:
> The quasi-verb is not a pure real verb, for it is
> treated like a _nomen_ in the sentence and its
> enlargements, according to their form, are
> considered as _attributes_ and not as _objects_
> (italics mine).
> {/quote}
I have heard of Basque and Welsh that they do not use finite
lexical verbs very often in their colloquial registers, rather
infinite forms such as verbal nouns. These languages may be
on their way to something like Kêlen (let's hope they don't
die out before that - they appear to be out of immediate
danger right now, but their future cannot be considered
certain).
Maybe a modern descendant of Old Albic will have lost its
finite verb forms, with only verbal nouns remaining ...
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (19)
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1c. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:20 pm ((PDT))
On 19 April 2012 22:53, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhieme...@web.de> wrote:
>
> > >
> This is true with many engelangs. AFAIK, Loglan and Lojban also
> do not distinguish between nouns, adjectives and verbs - from the
> standpoint of formal logic, they all denote predicates, and are
> thus treated the same in these languages. In my abandoned
> briefscript loglang X-1, there is also no distinction between
> nouns, verbs and adjectives, nor is there in my dormant speedtalk
> project X-3.
>
>
And in the artlang hook, there is my Nocha, which has a single class of
words (it doesn't even have any kind of "particle"). However, those words
are not predicates either (at least not explicitly). The way they combine
is both very simple in theory and complex in practice, and a bit fuzzy.
>
> There are quite a few concepts that are denoted by nouns in
> some natlangs and by verbs in others.
Yeah, I've noticed that a lot since I became truly multilingual, and this
in turn is influencing Moten vocabulary generation quite a bit :) .
>
> I have heard of Basque and Welsh that they do not use finite
> lexical verbs very often in their colloquial registers, rather
> infinite forms such as verbal nouns.
In the case of Basque, there are only a few finite verbs left, but they
tend to be relatively common verbs. So although in terms of numbers verbs
without finite conjugations are a big majority, in terms of actual use
finite verbs are still frequent enough.
But even those finite verbs don't have finite forms for all distinctions
used in Basque, so even they are often used with periphrastic conjugations.
> These languages may be
> on their way to something like Kêlen (let's hope they don't
> die out before that - they appear to be out of immediate
> danger right now, but their future cannot be considered
> certain).
>
>
My Moten, thanks to its influence from Basque, only has two auxiliaries
with finite forms (and each auxiliary has only three finite forms), and all
other verbs have only infinite forms and are conjugated strictly
periphrastically. Still, I don't feel it means the noun-verb distinction is
absent in Moten. It's just as strong as in languages with many finite
verbal forms. It's true though that semantically speaking, the distinction
in Moten isn't very strong...
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (19)
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1d. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" pueymccle...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 6:48 pm ((PDT))
Hello! I find this topic interesting, even though I don't quite follow all
of the examples or descriptions that have been given before. It seems that
several of us have created or are familiar with languages that somehow
merge nouns and verbs, lack verbs but have nouns, or have nouns that lack
verbs.
So, just to summarize things:
Why would one create a language that combines nouns and verbs (in some
manner)?
For Kélen we have a reason. It's an alien language. I would think that, on
the other side of that world, there's a language that's the opposite: A
nounless language language spoken by the velociraptor wolves. These two
languages
are somehow related.
Loglan and Lojban combine nouns, verbs, and adjectives because these are
the languages that Vulcans speak.
And Ithkuil has ... super-powerful formatives, because that's how clowns
think.
Does one create noun-verb languages for an aesthetic reason? As a
challenge? Is it really somehow more logical? Or more alien?
What challenges does a noun-verb language pose, for the language creator
and for translation? Does one end up with a lexicon with many abstractions
which somehow have to be inflected? Does one end up with a vocabulary
larger or smaller than it would have been were the language a bit more
conventional?
There are no right or wrong answers here, of course. Just different ideas.
Messages in this topic (19)
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1e. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" pueymccle...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 7:36 pm ((PDT))
I don't feel qualified to discuss any language too much (especially not
English), but I will mention that Khlìjha, Empress Éfhelìnye's language,
only has three parts of speech: Participle, Personal Pronoun, and Relative
Pronoun. Actually, traditionally speaking the Wise consider the Affix a
part of speech, but the only reason to do so really has to do with finding
the rhythm in poetry. Since I don't want to offend the Wise, between you
and me, the Affix is a part of speech.
The Participle basically corresponds to our nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
One could argue that they're all nouns or that they're all verbs meaning
"to be something."
A basic sentence takes the form of Predicate, later Subject. The predicate
usually functions like our verb.
So, let's look at a couple of examples. _Alixhlìnye_ is the name of a
Princess who visited the Otherworld and had some rather strange adventures
there along with a tea party. _Íri_ means "those who go, move, come." And
_qthèwa_ means "those who drink (something)." Oh, participles are in
general plural, but we don't have to go into that here.
Íri' Alixhlìnye.
"Alixhlìnye goes somewhere."
Qthèwa' Alixhlìnye.
"Alixhlìnye drinks something."
Íri qthewayòjhwa.
"Those who drink something go somewhere."
Alixhlìnye' íriyùpwar ker qthèwa.
"The one who goes somewhere while drinking something is Alixhlìnye."
Predicates and relative clauses can get fairly complicated because they can
inflect for Mode, Mood, and Voice.
Alixhlìnye' ól ker qthèwa.
"Alixhlìnye verily drinks something."
(Existential Mode, slightly different word order)
Qthewayàmpein Alixhlìnyeyan.
"Alixhlìnye shall drink something."
(Injunctive Mood)
Jáxe qthewàyejikh Alixhlìnye.
"Alixhlìnye drinks something or other."
(Antipassive Voice)
Objects and subjects have to be in certain cases for certain types of
clauses.
Qthèwa jhatiyùlkha' Alixhlìnye.
"Alixhlìnye drinks tea."
(Jhàti is on the Construct Case)
Qthèwa jhatiyùtya' Alixhlìnye.
"Alixhlìnye drinks some tea."
"Alixhlìnye begins to drink tea."
(Jhàti is in the partitive genitive form of the Locative Case).
Qthèwa jhàti' Alixhlìnyeyan.
"Alixhlìnye sets out to drink tea."
(Alixhlìnye is in the Ergative Case)
Qthèwa jhàti xhlir Alixhlìnye.
"Alixhlìnye chances to drink tea."
(Alixhlìnye is in the instrumental form of the Locative Case).
Many Predicates, especially in the Active Voice, require subjects in a form
of the Locative case, however.
Qhát tlhir qthèwa jhatiyùtya.
"Those who drink some tea are happy."
(Tlhir usually means "on.")
And then there are idioms, constructions, and just plain weird things.
Íriyàswaor xhmir Alixhlìnye jhàti.
"Those who go to Alixhlìnye have tea."
(-aswaor means "unto.")
Jhpé' Alixhlinyeyàswaor qthewàyatlhui jhatiyùtya.
"Alixhlìnye is confused because of those who drink some tea."
(Literally: Confused unto Alixhlìnye because of those who drink of tea.)
I am not entirely sure whether this is system that's simpler than Loglan or
Lojban, but it's a system that seems to work well enough.
Oops! Gotta go. The palace eunuchs have informed the Wise that I
questioned whether Affixes are their own part of speech! I may have to go
into hiding for a time ...
Messages in this topic (19)
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1f. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 11:46 pm ((PDT))
On 20 April 2012 03:48, Puey McCleary <pueymccle...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, just to summarize things:
>
> Why would one create a language that combines nouns and verbs (in some
> manner)?
>
> For Kélen we have a reason. It's an alien language. I would think that, on
> the other side of that world, there's a language that's the opposite: A
> nounless language language spoken by the velociraptor wolves. These two
> languages
>
> are somehow related.
>
> Loglan and Lojban combine nouns, verbs, and adjectives because these are
> the languages that Vulcans speak.
>
> And Ithkuil has ... super-powerful formatives, because that's how clowns
> think.
>
> Does one create noun-verb languages for an aesthetic reason? As a
> challenge? Is it really somehow more logical? Or more alien?
>
>
In Nocha's case, it's the secret language of a secret society, and thus
very probably artificial even within its fictional setting. The reason why
it lacks a verb-noun distinction then is that it reflects the worldview of
that secret society, which sees no difference between objects, concepts and
actions. All are equal manifestations of their central No concept :) .
> What challenges does a noun-verb language pose, for the language creator
> and for translation?
Many. The most difficult part is not to get used to the grammar, but to try
and prevent the vocabulary to segregate itself semantically along more
traditional verbal/nominal lines. If you fail to do so, at least IMHO, you
end up with a language that may *look* like it's got no distinction between
verbs and nouns, but that's just a thin disguise, and in depth the
verb-noun distinction still exists.
> Does one end up with a lexicon with many abstractions
> which somehow have to be inflected?
I've basically tried to avoid that in Nocha by using concrete words and
extending their meaning into the abstract, a bit like how Japanese uses
many periphrastic constructions with concrete verbs to form various
abstract conjugation patterns.
> Does one end up with a vocabulary
> larger or smaller than it would have been were the language a bit more
> conventional?
>
>
No idea. Nocha is very much a work in progress and has little vocabulary.
My guess is that the size of the vocabulary shouldn't be influenced by
whether there is a traditional verb-noun distinction or not. 1 verb + 1
noun or 2 predicates is still only 2 words :) .
> There are no right or wrong answers here, of course. Just different ideas.
>
Of course :) . And those are just mine :) .
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (19)
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1g. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Apr 20, 2012 5:15 am ((PDT))
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets, On 20/04/2012 07:46:
> On 20 April 2012 03:48, Puey McCleary<pueymccle...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Does one create noun-verb languages for an aesthetic reason? As a
>> challenge? Is it really somehow more logical? Or more alien?
Engelang-minded folk who start their intellectual journey with the analysis of
natlangs tend to be attracted by the idea of paring away from grammar all that
is inessential, and this leads to the collapse of word-class distinctions. If
the journey starts from considering what meanings language must express rather
than how natlangs express them, then it's not all that easy to come up with
compelling reasons for introducing word-class distinctions in the first place.
Ivan Derzhanski's unpublished conlang, whose name I forget, had a noun--verb
distinction whose sole basis was that a bare noun would mean "thing that is X"
and only in combination with an auxiliary would express the predicate "is X",
whereas a bare verb would express the predicate "is X" and only in combination
with an article would mean "thing that is X". The ultimate rationale for this
scheme was the brevity afforded by being able to omit auxiliaries and articles
as often as possible.
>> What challenges does a noun-verb language pose, for the language creator
>> and for translation?
>
> Many.
I would say "None whatever".
> The most difficult part is not to get used to the grammar, but to try
> and prevent the vocabulary to segregate itself semantically along more
> traditional verbal/nominal lines. If you fail to do so, at least IMHO, you
> end up with a language that may *look* like it's got no distinction between
> verbs and nouns, but that's just a thin disguise, and in depth the
> verb-noun distinction still exists.
Can you explain your thinking? Does it depend on equivocating over the meaning
of the term "verb--noun distinction"?
Does Lojban have a verb--noun distinction?
--And.
Messages in this topic (19)
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1h. Re: Destroying the noun/verb distinction
Posted by: "Michael Everson" ever...@evertype.com
Date: Fri Apr 20, 2012 6:10 am ((PDT))
On 20 Apr 2012, at 13:15, And Rosta wrote:
> Does Lojban have a verb--noun distinction?
Who knows? Lojban uses arcane grammar terms I guess to pretend it doesn't have
nouns and verbs and adjectives.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (19)
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2.1. Re: Fith Texts
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 1:07 pm ((PDT))
And Rosta, On 19/04/2012 11:38:
> I agree with you, as can be seen by comparing my original message to
> Miles Forster about LIFO conlangs.
>
> In haste,
On reflection, and in less haste, I don't fully agree after all.
> Logan Kearsley, On 19/04/2012 00:53:
>
>> On 18 April 2012 17:19, And Rosta<and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Logan writes: "if a general LIFO stack is not only sufficient but necessary,
>>> then the human brain can't handle it, because language doesn't count higher
>>> than 2. Natural language processing abilities are neither a strict superset
>>> nor subset of
>>> what an ideal push-down automaton can handle; we're differently constrained
>>> by having small, finite memory."
>>>
>>> The stack as I have described it does not require counting, and its
>>> vulnerability to the limitations of short-term memory is in fact key
>>> evidence for its involvement in psycholinguistic parsing.
>>
>> It only doesn't require counting if you never have to explicitly
>> access something at a depth other than "on top". And if that's the
>> case, the fact that you happen to be using a stack underneath is not
>> particularly interesting, because you could just as well use something
>> else and get the same results.
The algorithm I described requires a stack on which the items are *ordered by
recency*. The only operation performed on the stack is the removal of the top
item or the addition of a new top item. But because the removal of the top item
can be iterated, the ordering of items on the stack matters. I don't mean to
quibble about terminology, but "LIFO" and "stack" seem to me fully apposite for
this, tho I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.
If the 'stack' were instead a FIFO 'queue', that would yield weird and
unnatlang-like results, as would various sorts of operations on the list of
items being processed. Fith is weird because of its list operators, not because
of the LIFO ordering of the list. The LIFO ordering is in fact
human-language-like, and FIFO (or anything else) would be much more
counternatural.
>>> Logan continues:
>>>
>>> "When discussing the idea of LIFO grammar in a conlang context, it's
>>> important to distinguish between a language that *can* be parsed by a
>>> stack machine, and a language that *relies* on being interpreted by a
>>> stack machine. The former I consider to be a rather useless
>>> categorization, but Fith is a LIFO language in the second, stronger
>>> sense. It may thus be less computationally complex than human
>>> languages, but falls prey to the division between "problems that our
>>> brains can be trained to solve by conscious emulation" and "problems
>>> for which our brains have a suitable algorithm compiled in"."
>>>
>>> Again to repeat the earlier thread, there is no essential difference between
>>> Fith (without stack operators) and English. The tree structure for a Fith
>>> sentence would be indistinguishable from the tree structure of a head-final
>>> natlang.
>>
>> Fith without stack operators is not Fith.
>> The result of removing the stack operators from Fith isn't anything
>> that I would find it useful to classify as a LIFO stack language,
>> precisely because it is indistinguishable from a normal head-final
>> natlang; it doesn't *do* anything with the fact that it happens to be
>> implemented with a stack.
what makes Fith weird is the processing list operators, not the LIFO ordering.
The LIFO ordering is natural. Other orderings, such as FIFO, would be
counternatural.
It's perverse to say you'll only classify a lg as a LIFO lg if it includes list
operators, because then you end up ostensibly attributing to the completely
unweird LIFO ordering the weirdness of the system that is in fact due to the
list operators, and then newcomers to the subject are accordingly misled.
--And.
Messages in this topic (66)
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2.2. Re: Fith Texts
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Fri Apr 20, 2012 12:38 am ((PDT))
On 19/04/2012 21:06, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
>> Logan Kearsley, On 19/04/2012 00:53:
>>
>>> On 18 April 2012 17:19, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]]
>>>>
>>>> The stack as I have described it does not require
>>>> counting, and its vulnerability to the limitations
>>>> of short-term memory is in fact key evidence for
>>>> its involvement in psycholinguistic parsing.
>>>
>>> It only doesn't require counting if you never have to
>>> explicitly access something at a depth other than "on
>>> top". And if that's the case, the fact that you
>>> happen to be using a stack underneath is not
>>> particularly interesting, because you could just as
>>> well use something else and get the same results.
>
>
> The algorithm I described requires a stack on which the
> items are *ordered by recency*. The only operation
> performed on the stack is the removal of the top item or
> the addition of a new top item.
Yes - that's what a stack is: items are always pushed onto
the top, and items may be removed only by popping them off
the top. So far, I guess, we all agree. But ....
> But because the removal of the top item can be iterated,
> the ordering of items on the stack matters.
I assume "the top item" does not refer the same item, you
simply mean we can can keep popping items off the top of the
stack until the stack is empty. Of course, if one is using
a stack then the order of items does matter. if the order
of items is immaterial, then there's no point in using a stack.
> I don't mean to quibble about terminology, but "LIFO"
> and "stack" seem to me fully apposite for this, tho I'm
> open to being persuaded otherwise.
Yes - but none of this explains "The stack as I have
described it does not require counting." How do we know how
many items to pop off the stack? What are we doing with the
stack? Somewhere along the line I would expect to pop off
something that required some operation to be performed, e.g.
to stop popping any more item off; to pop off only certain
number; to pop off the top two, perform some calculation,
and push the result back onto the top etc.
> If the 'stack' were instead a FIFO 'queue', that would
> yield weird and unnatlang-like results,
If the so-called stack were a LIFO queue, it would not be a
stack - it would be a queue ;)
[snip]
> Fith is weird because of its list operators, not because
> of the LIFO ordering of the list.
I disagree. What would be weird IMHO is employing a stack
(LIFO) structure and have no operators. How would we use a
the stack? Communicator A pushes each word/utterance onto a
stack; when s/he has finished, listener B then pops them
off? That would be silly: it would simply mean that speaker
has to finish, then the listeners understands only when s/he
has the items in reverse!!!
Obviously - I assume - that is not what you mean. But, if
there are no operators, how is the stack used or, more
importantly, why use a stack at all?
> The LIFO ordering is in fact human-language-like, and
> FIFO (or anything else) would be much more
> counternatural.
I think that statement is quite controversial. Personally,
i see nothing in human language processing which leads me to
think that either LIFO or FILO is any more or less human
like. The mere fact that most of find using infix notation
in mathematics more "natural" than either prefix or postfix
seems a fair indicator to me that probably neither LIFO and
nor FIFO are more akin than the other to the working of the
human brain.
[snip]
>
> what makes Fith weird is the processing list operators,
> not the LIFO ordering. The LIFO ordering is natural.
> Other orderings, such as FIFO, would be counternatural.
I disagree strongly - see above. What would make Fith weird
would be using a stack _without_ any operators. As far as I
can see, you'd get the weird scenario I gave above.
> It's perverse to say you'll only classify a lg as a LIFO
> lg if it includes list operators, because then you end
> up ostensibly attributing to the completely unweird LIFO
> ordering the weirdness of the system that is in fact due
> to the list operators, and then newcomers to the subject
> are accordingly misled.
I guess then I'm as perverse as Logan.
What seems to me misleading is to suggest a stack can with
used without any operations being performed. What on earth
is the point of using a stack unless for the trivial task of
reversing things?
Also I am baffled by "... its vulnerability to the
limitations of short-term memory is in fact key evidence for
its involvement in psycholinguistic parsing."
Surely on reason for using a stack is that things can be
stored lower in the stack which will eventually, during the
stacks use, find itself as the top item and is popped off
again. Long term retention of an item which eventually
resurfaces would IMO be some evidence that a stack structure
is being used. But if all the storing and retrieving is
merely short term and no counting is involved then I find
myself in complete agreement with Logan who wrote:
"It only doesn't require counting if you never have to
explicitly access something at a depth other than 'on top'.
And if that's the case, the fact that you happen to be using
a stack underneath is not particularly interesting, because
you could just as well use something else and get the same
results."
Amen.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]
Messages in this topic (66)
________________________________________________________________________
2.3. Re: Fith Texts
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Apr 20, 2012 4:55 am ((PDT))
R A Brown, On 20/04/2012 08:38:
> On 19/04/2012 21:06, And Rosta wrote:
>> I don't mean to quibble about terminology, but "LIFO"
>> and "stack" seem to me fully apposite for this, tho I'm
>> open to being persuaded otherwise.
>
> Yes - but none of this explains "The stack as I have
> described it does not require counting." How do we know how
> many items to pop off the stack? What are we doing with the
> stack? Somewhere along the line I would expect to pop off
> something that required some operation to be performed, e.g.
> to stop popping any more item off; to pop off only certain
> number; to pop off the top two, perform some calculation,
> and push the result back onto the top etc.
The algorithm I gave says that you only pop off one item from the stack. (And
if you can succeed in combining it with the Current Item, then that means what
had been the second item on the stack is now the first and so now you can pop
it off in turn and try to combine it with the current Current Item.)
Are we talking at cross-purposes?
>> Fith is weird because of its list operators, not because
>> of the LIFO ordering of the list.
>
> I disagree. What would be weird IMHO is employing a stack
> (LIFO) structure and have no operators. How would we use a
> the stack? Communicator A pushes each word/utterance onto a
> stack; when s/he has finished, listener B then pops them
> off? That would be silly: it would simply mean that speaker
> has to finish, then the listeners understands only when s/he
> has the items in reverse!!!
>
> Obviously - I assume - that is not what you mean. But, if
> there are no operators, how is the stack used or, more
> importantly, why use a stack at all?
As you'll probably remember, Fith has a class of words called (IIRC) 'stack
operators', some of which do counternatural stuff like reordering items on the
stack. There's general agreement among us all that it's certain of these stack
operators that make Fith weird.
These operators are distinct from the basic syntactic operation of combining
two items into one. The algorithm I gave in response to George's question
applies equally to English and to Fith, and it uses this basic operation.
Fith without its operators would still be parsed using this basic operation of
combination.
>> The LIFO ordering is in fact human-language-like, and
>> FIFO (or anything else) would be much more
>> counternatural.
>
> I think that statement is quite controversial. Personally,
> i see nothing in human language processing which leads me to
> think that either LIFO or FILO is any more or less human
> like.
(Is LIFO different from FILO?)
I don't think the mere fact of your skepticism renders it controversial,
especially in the context of the meagre amount of informed knowledge we have
collectively adduced in our discussions, all of what little evidence has been
adduced during which has been supplied by me. With regard to LIFO versus FIFO,
if you have the auxiliary assumption (as I do) that only the top/first item on
the processing list is accessible to the processor, then it seems to me (tho
admittedly it boggles my mind and maybe I'm being obtuse) that FIFO ordering of
the processing list is incompatible with natural language word order -- it
would yield ineluctably tangling branches, no?
> The mere fact that most of find using infix notation
> in mathematics more "natural" than either prefix or postfix
> seems a fair indicator to me that probably neither LIFO and
> nor FIFO are more akin than the other to the working of the
> human brain.
It seems to (again, a possibly obtuse) me that head--dependent ordering and the
LIFO/FIFO ordering of the processing list (with the auxiliary assumption about
only the first item being accessible) are orthogonal.
>> what makes Fith weird is the processing list operators,
>> not the LIFO ordering. The LIFO ordering is natural.
>> Other orderings, such as FIFO, would be counternatural.
>
> I disagree strongly - see above. What would make Fith weird
> would be using a stack _without_ any operators. As far as I
> can see, you'd get the weird scenario I gave above.
>
>> It's perverse to say you'll only classify a lg as a LIFO
>> lg if it includes list operators, because then you end
>> up ostensibly attributing to the completely unweird LIFO
>> ordering the weirdness of the system that is in fact due
>> to the list operators, and then newcomers to the subject
>> are accordingly misled.
>
> I guess then I'm as perverse as Logan.
>
> What seems to me misleading is to suggest a stack can with
> used without any operations being performed. What on earth
> is the point of using a stack unless for the trivial task of
> reversing things?
Hopefully things are clearer now that I've pointed out the distinction between
Fith's processing list operators and basic parsing operations. (I was talking
about the former; you thought I was talking about the latter, it seems.)
> Also I am baffled by "... its vulnerability to the
> limitations of short-term memory is in fact key evidence for
> its involvement in psycholinguistic parsing."
>
> Surely on reason for using a stack is that things can be
> stored lower in the stack which will eventually, during the
> stacks use, find itself as the top item and is popped off
> again. Long term retention of an item which eventually
> resurfaces would IMO be some evidence that a stack structure
> is being used.
Incremental increases in psycholinguistic processing difficulty demonstrably
correlate with incremental modifications of tree shape. As I explained in a
previous message, a prime theoretical candidate to explain this phenomenon
involves the hypothesized use of a stack: given the premise that the
probability of an item fading from memory while it is on the stack is a
function of the time it is on the stack and of the number of items on the
stack, then the theory does an excellent job of predicting the observed
correlations between processing difficulty and tree shape.
>But if all the storing and retrieving is
> merely short term and no counting is involved then I find
> myself in complete agreement with Logan who wrote:
> "It only doesn't require counting if you never have to
> explicitly access something at a depth other than 'on top'.
> And if that's the case, the fact that you happen to be using
> a stack underneath is not particularly interesting, because
> you could just as well use something else and get the same
> results."
>
> Amen.
I don't follow you; I don't see the relevance of this to our discussion; maybe
you can explain further in the light of my further responses.
--And.
Messages in this topic (66)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. Re: Sutton SignWriting (Was: Written Form of American Sign Language
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:47 pm ((PDT))
David Peterson, On 29/03/2012 21:20:
> On Mar 29, 2012, at 4:39 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
>
>> What I find curious is how these two arguments didn't turn out instead to be
>> "English is what hearing people use; ASL is what deaf people use". Is there
>> no sort of sense among Deaf people that their own language is being
>> subjugated to the hearing folks' language by English being the only form
>> that is writable?
>
> It's certainly possible that they *could* take it that way, but my experience
> is the same as Arthaey's: ASL is too [insert superlative adjective here] to
> be written; that's just for English.
Besides the political angle, it's always seemed to me that SLs are impoverished
by lacking writing, even in an age where video is increasingly easy to
distribute, because writing abstracts away from all performance; prosody and
all else extraneous to the text is stripped away; and the reader chooses how to
scan the graphical text.
And I think both oral and sign languages would benefit from an
automaton-performed mode, intermediate between speech and writing, in which the
text can be spoken by a computer with no more prosodic modulation than is
grammatically necessary. I've longed and longed (in vain) for such a thing for
my poetry -- i.e. a way of having a suitably annotated text read aloud by a
computer in a phonologically and prosodically appropriate way.
--And.
Messages in this topic (16)
________________________________________________________________________
3b. Re: Sutton SignWriting (Was: Written Form of American Sign Language
Posted by: "Adam Walker" carra...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:54 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 5:47 PM, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And I think both oral and sign languages would benefit from an
> automaton-performed mode, intermediate between speech and writing, in which
> the text can be spoken by a computer with no more prosodic modulation than
> is grammatically necessary. I've longed and longed (in vain) for such a
> thing for my poetry -- i.e. a way of having a suitably annotated text read
> aloud by a computer in a phonologically and prosodically appropriate way.
>
> --And.
>
>
>
What a very strange thing to long for -- having all the blood sucked from
one's poetry by a vampyrical mechanism -- whyever would you wish for such
an abomination? In what way do you concieve of this as a good thing for
you, your poetry or your audience. I am truly baffled.
Adam who ...
Messages in this topic (16)
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