Syllabic division of words

[Randall Reetz]

All those words in rebuttal and not one of them addressing the actual meaning of my posts.  Sad.

-----Original Message-----
From: Richmond Mathewson <richmondmathewson at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 1:37 PM
To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
Subject: Re: Syllabic division of words

Randall Reetz wrote:
> I am never sarcastic.  These functions can be written upon a meta-grammatical base that will work across languages.  Rev already does this in limited ways.  I find these limits absurd and backwards.
Really! Get on and rewrite the functions that can cope with all spoken 
human languages . . . I tell you what, . . .
the world will beat a path to your door faster than you can draw breath!

[ I am OFTEN sarcastic; often when people don't stop and have a good 
think before they start pumping out
universalist proposals. ]
>   Provencial even. 
Might be a good idea to spell "Provincial" properly; and, come to think 
of it, you are using the word in an incorrect
fashion:

"1 of or concerning a province of a country or empire : provincial 
elections.
• of or pertaining to a style of architecture or furniture in fashion in 
the provinces of various European countries : French Provincial furnishing.
2 of or concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country : 
scenes of violence were reported in provincial towns.
• unsophisticated or narrow-minded, esp. when considered as typical of 
such regions."

[ OED ]

[ Mind you, for all I know, some of the programmers in Edinburgh may 
have their houses stuffed with French Provincial furnishing
(from Provencal, no doubt) . . . Oh, God, my Quaternary education is 
just such a burden . . . :) ]
>  It is long past time to ask the big questions of computing as a field.  We follow as sheep, 
Meh, Meh . . . having worked many summers on farms with sheep I probably 
feel more respect for them than you do.
(lost both my big toenails about 25 years ago as a 'Yow' didn't fancy me 
as her hairdresser and stepped on my toes with her
nippy sharp feet . . . if you are coming to the Edinburgh conference 
remember to ask me to take my socks off so you can see.)
> even when we are in charge of computing's future.
>   
Gosh . . . sounds awfully like something a Hare Krsna guru once said; 
"We are in charge of humanity's future." BULL!
> randall
>
>   
"meta-grammatical" . . . hmpf . . . this presupposes 2 things:

1. Languages are all written using Alphabets;

i.e. not syllabaries (e.g. Japanese, Sanskrit)

not ideographic systems (e.g Chinese)

2. All languages are based on the highly hypothetical "deep-structure"
proposed by Generative Grammar.

As #1 is just not true, and #2 has been shown to be a reasonably useful
theory that is shot full of holes (Generativists have to keep tweaking
the theory as they discover new problems thrown up by languages that
were not considered in Chomsky's original theory - and some languages
just refuse to fit); unlike all computer languages which can be "boiled
down" to Zeros and Ones; this is NOT going to happen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Think back to the end of the 19th century when Carnap and Russell
were trying to find "the unified theory of everything"; most of us have
left that late teenage mentality behind and realised that our
universe is extremely complicated, and, probably, will never be
explained completely in mechanistic.materialistic terms.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Back to the Sanskrit.

Kisses, Richmond.
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