[OT] A continuing pain

[Richmond Mathewson]

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


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"Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of meanings users attach to words and phrases."
                                       Mathewson, 2006
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