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From: ian@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: more Chinese Room
Message-ID: <4941.25b48ec4@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Jan 90 15:27:00 GMT
References: <2602@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu> <1527@skye.ed.ac.uk> <4921.25ad37f7@mva.cs.liv.ac.uk> <1585@uniol.UUCP>
Organization: Computer Science CSMVAX, Liverpool University
Lines: 18

In article <1585@uniol.UUCP>, schwuchow@uniol.UUCP (Michael Schwuchow) writes:
> IMHO the code-breaking of Mayan codices, Egyption hieroglyphics and so on
> is not only based on syntactic knowledge, but on known semantics too.
> The Mayas, the Egyptians are humans too. So you can suppose about what they
> had written. Their culture is not totally lost, but relicts were traduced.
> So you can fix some words like king, duke ,servant, slave; sun, water, rain,
> moon, season; build, fight, govern; saw, grow, harvest, ... relatively
> easy, because you can suppose, what a text could mean.
> 
But, you would need to know something of Chinese culture to perform
translation.  One verb in English may be translated in several ways in
Chinese, dependant on the status of the participants.  To translate this,
there would be rules describing the relationships between kings, dukes,
servants and slaves.  Thus, some semantic knowledge must be included in the
syntatic knowledge.

Ian
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