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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,misc.education
Subject: Re: Another thread gone tangential
Message-ID: <26334:Dec1403:45:1590@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 90 03:45:15 GMT
References: <1811@blackbird.afit.af.mil> <9237:Dec1315:28:3190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1814@blackbird.afit.af.mil>
Organization: IR
Lines: 79

In article <1814@blackbird.afit.af.mil> dlindsle@blackbird.afit.af.mil (David T. Lindsley) writes:
> In article <9237:Dec1315:28:3190@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
> >catch/catches/caught/caught/catching is a *complete* conjugation. What
> >other language is so simple? To learn a verb in English you must learn
> >just five words.
> But there is a notable lack of rules to follow when attempting to generate
> the latter four forms from the first (whereas, in Latin, for example,
> this is a trivial task for the majority of verbs).

You deleted my assertion to the contrary. In English it is a trivial
task for the majority of verbs to generate the mere five forms. There
are perhaps a dozen different verb types, each based on the spelling of
the word, to cover almost every case.

In French, a verb has dozens of forms. There are at least two hundred
different types, only loosely correlated with spelling; there are more
exceptions than in English.

There is no objective basis for claiming that French verbs are more
regular than English verbs.

> >> In addition, it is difficult to tell gerunds from participles,
> >A gerund is a noun. A participle is not. That's about as simple as a
> >language rule can get.
> Simple in theory, yes. But when you get into complex-compound sentences
> with multiple subordinate clauses, it's not so easy to tell the
> difference -- precisely because there are "just five words".

No!

You deleted my points about how people parse. It is irrelevant that a
word may have several meanings. A reader will read the most probable
meaning that he's expecting based on the previous text. If that meaning
doesn't fit, he'll back up and try again; this makes the text a bit more
difficult to read.

You keep talking about features of English which really are problems for
computer parsing. They are NOT problems for human readers. Your direct
versus indirect object, for instance: people don't need to decline
``bus'' in order to understand ``catch the bus'' and ``get on the bus''
equally well. Once you expect a direct object, you read a direct object
without any trouble.

  [ native speakers supposedly have the most trouble with English ]
> Now the only reason I can see for this is that English lends itself
> less to formal/rigorous definition than (at least some) other
> languages do. I have discussed the topic with scholars of language(s),
> and I have not found one who disagrees with me. (Not till this thread
> started, anyway, and I'm still not sure...)

Several years of copy editing experience, since you asked.

> So I would say that English is unstructured, relatively speaking. And
> I do believe that's justified.

Not on any objective basis. English is both more regular and more
structured than any other language I know of.

> >You're talking about these ``problems'' of English as if the subject
> >line were ``How to program a natural-language parser.''
> If the syntax is (relatively) undefined, I would think it would
> necessarily be (relatively) difficult to express oneself clearly.
> Thereby making it more difficult to learn to write.

Kee-rist. Anyone who learns to write by writing and getting criticism
will do perfectly well in any language. And just because it's hard to
program a generative parser doesn't mean that the syntax is vague.

> You begin by discussing "formal models of natural languages", then
> use semantics to prove your point?

Yes. No linguist in the last fifty years has tried to formally model
natural language without taking semantics into account.

Now you've really convinced me that you're a computer scientist who's
dabbled in computer parsing and had a tainted view of English ever
since.

---Dan