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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Re: Langauge Evolution
Message-ID: <193@scc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 24-Oct-84 22:32:48 EST
Article-I.D.: scc.193
Posted: Wed Oct 24 22:32:48 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Oct-84 20:18:45 EST
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Organization: Personetics, Inc. - Santa Cruz, Calif.
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**
	Rick Briggs seems to feel that English is degenerating.

>         Current Linguistics has begun to actually aid this entropy by
> paying special attention to slang and casual usage(descriptive vs.
> prescriptive).  Without some negentropy from the linguists, I fear
> that English will degenerate further.

	Most linguists would not say that langauges
degenerate, but that they change or even evolve.   English has
case marking on the nouns 1000 years ago, but lost them during
the years of the Norman conquest from 1066 for a couple of hundred
years until Chaucher.  

	Chinese has no case markings either.  It also has no tense
(we have two), no number (singular or plural), and no gender. 
Chinese clearly did not degenerate from Sanskrit.  I believe
there is written Chinese that is as old as any Sanskrit.  

	Case marking indicates the relationship between the nouns
and the verbs.  In some languages; for instance Latin, Sanskrit, 
and Russian; this relationship is indicated by suffixes to the
nouns.  In English we indicate these same relationships
by using word order and prepositions.   The English system
of prepositions is rich.   The prepositions serve a similar
function to endings that indicated indirect objects in languages
that have case marked endings.  Since prepositions are words
and not endings, there can be more distinctions.   It is easily
argued that since there are more ways of incicating specific
relationships in English that English is more precise than
languages that uses suffixes.

	In France, the French Academy trys to preserve the purity
of French.  They are down on loan words.  They have not mangaged
to hold back the changes in the French language, and they have
to revise their standard periodically.

	Hitler tried to purify German.  

Unambigious Languages

	The whole idea of languages that are unambigious was
throughly explored by the logical positivists, notably Carnap.
The postivists explored a procedure pioneered by the 
early Wittgenstein (and later abandonded and belittled by
Wittgenstein).   They believed that philosophical problems
could be solved by determining the reference of propostions
and determining the truth value of those propositions (as determined
by sensory experience).   Propositions about such things
as "good" were "sensless" in this system because "good"
does not refer to anything in the world we can verify with out
senses.

	This approach is find for something like "good", which 
we can easily do without.   It runs into problems with words
like "chair."    When I use the word "chair" I may not have
any specific chair in mind.  They solved this problem with
reference to "concepts", a fuzzy solution at best.  This idea
was trounced by Wittgenstein (in the Blue and Brown Books and
Philosophical Investigations).  

	Since ambiguity can be phonological, syntatic, semantic,
or pragmatic, to name a few, the term "amgiguity" is very ambigious.
Were we to select a formal language (say Sasitic Sanskrit or
a language developed by Carnap or Russell), we would find (courtsy of
Kirk Godel) that that language was incomplete.  

	Ambiguity is a feature, not a bug.
-- 
scc!steiny
Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382
109 Torrey Pine Terr.
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
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