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From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Symbolic Links
Message-ID: <126@minya.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 28-Aug-87 23:12:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: minya.126
Posted: Fri Aug 28 23:12:46 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Aug-87 07:26:41 EDT
References: <8731@brl-adm.ARPA> <2789@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1781@munnari.oz> <1685@sol.ARPA>
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Xref: mnetor comp.unix.wizards:3964 sci.lang:1260

In article <1685@sol.ARPA>, ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) writes:
> Say, guys, why don't you have it out by mail and post a summary when
> the wars are over? Half :-).
> 

No, don't stop!  I'm bringing this flaming session (oops, I mean serious
technical discussion :-) to the attention of the folks over in sci.lang,
and they might find it very interesting.

Hey, sci.lang folks, we have here a real, live anecdotal illustration of
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.  There's a very confused discussion going on
in comp.unix.wizards that is based on a peculiarity of the English language,
and since the participants are clearly all native speakers of English, their
concepts and attitudes are strongly constrained, making a solution impossible.

The discussion is on the subject of symbolic links; in particular, the
question is:  After doing a "cd foo" where foo is a symbolic link to some
other directory, what is the meaning of ".."?  Is it the "true" parent
of foo?  Is it the directory you cd'd from?  This is complete with quite
forceful assertions that one or the other is The Right Interpretation.

What has this to do with the SWH?  Well, the crux of the discussion is
the phrase 'the meaning of ".."'.  The language-based problem is, of
course, the English word "the", which is used to imply that there is
a unique object that satisfies the criterion.  For the original Unix
file system, a directory had a unique parent, and ".." had a well-defined
interpretation as "the parent directory"  Once symbolic links were foisted
upon an unsuspecting Unix world, this broke down.  It is now possible for
a directory to have multiple parents, and the phrase "the parent of" no
longer has a (unique) referent.  The participants in the discussion seem
to have no idea that this is a problem; they continue to argue about "the"
meaning of "..".  

I contend that if this discussion were taking place in, say, Latin or Russian
(which lack definite articles), the discussion would have been short-lived.
A phrase such as "parent of" would be obviously ambiguous, and discussion
of the correct meaning would easily be seen as silly as discussion which
of your biologic parents ("the mother" or "the father") is the correct
interpretation of "the parent".  

This discussion is especially interesting from a linguistic viewpoint,
because the native language of these people distinguishes "mother" from
"father", and "the parent" is inherently ambiguous.  However, the parties
to the current discussion are in the sublanguage of Unix, so they speak
a language in which "the parent" is (or at least used to be) unambiguous.
Their prior competence in everyday English seems to have no effect on
their analysis of the Unix problem; the language's use of the definite
article strongly constrains their approaches to the "problem" and prevents
a solution.

I recommend this discussion to readers of sci.lang, and I request that
the participants in comp.unix.wizards keep it up for a while longer.

-- 
	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)