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From: nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai,comp.ai.neural-nets
Subject: Re: Infinite alphabets - (Turing via Berke)
Message-ID: <417@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Tue, 13-Oct-87 14:30:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: russell.417
Posted: Tue Oct 13 14:30:39 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Oct-87 20:34:55 EDT
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Reply-To: nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
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In article <8583@shemp.UCLA.EDU> berke@CS.UCLA.EDU (Peter Berke) writes:
>
>By Turing's above remarks, I think by his definition, Chinese cannot
>succeed at having an enumerable infinity of symbols.  It can only
>"attempt" to have them.  Unless you "go down a level" and consider
>"things that make up" Chinese symbols "the symbols."  Then, there
>must be a finite number of them.  Does anyone know if this is true
>about Chinese?  It would seem that even in English it does not apply to
>orthography, though it apparently does to letters, 
>since we use in hand-writing no fixed "alphabet" of strokes, etc.  Well, 
>I meant only to introduce Turing's words, forgive me for going on.
>

The comparison between Europian alphabetical system and Chinese
character system is very interesting.  Chinese can DO have infinite
characters.  What they do is to assign one character to each concept.
Of course, they don't have infinite characters now.  But I say it is
possible to have them if they want.

One chinese character usually consists of smaller constituents.  For
example, a character for "maple tree" consists of two parts: one
designating "tree" and the other designating "wind".  The character
for "forest" consists of three "tree"s.

The character for "tree" comes from a pictorial representation of a
real tree.  It is like this:

                     |
                 ----+----
                    /|\
                   / | \
                  /  |  \

So are characters for "sun", "house", "river" and so on.  By this way,
you can just invent a new character for a concept if it is a basic
one.  Otherwise you can combine several characters to define a new
one.

I think that Europian way of thinking is analytic while Eastern is
holistic.  Having alphabets to compose words vs. having characters for
each concepts, is one of the examples.  I further think that digital
computer follows Europian way.  I want to come up with Eastern
equivalent of digital computer (not an analog one, though).
Connectionism is one of the possibilities.

-- 
Hideyuki Nakashima
CSLI and ETL
nakashima@csli.stanford.edu (until Aug. 1988)
nakashima%etl.jp@relay.cs.net (afterwards)