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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: <436@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 12:16:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: russell.436
Posted: Fri Oct 16 12:16:21 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 23:12:57 EDT
References: <154@Aragorn.UUCP> <114400001@exunido.UUCP>
Reply-To: nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 23
Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1571 comp.ai:906 comp.ai.neural-nets:16

In article <971@kodak.UUCP> bayers@kodak.UUCP (mitch bayersdorfer) writes:
>In article <417@russell.STANFORD.EDU> nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
>>
>> Chinese can DO have infinite characters.
>
>I don't mean to make a reductio ad adsurdum, but can any alphabet which
>a given human can perceive be truely infinite?

OK.  Let me change "infinite" to "unbounded".  Who cares for infinity
in real life, anyway?

What I wanted to say was, however, not that point.  What Chinese tried
was (or so seems tome was) to assign a symbol for each distinct
concepts.  So, as the number of concepts grow, so does the number of
symbols (potentially).  Europian "word"s correspond to Chinese
"character"s.  No Chinese equivalent of Europian "alphabet"s exist.


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