SPUG: need another list moderator
Michael R. Wolf
MichaelRWolf at att.net
Sun Sep 20 16:04:08 PDT 2009
On Sep 20, 2009, at 9:46 AM, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009, Michael R. Wolf wrote:
>>
[...]
>> Sadly, English wasn't *designed* by linguists. Its loose and
>> flexible
>> "grammar rules" are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Had it
>> been
>> designed, there would be more structural underpinnings, probably
>> punctuation, to reduce ambiguities and increase expressiveness.
>
> Early languages such as Latin were pretty structured with
> extensive differentiation in declension of nouns and adjectives,
> and conugation of verbs (I didn't learn much English grammer
> until I started taking Latin and French in 8th grade).
Me too! I remember using my Latin as a structure to observe my
English. I still treat Perl as a human language, and use many English
linguistic analogies when I teach Perl class. Adults learn best when
building on prior knowledge, and what deeper knowledge can I draw upon
than their grasp of English, even if (or especially if) it's a second
language?
I still remember asking my 9th grade English class if we could diagram
sentences. She said that it's not taught that way any more, and I was
disappointed. Reflecting back, that was an early indication of my
interest in linguistics, grammars, and parsing theory.
Perhaps this group could answer one of my unanswered questions from
High School.... How would you diagram or parse this common English
construct:
The bigger, the better.
The cheaper, the better.
The newer, the better.
I'll even expose the localizer, or implied phrase or pronoun that's
implied (but not stated) in the context of the utterance, ("$_" in
Perl terms, or "it" in English terms), but that still doesn't yield a
sentence structure that I've seen diagramed
The bigger the paycheck, the better.
The cheaper the car is, the better the car is.
The newer the potatoes, the better they are.
Any help with my English, you linguists?
And, to take a leap back to CS, what programming constructs does this
remind you of?
It sounds like a declarative language to me, and reminds me of an
inference engine that I worked with back in my Bell Labs days. We'd
give it some constraints and it would generate a "solution".
OC-12 circuit boards come in multiples of 2
There are 5 slots in a card cage
OC-12 and OC-3 boards can share a power supply
T-1 and OC boards cannot share a rack
OC-12 circuit boards can go in slots 1-3
Each site should stock 10% of board count as spares
Boards take 6 weeks to repair
OC-3 circuits can go in any slot
The site is already configured with some equipment
etc...
How many of each is required?
circuit board
circuit board spares
power cord
power supply
cooling capacity
It reminds me of the class of puzzles with phrases like
Joe does not like strawberries
Sam is older than Leslie
Allison and Leslie split a desert
The youngest person likes chocolate
What did each person have for dessert?
What is the age order of the diners?
And to take it another step... anyone know of inference systems,
either in Perl or otherwise, that are presently being used?
--
Michael R. Wolf
All mammals learn by playing!
MichaelRWolf at att.net
More information about the spug-list
mailing list