comp.lang.lisp Google Group

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T18:14:44Z

google for it. the guy's a total idiot.
etymology is a very precise discipline, the one thing you *can't* do is throw
some random words together, posit some arbitrary developmental steps and claim
you've found the origin of some word. *every* step in the hypothesised
development of a word has to be carefully analysed phonologically,

Re: Is there a better way to store this?

2009-11-09T17:58:32Z

It's easier to debug when you can see the entire tree.
Remeber in the animal guessing game it tries to learn the new animal if
it can't guess it and it is easier to just look at a dump of the list
than to drill through it with the inspector. Oh, and the structure name
should be node, not animal-name.

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T17:48:01Z

I have not read Edo Nyland, but I do remember reading somewhere that he
is highly controversial in the linguistic community.
Björn Lindberg

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T17:43:06Z

I don't know Chinese or French, but I would be surprised if these
languages didn't have dimensions which admit a lot of ambiguity or
arbitrariness. For example, if a French child, just learning the
language, tries to communicate with his parents, I am sure they will
figure it out even if the sentence is not well-formed.

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T17:29:02Z

I mentionned lignuistic _archaeology_, notably the works of Edo
Nyland, who shows that most languages were engineered. Said
otherwise, most of the languages called "natural" are actually as
artificial as Esperanto.

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2009-11-09T17:25:51Z

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Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T17:24:37Z

Perhaps English is a language imprecise and ambiguous enough to begin
with that sloppy use doesn't impede significantly more the
communication.
On the contrary, in Chinese, correct pronouncition of tones is
primordial, since a different tone gives a different meaning. By the
same token, French is also a precise language, where the change of a

Re: Is there a better way to store this?

2009-11-09T17:02:32Z

Why the (:type list)? Structure objects serialize just fine.

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T16:40:05Z

It then remains to be explained why you dragged linguistics into the
discussion at all. If we accept your interpretation of the scope of
linguistics, it has nothing to say on the different skill levels of
native speakers.
The contradiction I see is that you made an authoritative claim based on
lingustics, yet indirectly admit that it is not applicable to the matter

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T16:34:00Z

Reminds me of the very popular song with Shaggy, "It Wasn't Me".
Linguists need to spend more time in bowling alleys and sports bars.
Nope. I would recommend a bowling alley or a sports bar.
kt

Re: Is there a better way to store this?

2009-11-09T16:32:46Z

Yes, that's what I ended up doing.
(defstruct (animal-name (:type list))
item
left-child
right-child)
(defun questionp (string) (char= (aref string (1- (length string)) #\?))
(defun animalp (string) (not (questionp string))

Re: Is there a better way to store this?

2009-11-09T16:29:41Z

On Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:08:46 -0600, John Thingstad <jpth...@online.no> tried to
confuse everyone with this message:
No, this is a bad idea. If you're going to store objects, using external
libraries such as CL-STORE is the way to go. But in your case, you can easily
store all your data as a list, which is trivial to save or read from disk.

Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T16:17:57Z

In most people's minds, languages are instantiated as rather tiny objects.
Most people know a couple thousand words at best, and can grok sentences that
are composed of no more than couple of levels of depth.
The cultures that surround some languages may be huge. But these are virtual
objects. Individuals immersed in those cultures each have only a small piece of

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Re: Ron Garret considered harmful

2009-11-09T16:03:44Z

I think that you misunderstand (or maybe I am not very good at
explaining what I understand about linguistics, which is admittedly
very little).
My impression is that the healthy adults in the statement above would
be those who have the mental capacity to generate the grammars of
natural languages they know. When they can't, the conditions are very