Return-Path: Message-Id: <9110180236.AA05381@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Fri Oct 18 00:56:28 1991 Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc Sender: Lojban list From: cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc Subject: Re: alternative translations X-To: lojban@cuvmb.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 15 Oct 91 17:48:32 EDT." <9110152157.AA28567@julia.math.ucla.edu> Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Fri Oct 18 00:56:28 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Bob Chassell writes about alternative translations: > le nanmu cu jukpa le sovda le zu'o febvi > man cook egg activity-abstractor boil > x1 gismu x2 x3 > is translated as: [in the style he suggested] > x1: cooker, I have in mind, the man > gismu: is in a relationship with > x2: food-prepared, I have in mind, an egg or eggs > x3: method-of-food-preparation, I have in mind, > activity abstraction related to boiling > > This form of translation appears to work for gismu that take two or > more places, but fails for one place gismu. Bob has expressed in English a formalism that I often use (and that some people have complained gives them headaches). But when correctly viewed, the same formalism works equally, though with an Excedrin- strength headache, on one-argument predicates. My goal is to "interpret the sentence" independent of the language used, rather than to "translate it into English". Of course most people on this list are English native speakers so there's an obvious relation between the goals. The formalism is this: 1. A predicate word is a symbol for a relation. 2. A relation (in this context) is a true/false valued function of N arguments, the places. If "the rat eats the cheese", given particular referents for the two sumti, either it does or it doesn't. Fuzzy logic is accomodated easily. 3. Such a function can equivalently be represented as a set of pairs (for citka-eat) of thus-related referents. One of those pairs will be (the rat, the cheese), whereas (me, the cheese) will be missing since I didn't get to eat the cheese. Predicates with N places will have place occupant lists with N members. Fuzzy logic is not easy with this representation. Then for 1-place predicates, the relation definition set will consist of monads (sets of one item each)! Or the truth function will have only one argument. It is clear that with this kind of definition of relation, it is very important that each relation have a specific number of places, possibly infinite though I hope not; an "indefinite" collection of BAI cases is very hard to handle. -- jimc