From pycyn@aol.com Wed May 10 11:04:07 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 8687 invoked from network); 10 May 2000 18:04:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 10 May 2000 18:04:07 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-d05.mx.aol.com) (205.188.157.37) by mta3 with SMTP; 10 May 2000 18:04:07 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-d05.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v26.7.) id a.b6.4eb2415 (3853) for ; Wed, 10 May 2000 14:04:01 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 14:04:01 EDT Subject: Centripetal-centrifugal, little-endian--big-endian, subsets-contents, etc. To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows sub 33 From: pycyn@aol.com X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 2637 Thanks to Pilch and Helsem, the terminologies are starting to get a bit clearer here: centrifugal = little-endian = specification to the right = principal information last centripetal = big-endian = specification to the left = principal information first = tanru Which raises the question of what "principal information" means: the narrowest category or the broadest? 10-5-00 is centrifugal and 00-5-10 is centripetal so apparently is is the broadest category (year here) that is principal. But then ordinary tanru are said to be centripetal and they regularly have the broadest category (modified) at the right end. Pilch: <> "component"? a day is a member of a set or sequence of days that is a month, a key is simply in a keybox. a content of a container (I am envisioning a physical key and a box that contains it; am I missing something here?) <> But typically, when I say "the 20th" I AM referring to a certain day ({le renomoi}, not {lo renomoi}), although my hearer may not be sure which one and so ask: "Which 20th." In that sense "20th day" is a general noun, referring to (in fact) the whole set of days, since each is the 20th in some sequence (maybe even some month). And so my answer does pick out a subset of days, those that fall in month 5 (probably about one twelfth of all days, scattered fairly systematically through the set/sequence) assuming we agree on our calendars, of course. And then, to nail it down we pick one continuous 365 (in this case 6) day chunk, a year, and so get the 20th of the 5 in that year (we assume these only happen once in a year) OK; I think that is an odd way to think of dates, but it is coherent. And it matches the pattern for key => box-key => boxkeybox-key (aside from the joke): class A, subset of A by B, subset of A by(subset of B by C). C is now the principal information and also the narrowest category in this case, though the largest set in the end result. <> I think that I am confused, especially since it seems to me that the previous section just treated them as the same. What is the significant difference for present purposes? <> I am not clear how it is that a subset specifier is usually also a container. That is true in geographical addresses in a loose sort of way, but not obviously for names or dates or electronic addresses. Nor is it obvious that human though goes from container to content any more necessarily than from content to container. And it is unclear what all this is building to. <> This is news to computers I know. I suspect that this is meant in some particular way. What? << Human thinking cannot procede in a little-endian manner, because time has only one direction. One will always start at a certain container level and proced inwards to the center from there (centripetal).>> Well, not centripetal in the sense above, but now more literally (th source of the metaphor?) And I still see little evidence that this is the way human though inevitably (or even usually) flows. << If the language offers only a centrifugal addressing pattern, that can only mean that the human mind has to make an extra effort at transposing. Such efforts are quite normal in natural languages, but the Logical Language experiment is designed to eliminate them as far as possible.>> I am inclined to think that the fact that human languages fairly regularly offer centrifugal constructions is itself evidence that the centripetal-only thought pattern is not in fact the rule. And, of course, none of this decides the structure of dates, since it is equally possible (and, to me, more natural) to take the year as the name of a set and a month as specifying a subset within that set and the day as specifying a unit subset within that and thus get dmy again but as a centripetal structure. <> Of course if you label the units (as the Chinese fairly regularly do) then you can use any order, since there is no ambiguity about what the numbers mean. the problem at hand is a convention which does without unit labels and still allows dropping items with minimal markings to indicate where we are in the sequence. <> One final item on centripetal -- left expanding -- strings. My memory of Language Theory (admittedly often 40 years old) is that there was an empirical law to the effect that there was an upper limit (probably the classic 5+/- 2) on the length of left-branching structures that a human mind could process. Insofar as centripetal structures are left-branching (and that may vary with the kind of structure) this would mean that they could not handle all situations, that some centrifugal forms are necessary. Does anyone know whether that rule has been repudiated? Can anyone work out the branching structure of various types of centripetal constructions?