[lojban] Re: Loglish: A Modest Proposal

["Ben Goertzel" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

> > WordNet does have a systematic ontology for
> > categorizing
> > all the words/senses in it, but not a core
> > vocabulary...
> 
> Well, as a philosophy teacher, I can never see
> the word "ontology" without getting totally
> confused (this applies in philosophy as well as
> outside), so what does an ontology in this
> peculiar sense mean in terms of rigorous unique
> specifications of  meaning, the sort that would
> have been given by a fixed basic vocabulary and
> some rules of combination?

In a WordNet context, "ontology" just means a hierarchical
categorization system, that's all.

WordNet is a hierarchy (a directed acyclic graph) of
semantic-senses, with a set of words attached to each
semantic sense.

It doesn't try to derive all word meanings via combining
a set of basic meanings.

The most interesting attempt I know of in this direction
is Anna Wierzbicka's work with the Natural Semantic
Metalanguage (NSM), but it hasn't yielded any useful
linguistic resources yet so far as I know.

-- Ben




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