Subject: Selma'o (was irregularities...)

From: Lee Daniel Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 10:46:13 -0800 (PST)

> Imagine that prior to reading the Book, Jimbob learns about selma'o. So he
> asks me, "What selma'o is .ui in?" I tell him, "UI." He asks what UIs do,
> and I say that all but one of them show emotions,..

The correct answer is "selma'o don't _do_ anything; they are about form,
not function. It just so happens that many cmavo from the same selma'o
also have similar functions, but that's never been an intention of the
language design." This isn't really a complicated idea, and I'm as
baffled as others here why you seem to have trouble with it.

It would actually be _dishonest_ to try to acheive some kind of clean
association between grammar and semantics. Among our purposes is to
learn about the nature of language; any pre-conceptions we bring to
that task limit what we can learn. For example, in order to get the
software parser to work, we had to create selma'o. In order to express
certain things, we had to put certain words in those salma'o: the
fact that we ended up with different meanings in them _is an interesting
result_ of our work; if we had come in with a pre-conceived notion of
grammatical groups corresponding to semantic function, we wouldn't
have made that discovery.

It's much like what David Friedman says about his economic analysis
of law: some people ask him why he puts the benefit of crime into his
equations; he does so because he wants to see how the equations come
out without influencing them. If it turns out from his analysis that
certain laws work to deter crime, that's an interesting result. If
it turns out that certain laws don't, that too is interesting. But
you can't get an honest result if you start with the answer before
you ask the question.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <[email-masked]> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC