Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: thoughts on numerical language

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 21:37:19 EST

In a message dated 12/4/2001 6:05:56 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> In the end, the quickness of expressions determines what gets 
> expressed, too (isn't that Zipf?).
> 

Not really. At most it would be that what is most shortly expressed gets 
said most, but even that is not quite right -- and is wrong way 'round.

<Viewed numerically, a typical phonology can be 
thought of as a mixed base number perhaps>

As can anything with a bit of ingenuity. What is the point here?

<I think it will differentiate itself when you start looking at 
things that are just too cumbursome that they are never expressed in 
a human language. For example, in a binary language it's easy to 
imbed something like a bitmap to directly describe a flat picture 
(or indeed any flat bit string, like a DSD sound).>

Well, now we have gone beyond language to including the thing itself (yes, I 
know that the picture, nor the jpeg (or whatever) of the picture is not 
strictly the thing itself but it fails to be in a rather different way that a 
linguistic reference or a linguistic description fail to be -- and a way 
closer to the thing). I don't mind illustrated text, but I think calling the 
illustration a part of the text is pushing terminology a bit too far.