🚀 go-pugleaf

Alan Brain <aebrain@dynamite.com.au> wrote:

>BTW its Ada not ADA, a proper name not some TLA (Three Letter Acronym).

 I am currently browsing a book called "Women, Fire and Dangerous
Things - What Categories Reveal about the Mind" by George Lakoff.
 
 It's a tough book and for a non academic such as myself fairly
hard going but I believe in a world of computers concerned with
objects, categorisation and artificial intelligence it's
interesting reading, especially with regard to the way different
cultures categorise different things, and the way that millions
of human minds and the way the often illogical "logic" of
computer systems differ.

 With regard to your observation the book mentions that although
there are "nouns" some nouns are more "nounier" than other nouns,
in the sense that "toe" in the sentence "I stub my toe" is more
"nounier" than the word "time" in "Have you any idea what time it
would take to complete this project?"..
 
 The title comes from studies of an aboriginal tribe who preface
each noun with a category for that noun; the categories being
"Bayi" "Balan" "Balam" and "Bala" where the second category
"Balan" is a category which includes women, fire and dangerous
implements.
 
 English is one of the few languages which fails to categorise
the majority of objects with sexual connotations, with the
exclusion of ships ( referred to often as "she" ].
 
 I believe such differences in understanding of categories is
also important in relation to the systems of categories currently
being defined for the Internet in that there is no clearly
defined set of categories agreed to by all human beings.
 
 According to the book, an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled
the "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" animals are
formerly classified into :-
 
 a) Those that belong to the Emperor.
 b) embalmed ones
 c) those that are trained
 d) sucking pigs
 e) mermaids
 f) fabulous ones
 g) stray dogs
 h) those that are included in this classification
 i] those that tremble as if they were mad
 j] innumerable ones
 k] those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush
 l]  others
 m] those that have just broken a flower vase
 n] those that resemble flies from a distance

 The author notes that categorisation such as this often causes
confusion for Westerner trying to understand the classification
schemes of other cultures, especially non western cultures.
 
 It's a serious book that deals with categorisation, which is
also an essential concept in mathematics in that we utilise
symbols and categorisation freely, and in computer science often
without a great deal of thought, the essence of meaning often
being one of emotion.
 
 As the Senate committee attempts to classify or categorise
things "objectionable" and "non objectionable" with regard to the
Internet they may like to consider the nature of classification
itself and  the lack of universality with regard to any proposed
classification system.  Unless they do, any proposed legislation
is at best as fuzzy and ill conceived as the aforementioned
"Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge".

                                         Bob

--
Bob Bain, Sydney, Australia   
bobb@acslink.aone.net.au