🚀 go-pugleaf

<7igr2v$u5v$1@quine.mathcs.duq.edu>, Patrick Juola
<juola@mathcs.duq.edu> inimitably wrote:
>.... and you claim this on the basis of what evidence?

A sequence of pictures without words  - a story-board - can tell a
story. Used all the time in developing TV commercials, for example.
>
>One of the "advantages" of any natural language, pictographic
>or alphabetic, is that new words can be coined and hence any
>language can be arbitrarily precise -- look at the degree of
>precision chemists use in discussing novel compounds,

Well, they have moved on a bit from 'liver of sulfur', but you can't
properly describe a protein in words - the structure in three dimensions
is of the essence.

> and then
>the degree of precision that their marketing departments use in
>coining new names for marketing purposes (Claritin, Xantac, Viagra, &c).

This is 'precision'? In what way? 
>
>What I thought you were arguing a few posts back was that the
>advantage of a pictographic representation is that it gives a more
>natural mapping to the underlying world -- the relationship between
>sign and symbolized isn't arbitrary.  Unfortunately, this fails for
>several reasons -- one, there's no way that you can't make non-arbitary
>relationships to abstract concepts,

Pardon? That's a triple negative: I'm not objecting on purist grounds,
just confused by it.

> and two, that different languages
>will divide the universe-space into different categories, so you'll
>need to put in all the bad-old-arbitrariness in a new guise.
>
Well, you may be right: we don't know yet. I'm just a bit more
optimistic.
-- 
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
Phone +44 (0)1268 747839 Fax +44 (0)1268 777124.
Did you hear about the hungry genetic engineer who made a pig of himself?