Article View: sci.lang
Article #2515Re: Infinite alphabets - (Turing via Berke)
From: Hideyuki Nakashima
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1987 16:16
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1987 16:16
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In article <971@kodak.UUCP> bayers@kodak.UUCP (mitch bayersdorfer) writes: >In article <417@russell.STANFORD.EDU> nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes: >> >> Chinese can DO have infinite characters. > >I don't mean to make a reductio ad adsurdum, but can any alphabet which >a given human can perceive be truely infinite? OK. Let me change "infinite" to "unbounded". Who cares for infinity in real life, anyway? What I wanted to say was, however, not that point. What Chinese tried was (or so seems tome was) to assign a symbol for each distinct concepts. So, as the number of concepts grow, so does the number of symbols (potentially). Europian "word"s correspond to Chinese "character"s. No Chinese equivalent of Europian "alphabet"s exist. -- Hideyuki Nakashima CSLI and ETL nakashima@csli.stanford.edu (until Aug. 1988) nakashima%etl.jp@relay.cs.net (afterwards)
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Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!labrea!russell!nakashim From: nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima) Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.ai,comp.ai.neural-nets Subject: Re: Infinite alphabets - (Turing via Berke) Message-ID: <436@russell.STANFORD.EDU> Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 12:16:21 EDT Article-I.D.: russell.436 Posted: Fri Oct 16 12:16:21 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 23:12:57 EDT References: <154@Aragorn.UUCP> <114400001@exunido.UUCP> Reply-To: nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima) Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U. Lines: 23