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From: elman@sdamos.UUCP (Jeff Elman)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Sanskrit
Message-ID: <17@sdamos.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 3-Oct-84 15:57:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdamos.17
Posted: Wed Oct  3 15:57:24 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 07:55:09 EDT
References: <12582@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Organization: Phonetics Lab, UC San Diego
Lines: 73

Rick,

I am very skeptical about your claims that Sastric Sanskrit is an
unambiguous language.  I also  feel you misunderstand the nature 
and consequences of ambiguity in natural human language.

    |        The language is a branch of Sastric Sanskrit which flourished
    |between the 4th century B.C and 4th century A.D., although its
    |beginnings are somewhat older.  That it is unambiguous is without
    |question.  

Your judgment is probably based on written sources.  The sources may also
be technical texts.  All this indicates is that it was possible to write 
in Sastric Sanskrit with a minimum of ambiguity.  So what?   Most languages
allow utterances which have no ambiguity.  Read a mathematics text.

    |The problem is that most (maybe all) of us are used
    |to languages like English (one of the worst) or other languages which
    |are so poor as vehicles of transmission of logical data.  

I think you have fallen victim to the trap of the egocentrism.  English is 
not particularly less (or more) effective than other languages as a vehicle
for communicating logical data, although it may seem that way to
a native monolingual speaker.

    |        The facility and ease with which these Indians communicated
    |indicates that it is possible for a natural language to serve all
    |purposes of artificial languages based on logic.  
    
How do you know how easily they communicated?   I'm serious.  And
how easily do you read a text on partial differential equations?  An
utterance which is structurally ambiguous may not be the easiest to
read.

    |If one could say what one wishes to say with absolute clarity (although 
    |with apparent redundancy) in the same time and with the same ease as 
    |you say part of what you mean in English, why not do so?  And if a 
    |population actually got used to talking in this way there would be 
    |much more clarity and less confusion in our communication.  

Here we come to an important point.  You assume that the ambiguity of
natural languages results in loss of clarity.  I would argue that
in most cases the structural ambiguity in utterances is resolved
by other (linguistic or paralinguistic) means.  Meaning is determined
by a complex interaction of factors, of which surface structure is but one.
Surface ambiguity gives the language a flexibility of expression.  That
flexibility does not necessarily entail lack of clarity.  Automatic
(machine-based) parers, on the other hand, have a very difficult time 
taking all the necessary interactions into account and so must rely more
heavily on a reliable mapping of surface to base structure.

    |        As to how this is accomplished, basically SYNTAX IS ELIMINATED.
    |Word order is unimportant, speaking is thus comparable to adding a
    |series of facts to a data-base.

Oops!  Languages may have (relatively) free word order and still have 
syntax.   A language without syntax would be the linguistic find of
the century!  

In any event, the principal point I would like to make is that structural
ambiguity is not particularly bad nor incompatible with "logical" expression.
Human speech recognizers have a variety of means for dealing with 
ambiguity.  In fact, my guess is we do better at understanding languages
which use ambiguity than languages which exclude it.

Jeff Elman
Phonetics Lab, Dept. of Linguistics, C-008
Univ. of Calif., San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093
(619) 452-2536,  (619) 452-3600

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