On Sat, 13 Sep 2008, Richard H. McCullough wrote:
> Chris
>
> mKE, the program which implements mKR, enhances intelligence
> by assisting a human in creating/updating/searching knowledge
> bases.
>
> mKR is integrating syntax and semantics without ambiguity.
>
> John has happy; implies that "happy" is an attribute. (01)
But "happy" is not an attribute (unless you are using the word
"attribute" idiosyncratically); it is an adjective. Intuitively, it
*expresses* an attribute. But you have no semantics, so there's no
telling what you have in mind by an attribute with any precision. (02)
> I do walk done; implies that "walk" is an action (03)
"walk" a verb. And what is an action? (04)
> "done" is useful because "walk" may be followed
> by many optional prepositional phrases. (05)
I'm not sure why that makes it particularly useful. You can achieve all
the same effects in any of several more standard ways. Have you studied
other KR languages to see how similar things are done? (06)
> P.S.
> Spanish, and several other non-English languages,
> use "has" for attributes instead of "is". (07)
I'm not certain what you mean by saying they use "has" for attributes,
but I'm guessing you mean that they use it for the *attribution* of
properties to individuals. That is so, but they do not use it *instead
of* "is". Spanish works pretty much like English here in the use of the
so-called "is" of attribution -- "John is happy" is translated as "John
es feliz", "es", of course, being the third person conjugation of "ser",
"to be". However, as in English (and most western languages), one can
use "has" to attribute a property to an individual by using an
adjectival nominalization, that is, the nominal form of an adjective.
Thus, in English, we can say (somewhat awkwardly) "John has happiness".
And in Spanish (I think -- very rusty here), "John tiene felicidad".
But the grammar of these two forms of attribution is quite different and
the use of "has" for attribution is rather stilted and uncommon. There
is a fairly extensive body of literature on this and related topics in
linguistics and logic that I can point you to if you are interested. (08)
> "done" is used in many modern programming languages. (09)
So I've heard. ;-) (010)
-chris (011)
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