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Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme revisited

To: "Barkmeyer, Edward J" <edward.barkmeyer@xxxxxxxx>, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Ron Wheeler <rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2013 14:35:28 -0500
Message-id: <52AF5600.2060208@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 16/12/2013 1:52 PM, Barkmeyer, Edward J wrote:
> Ron,
>
> What makes you think that all the verbs except 'to be' and 'to have' "got 
>simplified"?
> Many of the older verbs in all languages still retain "irregular forms".  In 
>English, consider:  Go, went, gone, or lie, lay, lain.  (Go is a favorite, 
>along with carry, do, have, sit, stand, lie, give, and verbs of placing.)  As 
>I recall, the Stanford Parts of Speech dictionary includes about 100 irregular 
>verbs.
I sit, you sit, he sits, we sit, you sit, they sit.
That is what I was referring to.    (01)

My quote "This is countered a bit by the "anything goes" rule for making up the 
plural
forms for common nouns and past tenses for verbs."
relates to what you are discussing.    (02)

> I think linguists generally agree that "irregular forms" are commonly 
>associated with verbs (and, to a lesser extent, nouns) that early speakers 
>(e.g., peasants and traders) actually used.  So, they carry elements of 
>mergers with other words of similar sense and former morphological rules for 
>formation of intent.  The 'simplified rules' were also based on morphological 
>rules of approximately the same time, but only for some verbs.  Because they 
>were simple, those rules were adopted for newly coined verbs when they were 
>ADDED to the language.
>
> In Germanic languages, the past simple of some verbs was formed by adding -d 
>or -t or -te, but in other verbs, it was formed by altering the principal 
>vowel (most of them were on syllable anyway).  In a similar way, in Anglo 
>Saxon, the past participle was usually formed by adding -en, but at some point 
>English speakers stopped distinguishing the past form from the past participle 
>form -- a simplified language practice -- in most cases.  "gone" and "lain"  
>and "done" and "given" are holdovers, because everyone used those words.
>
> Languages change over time.  In general, they become more regular and more 
>economical, because there is a larger set of concepts that need to be 
>conveyed, and a larger populace whose utterances need to be comprehensible to 
>each other.  Older languages are simpler than younger languages, and older 
>forms of current languages are more complicated than the current ones.
>
> (Being careful, I ascribe the above to a brief education in linguistics 50 
>years ago, and one or two books I have read since.  Current theory may be 
>different.)
>
> -Ed
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ron Wheeler
>> Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2013 8:24 AM
>> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme revisited
>>
>> A bit off topic but I have always wondered about a couple of odd English
>> language characteristics
>>
>> 1) When and how did it lose genders for nouns?
>>
>> 2) When and how did all the verbs except "to be" and "to have" get
>> simplified?
>> The requirement for an "s" at the end of the verb in the third person 
>singular
>> is another oddity.
>>
>> These are major departures from the root languages.
>>
>> They make the language a lot easier to learn.
>> This is countered a bit by the "anything goes" rule for making up the plural
>> forms for common nouns and past tenses for verbs.
>>
>> Ron
>>
>> On 13/12/2013 11:32 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
>>> Ed,
>>>
>>> All languages evolve.  But they have different structures, which may
>>> make certain kinds of expressions shorter and simpler than others.
>>>
>>>> What you think is significant about English right now was true of
>>>> French 300 years ago and may be true of Chinese in 2050.
>>>> It is all about language evolution, which is the central theme.
>>> The fact that English happens to be the dominant language now and
>>> French was dominant a few centuries ago is definitely *not* what I was
>>> trying to explain.
>>>
>>> For parallels, look at Japanese and Chinese.  Japanese scribes learned
>>> Chinese characters with their pronunciation in a dialect of Chinese.
>>> When they used them to write Japanese, they pronounced them in
>>> Japanese -- except in compounds.  The character for 'new' is
>>> pronounced in Japanese as /atarashi/ when used as an adjective by
>>> itself.  But in compounds, it's pronounced in Chinese as /shin/.
>>> The area of Tokyo named Shinjuku has three Chinese words and
>>> characters for 'new hotel district'.  Nobody pronounces those three
>>> characters with the native Japanese pronunciation.
>>>
>>> This is an example of the way a clash of languages changed Japanese.
>>> It caused Japanese to adopt the Chinese paradigm for coining new
>>> words, and weakened the native Japanese paradigms.  However, Japanese
>>> does have various grammatical morphemes.  So they developed the
>>> syllabic hiragana and katakana to express those forms.
>>>
>>> When the Japanese opened up to the wider world, they started to borrow
>>> many new words from western languages, which they spelled in katakana.
>>> The character for ju (a kind of hotel) in Shinjuku is pronounced
>>> /yadoya/ in native Japanese.  When they began to build western-style
>>> hotels, they borrowed the western word, which is pronounced /hoteru/.
>>>
>>> For the word 'taxi', the Japanese use syllabic katakana to spell
>>> /takushi/.  For 'bus', they say /basu/.  For taxi, the Chinese
>>> themselves say chu-zu-qi-che (for-hire-energy-vehicle).  For bus, they
>>> say gong-gong-qi-che (public-use-energy-vehicle).  But in context,
>>> they rarely use those compounds.  Instead, they'll say "Call me a che"
>>> -- i.e., taxi.  Or they'll say "I'm waiting for the che" -- i.e., bus.
>>>
>>> This is the point I was trying to make:  the changes to Japanese
>>> caused by its clash with Chinese weakened its native methods for
>>> coining new words.  That also made it more receptive to borrowing
>>> words from other languages.  But Chinese uses its own resources to
>>> coin new compounds.
>>>
>>> EJB
>>>> An-ge-stell-t-er is literally 'in-stall-d-er' -- a person who is 'put
>>>> in a place' in an organization.  The French origin of em-ploy-ee
>>>> could be translated in-use-d, or in-place-d, a participial adjective
>>>> taken as a noun.
>>> I agree.  But note three points:  (1) the clash with Danish caused the
>>> Anglo-Saxon paradigms to be weakened; (2) the clash with French
>>> introduced a completely different paradigm; and (3) the university
>>> system, which taught Latin (and some Greek) to anyone who did any
>>> significant amount of writing.
>>>
>>> As a result of these clashes, Anglo-Saxon compounds such as the
>>> equivalent of 'heaven-candle' were lost.  Anyone who wrote anything
>>> more than sales receipts used their university training to write
>>> 'celestial spheres'.
>>>
>>>> And we have coined similar terms, like 'installer' and 'mortgagee'.
>>>>
>>>> As we can see, rather than losing this technique for vocabulary
>>>> extension to the French influence, English simply gained the
>>>> mechanisms of the second language as well.
>>> No.  When there are multiple paradigms for word formation, they tend
>>> to become moribund or drastically simplified.  English retained a few,
>>> but most of them are not as productive as they were in their original
>>> languages.  The Germanic -er is still fairly productive in English,
>>> but -ee is rarely used except for words borrowed from French.
>>>
>>> The issues that cause one language or another to become dominant are
>>> very different from those that make it easy for a language to borrow
>>> new terms.
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>>
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>>
>> --
>> Ron Wheeler
>> President
>> Artifact Software Inc
>> email: rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> skype: ronaldmwheeler
>> phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
>>
>>
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>>    (03)


-- 
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102    (04)


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