Monday, March 30, 2009

Lots of hobby-linguists, especially among fans of auxiliary and logical languages, and also among fans of natural languages seem to think that double negatives are an illogical and ugly thing. Fans of logic seem to think it violates some need for clarity of thought, and that this is because it's fundamentally illogical somehow. On the other hand, people interested in naturalism seem to think it is a proof that language is something completely divorced from logic.

Both of these notions are wrong. Of course, they both stem from the thought that not(not(x)) must equal x, and that if it equals x the system no longer is logical.

Granted, language is not fully logical - often, phrases get meanings that are somewhat divorced from the meaning of the subcomponents; but this is mostly because of how we think - we don't think fully logically all the time, but rather in a fuzzy cloud of ideas and associations and connections, and we want to convey a likeness of this cloud, rather than an exact copy of a chain of very clearly delineated ideas. Most of the quirks of language probably come from how our brains work, and how it matches patterns, and will, for instance, associate a phrase more with a situation than with the meaning of the phrase, or somesuch, after some time. Given some thought, it's obvious that the communication between systems that works on such premises, where the protocols for communication are somewhat fluid, where the information often isn't even completely formalizeable, etc, will be somewhat illogical; yet, it often is surprisingly logical, and without some level of logic in it, it would get very difficult to use at all.

But anyways, back to double negation. It's assumed to be illogical, because in usual e.g. boolean algebra, !!x = x; analogously, in arithmetics, -(-(x)) = x; however, why should we assume that the negating function in a given language is -() or !()? Why not assume it is f(x) = 0x? What will be the value of f(f(f(f(x))))? yes, it's gonna be 0000x, which == 0x == 0. (Let's, for readability and parseability and clarity retain the x there.) Is multiplication by zero illogical because it doesn't alternate between x and 0, the way multiplication by -1 alternates between -x and x? Is this proof that maths is illogical?
No, it's not, but by extension, it's also disproof of one common proof that language is illogical, and I hope everyone would stop claiming that double negatives are illogical and therefore bad, or that they are illogical and therefore proof that language is illogical.

There are benefits to such a negating function as well - no need to keep track of how many negations there are stacked, since as long as there's at least one, the result will be negative; whereas for a system where negations cancel out, you need to keep track of whether you're negative or not at any given point. That is rather taxing.

However, I generally think the search for a totally logical language is misguided and fails to appreciate how our neural network handles information and thoughts.

Friday, March 20, 2009

I came across a post by Radius Solis on the ZBB which touched a topic I've generally not cared to think about, but being in need of some procrastination, I decided to think about it.

Here is the post:
"Hmm... I wonder. Various languages categorize nouns in various ways - by shape, by gender or animacy, by their utility to humans, by whether they are considered to be inherently possessed, and all sorts of other odds and ends. What languages, if any, categorize their verbs in a similar manner? And on what semantic basis? And where is the categorization marked?"

I would consider the Slavic motion verbs vs. other verbs such a distinction; these use the various prefixes (generally derived from prepositions) in a much more consistent way than do other verbs, and they have an added dimension in their aspectual system (altho' many grammars will state that this added distinction is not an aspect, I think it is close enough for this post to say that they have two axes of aspect whereas other verbs just have one).

I wouldn't be surprised, however, if for nouns, the categorization generally is fixed, and for verbs it's more generally derivative? So that, say, the closest analogy to 'by utility for humans', which I'd for no particular reason say is 'beneficialness for humans', the classification gets more tricky for verbs. Right, knives per se are very utilizeable by humans, but cutting ... can go both ways? Of course, a knife can be a bad thing as well in the wrong hand, ... do languages that classify nouns along utility have these classes as statical classes or do they permit changing stuff around?

As for classification along possession, shape, etc. The Slavic verbs of movement sort of go into the 'shape' slot, on some semantic grounds; verbs of movement have a specific sort of shape that other verbs might lack (altho' some verbs that indicate movement, iirc, don't qualify in some Slavlangs, so it's a rather exclusive club of verbs). Possession would make sense for verbs that mark actions that are culturally limited to various classes of people; maybe a verb that can only be performed by one gender would completely lack gender marking? Or have a different morpheme instead of the usual gender marking? Or whatever, but there's possibilities.
(C.f. the Russian verbs for marrying, where the verb for females actually is a prepositional phrase, za muzh / za muzhem, literally 'to behind the man' / 'behind the man', and for males, zhenitsya, 'to wife oneself [someone]' or whatever we'll literally translate it as - that is, to take oneself someone for wife' or such. That's an interesting classificational detail, altho' again, it's not really an entire classificational system, but nevertheless...)

This ties neatly in with one design idea I have for dairwueh, viz. the idea that the case of the object (accusative or some oblique case or partitive, not sure yet) marks whether the action is considered beneficial for the speaker (and listener, depending on in what standing they are) or not. Of course, this is neither derivational, nor a classification. It is rather just extra information added on.

Not a very coherent post, just some stuff that doesn't really add up to anything yet.