81–90 of 199 posts
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Actually, Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe, which is what makes it so good.
> Lithuanian is the most archaic language in Europe By what metric? > which is what makes it so good By what metric?
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When you say "evaluated", then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used. For example, we can evaluate logic programs top down, bottom up, using various forms of resolution etc. Mercury will reorder goals automatically to satisfy certain mode constraints etc. Importantly, the actual meaning of a logic program in the sense of solutions it describes are not influenc…
> then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used. Yes, but Prolog specifies a particular concrete evaluation strategy, and you have to rely on it to write practical programs.
For example, an increasing number of Prolog systems provide, in addition to SLDNF resolution (which is the the default evaluation strategy), also SLG resolution (tabling) as an evaluation strategy with different termination and performance characteristics.
These different strategies are very useful in practical programs, and it would be limiting if one were to prevent them by using extra-logical predicates.
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Well I don't agree with the modernist/empiricist worldview that question stems from. I think some things are qualitative, and other things are quantitative. The Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but my sketches aren't. If I were to design an experiment, I might learn what molecules are moving or how many people agree with me, but that wouldn't change what I know about the elegance of the paintings (or languages). Latin is…
OK, if your aesthetic preference is such that you find languages with complicated noun morphology more beautiful than those with complicated word-order constraints, that's fine. But if we're just talking about personal taste, there's no real reason to debate it with other people, since it's arbitrary. > Its over-dependence on word order also makes it easier to construct grammatically ambiguous statements, leading to…
> When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. I think Greek fits this bill much better. Archimedes spoke Greek; Marcellus spoke Latin. Plato and the scholarchs spoke Greek; Sulla, who burned the Academy, spoke Latin. Euclid, Ptolemy, Chyrippus, and Eratosthenes spoke Greek. The intellectual achieveme…
Also I don't understand your point about Western Civilization barely surviving Roman conquest – surely much worse things could have befallen the Greek heritage?
A totally different comment: any one know if arbitrary word order so important feature of Latin as a language, why no such thing in computer language. Lisp is Most flexible I suppose but basically it is fixed form (verb x). Whatever verb is it governs how x is interpret. Also you cannot eliminate (). Hence the basic and simple structure is fixed. Not sure any use of arbitrary word order.
Latin's (or Ancient Greek's, or Hungarian's) ability to reorder words because of inflectional endings is not absolute; you still have things like subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, even though they're not as ubiquitous as in Romance languages or English. You can reorder things locally, but not over long distances, and some things have to move together.
Interestingly, lots of programming languages have the freedom to reorder big chunks over long distances without altering the meaning, while I've never used a natural language that had that feature. I think the reason for the large-scale freedom is mostly that in programming languages you are usually defining named entities (subroutines, methods, classes, variables, constants, inference rules, predicates, rewrite rules, and whatnot) that the rest of the program interacts with by mentioning their names.
Languages with named arguments allow you to reorder named argument lists freely. My own Bicicleta takes that to somewhat of an extreme and also allows it within "subroutines", depending on dataflow dependencies to drive sequencing.
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> then this is a procedural aspect that depends on the concrete evaluation strategy that is being used. Yes, but Prolog specifies a particular concrete evaluation strategy, and you have to rely on it to write practical programs.
The way I see it, a key attraction of Prolog and logic programming languages in general is that different evaluation strategies are possible, and in fact also starting to be implemented in several systems to various degrees. For example, an increasing number of Prolog systems provide, in addition to SLDNF resolution (which is the the default evaluation strategy), also SLG resolution (tabling) as an evaluation strateg…
> When we study Latin, we must study it for one fundamental reason: because it is the language of a civilization; because the Western world was created on its back. I think Greek fits this bill much better. Archimedes spoke Greek; Marcellus spoke Latin. Plato and the scholarchs spoke Greek; Sulla, who burned the Academy, spoke Latin. Euclid, Ptolemy, Chyrippus, and Eratosthenes spoke Greek. The intellectual achieveme…
Well, people like St Augustine, Erasmus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Gauss and so on also kinda matter, and even if there is no disputing that Ancient Greece was intellectually far more important than Ancient Rome, the fact that Ancient Greek has probably less of 100 years worth of really important stuff (ignoring Homer) whilst Latin was used by the world's foremost minds for centuries (as you note) also must count f…
We could imagine Europe without a Dark Age, and we could imagine a world where the progress of European science did not end even before the Dark Age began. What would that world look like? I don't mean to suggest that it would be a matter of sweetness and light — Athens, too, had its share of slavery, wars of aggression, and political persecution, to say nothing of damned Lacedaemon — but what if intellectual and cultural progress in Europe hadn't halted and even gone backwards for more than a millennium?
Too, Ancient Greek's heyday was not a mere century. Basilios Bessarion, who taught Johannes Argyropoulos in Padova, lived in the 15th century, around the time of the fall of Constantinople. The wrestler Plato was born around 428 BC; his Academy survived until Sulla chopped it down in 84 BCE. Ptolemy didn't live until the second century CE. From Plato's birth to the fall of Constantinople was almost 1900 years. I think that's substantially more than 100 years of really important stuff.
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lingering brings other ideas besides "long". something like "fading but still there". does not seem appropriate for the text
Doesn't "lingering" have a connotation of "lasting longer than it should" when associated with a negative aspect? E.g. "lingering pain", "lingering stench".
Afaik, it means mostly something like "still there, after all that time"
Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary Lots of languages are like this. Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, etc. And those are just the ones that I know. Janu miluje Petr. -- PETR loves Jana. Petr miluje Janu. -- Petr loves JANA. Petr Janu miluje. -- Petr LOVES Jana. etc etc The only people who say that Latin is uniquely flexible are those people with no experience i…
Latin is the most powerful natural language I know. The reason is that the grammar is so developed that the word order is essentially arbitrary, and that, together with other grammatical features, gives rise to a method I have not seen so fully realized in any other language: It allows you to express the content in such a way that the way you express it matches the content. For example, consider the verses: Daedalus…
The flexible word order is shared with some other highly inflected languages, including Russian and ancient Greek. (I haven't studied Russian, so I don't know exactly how flexible the word order is.) In Latin the arbitrariness of the word order doesn't usually extend to prepositions (that's why they're called prae-positiones), which should usually immediately precede, and almost never follow, the words they govern. T…
http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/faculty/amba/PUBLICATIONS/papers...