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Article 2374 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: escheire@elara.mitre.org (Eric Scheirer)
Subject: Re: Machine Translation (was re: Searle's respons
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In article <1991Dec21.164621.6848@husc3.harvard.edu>, zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:
|> 
|> On the other hand, you might wish to maintain that the semantic properties
|> of two natural languages may be isomorphic, inducing a syntactical
|> isomorphism; or perhaps that in the absense of such isomorphism, the
|> synonymy transformation might be coextensive with some syntactical
|> manipulation.  The fallaciousness of this claim can be seen even in cases
|> of closely related languages like English and French, by considering, e.g.
|> the French word `conscience', ambiguously translatable as `conscience' or
|> `consciousness'.  Furthermore, the question of figurative meaning transfer
|> (e.g. as evidenced in the use of metaphor, irony, etc.)  is rightly
|> considered to be intractable not only by purely syntactic, but even by
|> semantic means.

I think your idea of "isomorphic" is a little too strict as pertains to semantic
entities.  Certainly, you don't want to claim that there are _ideas_ expressible
in French but not English, or vice versa, or between (most) any pair of natural
languages.   I don't want to say (I don't know how you feel about this) that the
semantic properties of different languages are _different_, let alone 
non-isomorphic.  Much formal theory of extensional sentence-level semantics
treats the semantic domain as constant, where meaning is built up from
the syntactic properties of the language in question.

Of course, as you point out, lexical semantics are a much harder question.
Idiom should probably be considered a subclass of the lexicon (no downward
extensionality for idiom).
------

Eric Scheirer -- Cornell University / The MITRE Corporation
(607) 253-2431 / HORJ@vax5.cit.cornell.edu

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