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Article 2379 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech,soc.culture.french
Subject: Re: Machine Translation
Summary: exact synonymy is rare
Keywords: synonymy, intensional vs. extensional, syntax vs. semantics
Message-ID: <1991Dec23.115503.6885@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 23 Dec 91 16:55:01 GMT
References: <1991Dec21.111459.2302@arizona.edu> <1991Dec21.164621.6848@husc3.harvard.edu> <1991Dec23.141719.27471@linus.mitre.org>
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In article <1991Dec23.141719.27471@linus.mitre.org> 
escheire@elara.mitre.org (Eric Scheirer) writes:

>In article <1991Dec21.164621.6848@husc3.harvard.edu>, 
>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

MZ:
>|> 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.

ES:
>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.

Why not?  For many years, I have wondered about thr proper way to express
in English idiom `-- La conscience dans le Mal!' ("L'Irr\'em\'ediable") and
`La vie en beau!' ("Le Mauvais vitrier") of Baudelaire.  Surely their
meaning can be conveyed by lengthy paraphrase, but the exact sense of the
words seems not to be expressible in English.

ES:
>                                      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.  

Personally I favor intensional semantics, whence my insistence on exact
synonymy, and observation that it rarely obtains.

ES:
>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).

All natural discourse is idiomatic, to the extent that it is rhetorical.
"En effet je suis persuad\'e qu'i se fait plus de figures en un seul jour
de march\'e \`a la halle, qu'il ne s'en fait en plusieurs jours
d'assembl\'ees acad\'emiques." (Dumarsais)

>------
>
>Eric Scheirer -- Cornell University / The MITRE Corporation
>(607) 253-2431 / HORJ@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
>
>There are three kinds of people in the world:
>  1. Those who know how many kinds of people there are in the world;
>  2. Those who don't.


