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Article 4728 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Language as Technology: A Phenomenological Study
Message-ID: <1992Mar25.225555.41966@spss.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1992 22:55:55 GMT
References: <1992Mar25.080515.20086@a.cs.okstate.edu> <1992Mar25.185007.21788@mp.cs.niu.edu>
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In article <1992Mar25.185007.21788@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>  The most important aspect of human language is that it is a digital system.

I presume you mean "mostly digital", or "in the aspects which interest me,
digital"?  Language does have analog features: e.g. stress, pitch, tempo,
length of pauses, intonation contours.

>  Ideas can be transmitted with body language, physical demonstration,
>etc.  You don't need language for that.  Digital language allows
>modelling/simulation, and allows the modelling to be separated from
>physical artifacts.  In effect this makes abstract ideas possible.  

What's unclear to me in your remarks is why the digital nature of language
is necessary for modelling or for abstract ideas.  Simulation is often
just as possible and just as symbolic with analog methods: e.g. you
could model voltage with water pressure; or you use brightness on a CRT
to represent some numerical quantity.  And I don't understand the
relation of abstraction to digitality at all.

>Digital
>language also greatly enhances memory quality and memory density [compare
>the density and quality of a conventional audio tape and a DAT].

This seems simply false; digital HDTV, requiring a billion bits per image,
only becomes efficient relative to analog competitors once a good deal of
sophisticated data compression has been done.


