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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: WARNING  Popperesque Paradigm shift approaches
In-Reply-To: Mike Wright's message of Fri, 13 Dec 1996 14:41:37 -0700
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Date: Sat, 14 Dec 1996 00:16:22 GMT
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In article <32B1CD8A.217C@scruznet.com> Mike Wright <darwin@scruznet.com>
writes:

>On the other hand, I understand that word order is irrelevant to the classical
>Latin versions of these sentences, since the relationship of each of the nouns
>to the verb is shown by inflection. What kind of mechanism would you posit
>that would not require a knowledge of these syntactical factors in order to
>understand these sentences in various languages?

Actually, word order is highly relevant in Latin; it simply has a different
relevance than in English:

	Canis virum momordit.		The dog bit the man.
	Virum canis momordit.		It's the man that the dog bit.
	Momordit canis virum.		The dog BIT the man!
	Vir canem momordit.		The man bit the dog.
	Canem vir momordit.		It's the dog that the man bit.
	Momordit vir canem.		The man BIT the dog!

There are interpretations for the other orders, as well, but these are the most
common; the absolutely unmarked one is SOV.

But it's theoretically possible for a semantic net to capture these niceties,
probably (in my opinion) *more* easily in Latin than in the equivalent English.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
