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b-hebrew - Re: b-hebrew digest: December 13, 1999

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: Bill Rea <cctr114 AT its.canterbury.ac.nz>
  • To: b-hebrew AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: b-hebrew digest: December 13, 1999
  • Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 09:19:43 +1300 (NZDT)


Dave Washburn wrote:-

>If he means "precise" in mathematical terms, I agree. However,
>most English speakers intuitively know the difference between
>"bald," "balding" and "not bald." While these ideas can't be
>quantified in terms of how many hairs are the upper and lower
>limits of each, we know examples of each one when we see them
>(one of my uncles was bald, another was balding, and my father
>was not bald). This raises the related question of how far we can
>legitimately take mathematical quantification in linguistics. I tend
>to disagree sharply with most other generative grammarians on this
>point, and it's a big reason why I rejected Government-Binding and
>most everything that has ensued from it.

There is a relatively new branch of mathematics dealing with fuzzy sets
and fuzzy logic which was created to handle these types of problems.
A quick example. While we know that a whale is not a fish, there is
something rather fish-like about a whale, so in terms of a fuzzy
set we might assign a whale to being 80% a member of the set of
fish.

I don't know if fuzzy sets and logic have been applied to languages
such as Hebrew, but there is no reason why it shouldn't.

Bill Rea, Information Technology Services, University of Canterbury \_
E-Mail b dot rea at its dot canterbury dot ac dot nz </ New
Phone 64-3-364-2331, Fax 64-3-364-2332 /)
Zealand
Unix Systems Administrator (/'



  • Re: b-hebrew digest: December 13, 1999, Bill Rea, 12/14/1999

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