Re: Localizable sentences are in a PUA for development purposes (from Re: off-topic discussions)

From: Julian Bradfield (jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jan 18 2010 - 10:36:58 CST

  • Next message: Jon Hanna: "Re: Localizable sentences are in a PUA for development purposes (from Re: off-topic discussions)"

    On 2010-01-18, Jon Hanna <jon@hackcraft.net> wrote:
    > Theoretically though, the length of a sentence is boundless. We know of
    > course that we can create an English sentence with any number (n > 0) of
    > occurrences of the word "buffalo" and result in a grammatically correct,
    > sentence, albeit an ambiguous one for higher values of n.
    >
    > This alone gives us an infinite number of sentences where no word is
    > used other than "buffalo". In languages where there is no homophones

    You're not ambitious enough!
    Get hold of Langendoen and Postal, "The Vastness of Natural Languages".
    Their thesis is that English (etc.) has universe-many sentences, where we
    mean the ZFC universe.
    Even William would have difficulty with that (but trying might keep
    him quiet for a while...). 

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