From: Jon Hanna (jon@hackcraft.net)
Date: Mon Jan 18 2010 - 11:08:17 CST
Julian Bradfield wrote:
> 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...).
Sadly, I missed pointing out that at the step where I've started
tokenising parts of words I can then extend the same approach into
sentences that do not repeat the same word. Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory
is beyond my level of mathematical fluency, but I imagine that if
English has that property, then so does the extension I propose of this
localisation system.
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