From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@md.chalmers.se)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 15:26:01 EDT
> > > > - Ø [LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE] and ø [LATIN
> > > SMALL LETTER O
> > > > WITH STROKE] are both ruled out as their semantics is
> > > totally wrong.
> >
> > Not at all (as seen by example Jarkko quoted!). In Danish
> > and Norwegian,
> > yes. But in Swedish and Finnish that vowel is written ö (and Ö).
>
> Uhhh, sorry, I must have not been clear enough. The symbol
> used in the Finnish
> morphology studies is NEITHER the ö nor the ø! It is used to
> mark the _absence_ of
> of a morphological unit:
>
> jalka -> jalan
>
> shows the change
>
> k -> EMPTY SET
Uhhh, sorry. I must have been less clear than I intended.
This neither indicates nor proves nothing of the kind. What IS shown
by your example is that a "slashed circlish shape" is used to explicitly
denote at least one kind of deletion in at least one context. I have no
problem with this being used for several different kinds of deletions, or
similar, or this being used by convention by many linguists; it's just that
your example does not show that. Note that there in no set here, not
even an empty one. To be nitpicking: the empty set IS something, it's not
nothing! The empty string is also something, but this something is a unit
for string concatenation.
What character this shape is, is harder to determine. Indeed,
the reference you give contradicts your statement. And I see no
problem in principle to have a letter, which in other contexts stand
for something else, in some specific contexts explicitly denote
deletion (of some kind, or similar).
Ok, maybe I'm overinterpreting your "shows" here. I think you mean
"indicates" rather than "proves". It may still be a borrowing from set
theoretic notation, and Ken gives an argument that that is at least
sometimes the case.
See further my responses to Peter and Ken.
/kent k
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