From: Clwinbery@aol.com
Date: Thu Jul 26 2001 - 12:38:31 EDT
In a message dated 7/26/01 3:09:24 PM, Jonathan.Robie@SoftwareAG-USA.com
writes:
>Ken wrote a very interesting message that explains how he is thinking about
>grammatical categories and meaning quite well, and relates this to computer
>languages.
>I currently make a living largely by designing computer languages (see
>http://www.w3.org/tr/xquery), and I will soon be giving a presentation
>on the relationship between syntactic query languages and semantic systems
>like RDF (the talk is called "The Syntactic Web", and I will be presenting
>it in Montreal in mid-August), so I have been thinking about some of the
>issues Ken raises.
>In a well designed computer language, there is very little ambiguity in
>the syntax. The languages that I design are LL(1), which means that if you
>read from left-to-right, any given token may be ambiguous, but looking at the
>next one will always clear up the ambiguity. The syntax of the language
>does not tell you the semantics - that's done either in the specification,
>in some formal language such as inference notation, or in code that is
>associated with the productions. However, the semantics can be tightly
>and unambiguously associated with the productions of the grammar.
>Neither English or Greek is like that. The form of a sentence is often
>ambiguous, to the great joy of those of us who like puns:
>- I see, said the blind man, who picked up his hammer and saw.
>- Those men are flying machines.
>- I knew a man with a wooden leg named Sam. (What was the name of his other
leg?)
>- "Your peace is beyond me; I rest in your peace. I hold to the love that
>I cannot grasp."
>Or consider the following example from yesterday's email:
>
> Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 03:28:05 -0500
> From: "Travelocity Member Services" <feedback@travelocity.com>
> Subject: Fly for Less this Summer and Fall
>
>These sentences are all ambiguous in their form. A computer parser can
>not tell you what they mean. If I designed a language that had this kind of
>ambiguity, people would send me email notifying me of the bug that I would
>then fix.
>
>What Ken is asking for is quite reasonable - he would like Greek, and
>probably also English, to be a "good language", as computer people define
>this. He wants to know the rules that determine the semantics of the
language:
>
>> Now, if you don't like that position, then provide
>>a meaningful, mediating view that enables someone who
>>has read a fair amount of different kinds of Greek to
>>determine not the category, which is illusory I'm
>>told, but the function of the genitive modifier.
>>That's all I'm asking for. Since the syntax isn't
>>determinative (and I never, ever urged otherwise), how
>>can one determine the semantic significance besides
>>trusting one's gut? I am not being facetious. I've
>>seen lots of posts about the evilness/uselessness of
>>grammatical categories. So I "call" as I gather they
>>say in poker (never played it so I don't know).
>The categories are a way of explaining, after the fact, how a particular
>person chose to classify an instance of, say, the Genitive. They are
>explanatory tools. If I say that a particular use of the genitive is
>subjective or objective, and you know what those words mean, then you know
>how I have decided to interpret that instance, and you can take a look
>at the text and tell me whether you agree. The fact that these categories
>have names make some people think that they define the True Meaning of Greek
>in some deep way, but telling you the category is really no different from
>saying that this particular instance seems to work like the English phrase
>"Man of Steel" rather than the English phrase "Bucket of Water". In either
>case, you can look at the Greek sentence and legitimately disagree with
>me.
>
>We are dealing with human language here. And for some deep reason that goes
>beyond anything I can put into words, English or Greek are much better
>than Java or XQuery when we need to express a psalm, a prayer, a parable, or
>a vision.
>
I would like to second what Jonathan has said. He has an excellent
understanding of language and what we try to do in the entire hermeneutical
task.
Syntax as I have tried to do it is a descriptive process in which I try and
reveal what I see in the writers mind using what the writer wrote in another
culture, on another continent, 2000 years ago. I would love to be able to be
100% sure of what I think Paul meant by what he wrote, but that is a pipe
dream.
I am open to the charge that some of my descriptive categories reflect the
problems of Englishing Paul's ideas. That is simply because translation
always involves two languages and with GNT sometimes 3 or 4 languages. I also
include some aspects of the history, culture, religion, etc. from the 1st
century. That is hard work but necessary I think.
So the use of categories (some are better or worse than others) seems to me
to be necessary. Much of what I read in the new linquistics is terminology
that says the same thing that has already been said but in different terms. I
find it interesting but still do not see that it makes the task any easier or
shorter.
One reason we try and limit the list to Greek grammar and linquistics is
because the Spiritual and theological dimension of what we do is even more
difficult to define, hence the great variety of opinions by listers.
I would say that if syntactical categories are illegitimate (are totally
unrelated to semantics) as descriptive tools, we have very little to discuss
on this forum the way it is set up. How do we get away from the illegitimate
use of categories? Learn and read, read and learn until we pass over the
Jordan!
Carlton Winbery
Louisiana College
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