Re: Another view on analysis and ER

From: David Cressey <cressey73_at_verizon.net>
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:08:55 GMT
Message-ID: <bTg6j.116$Bg7.57_at_trndny07>


"mAsterdam" <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org> wrote in message news:47597326$0$227$e4fe514c_at_news.xs4all.nl...
> David Cressey schreef:

> > To a Spanish speaker, the following are two different facts:
> > "Juan es loco."
> > "Juan está loco."

In casual conversation, I would say "John is crazy" for either one of them. But they don't express the same fact. For the first one, if John were to be not crazy tomorrow, it would be a sign of a most unusual and unexpected recovery from a chronic condition. For the second one, if John were not crazy tomorrow, it would probably mean that he went through a psychotic episode of short duration.

>
> What do they mean? My Spanish sucks.
>

> > Does this mean that the content of the database is different, depending
on
> > the first language of the observer?
>
> One requirement for a database can be:
> make sure that the content is language-neutral.
>

This could get into some deep waters. The linguists and programmers who have attempted to perform automatic translation between two natural languages have repeatedly come up against the obstacle that a language neutral scheme for expressing human thought is far more elusive than it seems. Received on Fri Dec 07 2007 - 20:08:55 CET

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