Re: Another view on analysis and ER

From: mAsterdam <mAsterdam_at_vrijdag.org>
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:45:24 +0100
Message-ID: <4759afb9$0$231$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>

David Cressey wrote:
> mAsterdam wrote:

>> David Cressey wrote:

>

>>> 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.
>

Thanks.

[snip]

>>> 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.

Deep and rich.

> 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.

Yes. Yet, facts in shared databases make a comparativly simple subset of what can be expressed in a narrative way.

Development of a database for a multilingual organization does face the requirement that the extension should be language-neutral. This seems more achievable than automatic translation. Received on Fri Dec 07 2007 - 14:45:24 CST