Robert.Frederking%CMU-CS-CAD@sri-unix.UUCP (10/19/83)
One comment and two meta-comments:
Re: the validity of grammars: almost no one claims that grammatical
phenomena don't exist (even Schank doesn't go that far). What the
argument generally is about is whether one should, as the first step
in understanding an input, build a grammatical tree, without any (or
much) information from either semantics or the current
conversational context. One side wants to do grammar first, by
itself, and then the other stuff, whereas the other side wants to try
to use all available knowledge right from the start. Of course, there
are folks taking extreme positions on both sides, and people
sometimes get a bit carried away in the heat of an argument.
Re: Greek: As a general rule, it would be helpful if people who send in
messages containing non-English phrases included translations. I
cannot judge the validity of the Macaroni argument, since I don't
completely understand either example. One might argue that I should
learn Greek, but I think expecting me to know Maori grammatical
classes is stretching things a bit.
Re: invective: Even if the reference to Yahweh was meant as a childhood
opinion which has mellowed with age, I object to statements of the
form "this same wonderful god... tortured and burned..." etc.
Perhaps it was a typo. As we all know, people have tortured and
burnt other people for all sorts of reasons (including what sort of
political/economic systems small Asian countries should have), and I
found the statement offensive.