- From: John F. Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:52:43 -0400
- To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>
- CC: 'SW-forum' <semantic-web@w3.org>, metadataportals@yahoo.com
Rich and Milton,
My very brief comment about Wittgenstein's language games was not
intended to be a definition.
RC> By that definition, it would appear reasonable to say that the
> vocabulary of one language game is likely to be distinct in some ways
> from the vocabulary of another.
They could use different words, or they could use the same words for
different purposes. For further discussion, see
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/lgsema.pdf
Language Games, A Foundation for Semantics and Ontology
MP> Wouldn't it be a more constructive and less frustrating exercise
> if instead of focusing on the world's lingua franca and its ever
> expanding vocabulary, we focus on saving some endangered languages
> of which the vocabularies are fixed and for which putting them on
> the semantic web could help save them?
I certainly agree that saving as many languages as possible is extremely
important. Trying to understand human cognition by concentrating on
only one language would be as misguided as studying life by focusing
on only one species.
I wasn't endorsing the Language Monitor project, which is trying to
assign precision to something that is inherently imprecise.
John Sowa
Received on Thursday, 11 June 2009 02:53:18 UTC