Re: [ontolog-forum] One new English word every 98 minutes

Hugh,
the response is interspersed.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hugh Glaser" <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: "Azamat" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>; "[ontolog-forum]" 
<ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>; "SW-forum" <semantic-web@w3.org>
Cc: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] One new English word every 98 minutes


On 11/06/2009 18:20, "Azamat" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy> wrote:

> Adrian, its really a funny service.
>
> I concur with John that monitoring "the number of words in the English
> Language" is an otiose and confusing job. For it is no more than a
> statistical count of new meaning situations: "each word was analyzed to
Perhaps that should read "new meaning situations *in English*"?

AA: Yes, but only as the language expressions of real world situations. 
That's distinction is critical. Human beings discover new real meanings or 
create them themselves by acting, intelligently or unintelligently. Consider 
the example of 1,000,001 word 'financial tsunami'. The world had this 
disastrous event, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Latter the world had have 
got the 2007-200? global financial crisis, as a result of inventing the 
senseless financial system, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932009. As i 
mentioned, such newfound aspects of the world are labeled and registered as 
language constructions: terms and words and phrases and compounds and 
sentences, be it Persian, Russian, Chinese, English, or any formal 
languages, mostly using the standard semantic techniques of meaning-change 
processes: specialization and generalization, radiation, transference or 
projection, degrading and upgrading, and tropes as hyperbole, figurative 
extension, etc. Using a rhetorical figure of simile, one may construct a 
figurative comparison: "the financial crisis is like a tsunami", thus 
creating the new meaning (be it in the mind only) basing on the real 
situations.
I believe there must be knowledge applications doing this automatically, 
like the analogical reasoning machine produced by John Sowa's Company, 
VivoMind Intelligence, http://www.vivomind.com/. Although, i don't know do 
they distinguish metaphor and simile as two kinds of comparison.

HG: And given that URIs are meant to be language agnostic (even opaque), it 
is
not clear to me how many of these "new" words would result in new URIs in a
Semantic Web sense.

AA: That's a justified and serious concern. For the existent URIs 
specificationshardly meeting this situation, imho.  We, in the company, 
engaged in working out the ontological URIs with inherent semantics.

HG: And as the proportion of English as the language used on the web has 
been
declining for many years, considering "meaning" as relating to English words
is perhaps a bit strange.
Once the Chinese and Spanish language communities start to generate more
URIs than they have hitherto, we may see an explosion in English phrases
trying to describe (and hence label), for example, Chinese idioms.
AA: Sure. It will be a big URIs mess, we will call it the Global 
Identification Crisis, 2009-. That's why the global indentification system 
stands in urgent need to be semanticized and ontologized, sorry for the 
neologisms.
There is a thought-provoking, engaging article on this topic, very useful to 
read, titled "in Defence of Ambiguity", even if i would put different 
semantic assumptions for building a universal identification scheme, 
http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=8113.

Regards
Azamat
http://www.semanticwww.com

Received on Friday, 12 June 2009 07:49:14 UTC