[sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

Steve Pepper pepper.steve at gmail.com
Thu Jan 31 04:44:00 EST 2008


A couple of points on Xuân’s reply to Prof. Lee's statement that
the syntax proposed by Lars Heuer is "HORRIFIC" for Koreans:

First of all, Prof. Lee pointed this out at the meeting in
Kyoto. He was supported there by others in the Korean
delegation, by the Japanese delegation and by others who had
some knowledge of SOV languages. (To be precise, the Japanese
stated that the situation was not quite the same for them, but
that they fully understood and supported the needs expressed by
the Koreans.) It has therefore already been established that
what Prof. Lee wrote is not just his "personal bias".

Secondly, I raised the idea of a CTM that was more "culturally
neutral" in terms of word order at the WG meeting in Montreal in
2006, [1] suggesting a kind of "Universal Grammar CTM" with the
ability to set parameters, for example for head-first/head-last
order (i.e. VO vs. OV). It turned out that this wouldn’t help
very much and the idea was abandoned. (The reasons for this, it
appears, can only be fully understood by someone fluent in
Japanese or Korean.)

The conclusion drawn by the Working Group in Kyoto is that we
need to emphasize those aspects of language (spoken or written)
that are truly universal and play down those that are cultural,
or specific to a particular family of languages. The use of
punctuation is one such universal. As I wrote in an earlier
posting, one of the advantages of the semi-colons and commas is
that their purpose can be understood by any literate person.

Steve

[1] http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0786.pdf s.27-31
 
--
Conference Chair, Topic Maps 2008
Oslo, April 2-4 2008
www.topicmaps.com


________________________________________
From: sc34wg3-bounces at isotopicmaps.org
[mailto:sc34wg3-bounces at isotopicmaps.org] On Behalf Of Xuân
Baldauf
Sent: 30 January 2008 22:47
To: Discussion of ISO/IEC 13250 Topic Maps
Cc: rho at devc.at
Subject: Re: [sc34wg3] CTM: Realistic use cases or toy examples?

Jaeho Lee wrote:

| If the topic maps on the left column in the comparison list
| are written, for example in Korean, it would be really cryptic
| because it doesn't give enough clue to distinguish between
| associations and topics.
|
| To me and probably to people in other cultures, the left
| column is HORRIFIC to read. Structural boundaries such as
| semi-colons are definitely needed for readability, IMHO, even
| in English.
  
I think your point of cultural bias regarding what makes a
language readable is quite valid.  However, if there is only one
person telling some language instance is horrific to read, it is
indistinguishable from personal bias. ;-) So it would be nice if
we could gather input from more people with non-Germanic
cultural background (i.e. Japanese? Chinese? ).

[...]



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