Thursday, May 26, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The next generation knowledge tools
John,
Dr. John Lawler, a computational linguistics professor from U Mich at Ann Arbor saw a version of my Q matrix in 1987 and his response was: "Wow! You made it all the way through! I only managed to have some partial success in English.
“Well”, he said, “why not start the research (into sound symbolism) from a well-developed Semitic language (Arabic)?" I am still in contact with him and he hasn't changed his mind.
I believe that sounds--whether Chinese or Western--can be mapped to more developed mental elements and relationships of cognition and ontology. In Arabic, the alphabet corresponds to sounds 1 to 1, and this made my job easier.
I believe that there can be stagnating fundamentalism everywhere and at all poles, left/right, religious/atheist and so on. There is also rampant fundamentalism in knowledge science as Paul and others point out all too often.
Dr. Lawler was "chased out of town" for defying the dogmas for his research into "athematic metaphors" (br-, dr- etc.). Other professors confirmed my research but would not go on record, and they pointed out that I am lucky to be independent from academia and free to express myself as I wish.
Tom