tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post6874033266922940276..comments2024-03-25T14:25:25.102+00:00Comments on Poetry as Socio-proctology: Apurvata, Antarabhava & Backus Naur Part Iwindwheelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-78775869976126392202015-07-20T18:09:05.466+01:002015-07-20T18:09:05.466+01:00that should be 'the point here is that there i...that should be 'the point here is that there is no linear relationship between things like syntheticity/analyticity or fusional/agglutinative etc such that actual entropy can be algorithmically determined in advance.'<br />Thank you for your comment.windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-66907615567966403062015-07-18T13:08:23.823+01:002015-07-18T13:08:23.823+01:00'The point here is that there's on linear ...'The point here is that there's on linear relationship between things like syntheticity/analyticity or fusional/agglutinatve etc/ tp deter,ome actual entropy'<br />Kindly clarifyAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-47647631941087347072015-07-08T18:00:27.392+01:002015-07-08T18:00:27.392+01:00Sadly, Indologists nowadays promote the notion tha...Sadly, Indologists nowadays promote the notion that Hinduism is some sort of Nazism. Just as the Nazis had some good rocket scientists to spread their evil, so too did these evil 'Brahmins' have a secret weapon in the shape of Panini.<br />This is utterly foolish.<br />At one time, people believed in 'strong A.I'. Worse they thought that Language itself was some sort of Evil, Hegemonic force which turned its speakers into robots. Maths has progressed since then.<br />There is a very good blog by Bhupinder Singh Anand on putting Maths on the foundations of computability- i.e. making it the servant not the potential master of Humanity. Anand is not a Professor or getting any money from his research. He is typical of the large class of Indian people who have always existed whose labor is one of love, not academic politics.<br />Another inspiring example of this continuity in Indian culture is the 'Shataavadhani' Ganesh.<br />Such people understand that Knowledge is free for all who have interest in it. It is not something to be bought and sold.<br />windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-47531717588290446902015-07-08T17:56:43.932+01:002015-07-08T17:56:43.932+01:00Entropy should increase if inflection is fusional ...Entropy should increase if inflection is fusional because more information is getting compressed into a given character string. However, from the semantic point of view the opposite could be the case. Isolating languages like Chinese have higher entropy or Kolmogorov complexity. Agglutinative Persian, or Urdu 'ezafat' which just links two completely different words together without spelling out how they are related can exceed even polysynthetic languages in the quality of compression. Take 'kajdar-o-marez' as used by Iqbal- it means 'tilting the wine bottle in such a fashion that you appear to be generously filling the other person's glass but actually you are not letting even a drop flow'.<br />The point here is that there's on linear relationship between things like syntheticity/analyticity or fusional/agglutinatve etc/ tp deter,ome actual entropy. Still, if Chinese characters take longer to write, or if telegraph messages are more costly to send, then we would expect to see higher entropy for Chinese or telegraphese. In the latter case, newspaper reporters used the suffix '-wise' to compress word count and pay lower telegram charges. Some people argue that spoken English is becoming more inflected. <br />With liturgical or literary languages, clearly, both difficulty of composition and the cost of deciphering affect the fitness landscape. It makes sense for the 'i-language' speakers (i.e. those fluent in its expression) to have two or three different models in their head so that 'e-language' (i.e. what is heard or read) can have higher entropy without sacrificing fail-safe redundancy. On the one hand this means that 'collocations' or 'merisms' rather than words gain salience. One word suggests the one it is associated with. Panini himself uses this feature to get high Kolmogorov complexity without loss of robustness.<br />Another way of thinking of robustness has to do with epigenetic canalisation- i.e. the ability of a system to produce the same observable result from different configurations.<br />Here too we find a result militating against linear relationships between type of grammar and the entropy of the E language- viz Shannon's Source coding theorem.<br />Returning to your question, it may be that high inflection makes oratory more effective because it becomes more personal- i.e. we will expect to see it in thymotic Tribal Republics- however for legal scribes and bureaucrats the sort of passive construction we see in Classical Sanskrit is preferable. Auerbach, in 'Mimesis' has many texts illustrating notions like this however they are specific to Europe where military conquest was the primary motive force of cultural change.<br />In India, by contrast, Sanskrit spread by providing a peaceful solution to a Social co-ordination problem. It was not unique in this. What was unique is the manner in which it survived and regenerated itself without explicit support from either the State or the Market. amazingly, Religions which denied it any special place- e.g. Jainism and Buddhism- became vectors for its propagation. I should add, it was never the monopoly of some caste or Priestly cabal or bunch of aristocratic gangsters.<br />It is a mistake to think the Indians went crazy about linguistics and neglected everything else. On the contrary, their interest in combinatorics and discrete maths for decision theory went hand in hand with their development of algorithmic methods in linguistics. Umaswati is a good example of a Maths guy turned Theological writer. he is referencing thermodynamic notions as well as 'matching problems' in the Jain context such that Advaita and Madhyamika become observationally indistinguishable from his own orthodoxy.<br />The true greatness of Panini and Patanjali and so on lies in the fact that they saw that human problems have non-coercive, egalitarian, co-operative solutions.<br />windwheelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18099651877551933295noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1674709389503889160.post-36560933852993365972015-07-08T12:41:37.885+01:002015-07-08T12:41:37.885+01:00"Older languages- like Latin or Old English- ..."Older languages- like Latin or Old English- tend to be highly inflected and thus word-order doesn't matter. However the corruption of a single morpheme radically changes meaning so, in practice, both increased redundancy and loss of inflection feature in the evolution of Language."<br /><br />Did Latin and Old English get there- that is the state of highly inflected morphology- also through linguistic evolution? If yes, is it true that the increasingly complicated inflection constitutes a lowering of entropy? Do you think that this process may have been intentional- were people deliberately making their grammar more inflected to serve some purpose?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com