= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jiro comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (130)
It's not possible to represent every possible set of relationships this way (you can't even say "adopted child of the gay spouse of my stepfather's brother", let alone variations on teacher and classmate). So what you're actually doing is creating a system that can easily represent some sort of relations, at the cost of making it more difficult to represent others.
I think you are confusing "easy to create a system for" and "most useful". It is easy to create a system which specifies "father of father of mother of father of..." It is hard to create a system which specifies things you would actually need to specify often. Your system is efficient in the first sense but not in the second sense.
I'm not making it more difficult to represent others. I don't lose anything that English can do.
You can't add extra features to the language without increasing the cognitive load in deciding when to use the extra features. You're still making everything else more difficult, it's just a distributed difficulty where everything is made more difficult by a miniscule amount, rather than one particular thing made difficult by a large amount.
I don't think that sentence would get added complexity. "adopted child" will likely be a 7-8 letter word using the same root as stepfather. Stepfather is a word that you can't derive from knowing "adoption" which make things harder for the language speaker. You can't derive spouse from knowing the word marriage.