Re: The modern mathematical concept of infinity is ...

On Feb 23, 3:17 am, Brian Chandler <imaginator...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Japanese, like Finnish, has a plug-n-play system of verb suffixes,
including a causative one we'll call 'sase'. Thus:

taberu : means 'eat'
tabe-sase-ru : means 'cause to eat', as in "feed the children"
tabe-sase-sase-ru : means 'cause to cause to eat', as in "get the maid
to feed the children"
... ["and so on", or not!]

It is normally possible to persuade a native speaker to agree that
tabesasesaseru "is Japanese". But the putative argument is whether
tabe-sase^n-ru "is Japanese" for any natural n. The formal model you
get by writing the obvious grammar in Prolog obviously allows any n,
because (a) it's much easier to do and (b) any limit would be quite
arbitrary. But clearly once the value of n reaches double figures, the
result is something with no relation to the actual Japanese language
as spoken. In this case, to claim that tabe-sase^i-ru (where i is
"Isles's number") is not a Japanese word seems pretty reasonable.

You could do the same thing in English if you want. I recently learned
about the "buffalo" game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

I guess one could then ask at what point the average English speaker
balks and declares the resulting sentence to be no loner parseable.

.

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