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Rob:
> On Mon, Dec 24, 2001 at 06:10:15AM -0000, thinkit41 wrote:
> > Decary? 10 arguments? I'm pretty unconvinced after 2, although
> > there may be a true ternary operator (none have given an example).
>
> You have chosen to ignore the example. Certainly you can get out of
> anything if you invent the appropriate words, but as pycyn points out,
> all you're doing is avoiding the fact that 'give' has three places
> (giver, gift, reciever) by making one word for 'give' and another for
> 'recieve', which between them cover the three places.
>
> You would also need separate idea words for "talk to" and "talk about",
> and "go to" and "go from", etc. How about concepts like "between" or
> "combine" where the x2 and x3 are interchangeable? Or would you simply
> leave those out of your language?
>
> What you would end up doing, it seems, is creating a separate idea for
> each combination of x1 and some other place, which is just a really
> inefficient way of doing tags. Hence I maintain that if you're not going
> to bother to use complete place structures, you shouldn't use them at
> all.
OTOH, the alternative extreme is to have no upper limit on the number
of arguments a predicate can have, which is doable but impractical.
One way of implementing Thinkit's binarity is to treat the predicate
as a state of affairs and then have binary relations between this
state of affairs and each participant. Go GIVE would be:
X1 = a giving
X2 is giver of X1
X3 is recipient of X1
X4 is gift of X1
The downside of this is that you need a much larger vocabulary -- one
word per argument-relation ('giver', 'recipient', 'gift') rather than
one word per underlying predicate ('give').
--And.