Mike,
Thank you for your observations. It appears that conjugation and declension functions would be better to consider per language group or per individual language.
conjugate_en(…)
conjugate_bnt(…)
conjugate_ar(…)
…
Best regards,
Adam
From: Mike Bennett
Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2020 12:43 PM
To: abstract-wikipedia@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Abstract-wikipedia] Conjugation and Declension Functions (Adam Sobieski)
Or more precisely, they differ in their nature and applicability in different language groups. See for example Bantu languages, which do conjugation and declension but against a list of typically a dozen noun classes, rather than 2 or 3 genders.
Meanwhile Semitic languages don't have the notion of an adjective and use instead different phrase stuctures.
So I think if you are going to try and identify language primitives at this kind of level, you are right into Chomsky territory, trying to find a universal set of abstractions from which to specialise for different language groups.
Here you will find the bones of philosophers who have gone before.
Mike
On 7/22/2020 12:29 PM, Charles Matthews via Abstract-Wikipedia wrote: