Re: SUO: Re: Re: Time, context, and relations
Jack Park wrote:
>From: John F. Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
><snip>"There existed
> > a situation of a cat on a mat at the point in time 2001 Jan 11
> > 16:12:05 UCT at the latitude 73W 53' 35" and longitude 41N 12' 27"
> > as reported by the person John F. Sowa."
>
>This sentence happens to remind of a suggestion by Rick Briggs that Shastrik
>Sanskrit might make a reasonable KR language.
>
>Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence
>Rick Briggs
>AI Magazine 6(1): Spring 1985, 32-39
>
>Here is the abstract found at
>http://www.aaai.org//Library/Magazine/Vol06/06-01/vol06-01.html
>(unfortunately, the full text does not appear to be available)
Ive just read it. It is an exposition of the case structure of
Sanskrit, which appears to be quite elaborate. For example, the
(translation of) the sentence 'Out of friendship, A cooked rice for B
in a pot on the fire' is rendered as a structure equivalent to the
following set of triples:
cook, agent, A
cook, object, rice
cook, instrument, fire
cook, recipient, B
cook, because-of, friendship
friendship, A, B
cook, locality, pot
'because-of' is an English gloss for a 'Point of Departure' case in
Sanskrit, roughly corresponding to cause.
The paper also displays some semantic networks (as they were called
in 1985) putting all this into graph form in obvious ways.
The interesting historical fact is that the ancient Sanskrit
grammarians actually wrote about structures like this, apparently.
The language had explicit lexical case words and didnt rely on
implicit word ordering with prepositions, so the 'semantic' structure
was made more explicit. For example, where we would say "John is
going", the Sanskrit looks more like this:
"An Act is taking place in which the Agent is John, specified by
singularity and masculinity."
Briggs gives an actual translation for the cooking rice sentence,
which starts:" There is an activity conducive to a softening residing
in something not different from the rice, and which takes place in
the present, and resides in an agent...".
Acts are said to 'reside in' their agents, so that 'A gives B to C '
would have been expressed something like 'there is an act of giving
residing in A directed to C containing B', using the special Sanskrit
root form 'a-sri', meaning roughly 'tied to' or 'resting on'.
Processes such as cooking were thought of as divisible into
subprocesses, each maybe with its associated residings and locations,
so quite complex 'cases' could be composed from the basic set through
the process decompositions associated with verbs.
Pat Hayes
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