[topicmapmail] natural language or not?

[Alexander Mikhailian]

>You seem to have posited your response on some assumption that when
>I mentioned natural language I meant a natural language grammar;

Does "natural language" mean "a language spoken, written or signed by
humans for general-purpose communication"? [1]. If yes, this  definitely
covers English, French, Dutch, as well and a few thousand known
languages. So that we can rightfully substitute "natural language" with
"English language" for the purpose of analysing, let's say, the Italian
Opera topic map.

Once we narrow the statement "topic names contain natural language" down
to "topic names from the Italian Opera topic map contain English
language", the assumption that topic names contain "English language"
can be back by two statements:

1) These topic names contain English words.

2) These words form sentences that obey English grammar rules.

Why so? Well, because a language is constructed out of words and a
grammar that controls the ways these words can be used to form
sentences. So, Language = Words + Grammar. This is actually a rare
definition where linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists
agree upon (I am aware that I use imprecise terms, but each field has
its own vocabulary and I'd better stick to the most common words in
their most common sense).

Looking at the contents of the Italian Opera topic map, we can
immediately say that the first statement is true. Indeed, nearly all the
topic names in this topic map are either nouns, verbs followed by a
preposition, noun groups and verb groups, all composed by English words,
unless they are proper nouns and explicitly marked as French or Italian
text.

The second is far from being obviously true, as the contents of the
topic names do not form err... sentences the way we are used to in
English. And there is a whole slew of semantics conveyed by the
structure of the topic map itself that have nothing to do with the
English grammar. 

>You seem to have posited your response on some assumption that when
>I mentioned natural language I meant a natural language grammar; I
>intended no such thing, nor does this have anything to do with a
>natural language grammar (or syntax). 

I rather tried to decompose the notion of "natural language" to see how
natural each of the two components is, when used in topic maps. 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language

-- 
Alexander Mikhailian