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> A lot of Chemistry and Biology is full of exceptions (some might even say that exceptions are the only rule in chemistry) What I meant by "exceptions" in my

by 4cao 5y ago

> A lot of Chemistry and Biology is full of exceptions (some might even say that exceptions are the only rule in chemistry) What I meant by "exceptions" in my previous comment: if grammar books have to be "thousands of pages long," then at some point they're no longer listing rules but exceptions to them. I wouldn't expect this statement to even be controversial but since apparently it is, all the more it's worth clarifying. Is the conjugation of the verb "to be" an exception, or is it covered by a very specific rule that only applies to that particular verb? I guess in the end it could be a matter of definition. But if this is supposed to be one of those "very complex — perhaps even unpredictable, or irregular [rules]," as the grandparent would apparently have it, then I have to question what his definition of an "exception" would be. Are there any exceptions to grammar rules at all? As a matter of fact I agree with you. In fact, if you look at my original comment, I've been saying something similar all along. Philosophically, what we consider intrinsic rules of nature is often an approximation introduced to gain insight by reducing complexity. However, the discussion was in the context of linguistics, and beyond that I don't see any obvious parallel to the example from natural sciences you're bringing up.

mcswell 5y ago
"if grammar books have to be "thousands of pages long," then at some point they're no longer listing rules but exceptions to them." I've never seen a grammar book that was thousands of pages long, and I've looked at lots of them. The longest ones I know (for English, naturally) are still well under 1000 pages. I have co-authored one (the Cubeo language) and edited or typeset lots of others, some of them running into the hundreds of pages. And the reason they're that long has nothing to do with exceptions, it has to do with verbal explanations for the reader, examples, excursions on semantics and pragmatics, citations, discussions of alternative analyses, and so forth. If you boiled it all down to rules--phrase structure rules, say, and morphological rules for languages that enjoy morphology, plus tables of exceptional paradigms (probably the only real exceptions), you'd probably end up with grammars on the order of 20 pages. And fwiw, I don't think any linguist would consider the paradigm of English "to be" to be even remotely regular.
- 4cao 5y ago
  Thank you for your comments, it's been a pleasure to read all of them. For the record, the quoted parts were taken from the post I was originally responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467 Also, I definitely agree (quoting from your other post) that: > The line between spoken and written language isn't really a question of writing. Transcribed speech is still an oral language. This is a very good point. Perhaps I shouldn't have written so categorically about this in my original comment. I only had in mind that due to the way some of the examples in the PDF are constructed, the focus seems to be more on the writing conventions than on the languages itself.
bradrn 5y ago
> Is the conjugation of the verb "to be" an exception, or is it covered by a very specific rule that only applies to that particular verb? I guess in the end it could be a matter of definition. But if this is supposed to be one of those "very complex — perhaps even unpredictable, or irregular [rules]," as the grandparent would apparently have it, then I have to question what his definition of an "exception" would be. Are there any exceptions to grammar rules at all? My point was more that exceptions are rules too. ‘The verb be is conjugated like X, go like Y, and other verbs like Z’ is still a rule, albeit a complicated one, and one which could alternately be rephrased in terms of ‘exceptions’, insofar as that would be at all useful. Truly irregular, unpredictable exceptions — such as are so common in chemistry — are in fact rather rare and restricted in human languages.

by 4cao 5y ago

mcswell 5y ago

"if grammar books have to be "thousands of pages long," then at some point they're no longer listing rules but exceptions to them." I've never seen a grammar book that was thousands of pages long, and I've looked at lots of them. The longest ones I know (for English, naturally) are still well under 1000 pages. I have co-authored one (the Cubeo language) and edited or typeset lots of others, some of them running into the hundreds of pages. And the reason they're that long has nothing to do with exceptions, it has to do with verbal explanations for the reader, examples, excursions on semantics and pragmatics, citations, discussions of alternative analyses, and so forth. If you boiled it all down to rules--phrase structure rules, say, and morphological rules for languages that enjoy morphology, plus tables of exceptional paradigms (probably the only real exceptions), you'd probably end up with grammars on the order of 20 pages. And fwiw, I don't think any linguist would consider the paradigm of English "to be" to be even remotely regular.

4cao 5y ago
Thank you for your comments, it's been a pleasure to read all of them. For the record, the quoted parts were taken from the post I was originally responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467 Also, I definitely agree (quoting from your other post) that: > The line between spoken and written language isn't really a question of writing. Transcribed speech is still an oral language. This is a very good point. Perhaps I shouldn't have written so categorically about this in my original comment. I only had in mind that due to the way some of the examples in the PDF are constructed, the focus seems to be more on the writing conventions than on the languages itself.

bradrn 5y ago

> Is the conjugation of the verb "to be" an exception, or is it covered by a very specific rule that only applies to that particular verb? I guess in the end it could be a matter of definition. But if this is supposed to be one of those "very complex — perhaps even unpredictable, or irregular [rules]," as the grandparent would apparently have it, then I have to question what his definition of an "exception" would be. Are there any exceptions to grammar rules at all? My point was more that exceptions are rules too. ‘The verb be is conjugated like X, go like Y, and other verbs like Z’ is still a rule, albeit a complicated one, and one which could alternately be rephrased in terms of ‘exceptions’, insofar as that would be at all useful. Truly irregular, unpredictable exceptions — such as are so common in chemistry — are in fact rather rare and restricted in human languages.