3.812 Gaelic yes/no; the aorist of support (29)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Fri, 1 Dec 89 23:08:57 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 812. Friday, 1 Dec 1989.
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 89 14:54:00 EST
From: Tom Thomson <tom@prg.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Yes and No; Support
Gaelic is even worse than Latin in this respect; not only are there no
words for Yes and No (at least for No as negative reply to a query),
there isn't even something which will do for Yes in many cases like
Latin ita. Yet the bible has been translated into the language, so what
happened to the preponderance of Nos?
On support for humanists in computing, I find Michael Sperberg-McQueen's
arrogance quite unsupportable! Most computer scientists of my
acquaintance are fully aware of what an aorist is (most non-linguist
"humanists" I know are not). (I asked around to find out.) An
education in formal (mathematical) theories of grammar, classification
of syntax structures, and all the rest of that guff on the boundary
between maths and computing might even be quite useful to someone
supporting humanist computing.
Tom Thomson [tom@nw.stl.stc.co.uk / tom@prg.oxford.ac.uk]