@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:
You appear to be easily miffed. Relax, my little quip was sent to George OB, not you. The fact that you corrected a quote in Greek is fascinating , since almost every other language is Greek to me, I will remain impressed.[...]
S'okay, Farmerman, I already knew the Greek alphabet (obviously) from mathematics, and figuring how many of their words have come down to us I decided to start with Homer and work my way through the thousand years between Homer and 0 AD. Little did I know a thousand years is a long way in any language, but they (the original Greeks) are completely fascinating from an AI point of view - they really DID have a word for everything.
It's a language of absolutely dazzling precision and beauty; certainly the most - mathematically speaking - elegant solution of phrasing any problem, or of stating its solution. In retrospect I'm glad I know their horrendously complex syntax, grammar, and quasi-endless vocabulary - but if I HAD known how much hard work would be involved BEFORE I started I would never had bothered. For even the fastest petaflop computers we better stick to basic English, but if only computers COULD be taught ancient Greek we would learn and accomplish so much more, imho.
Richard Feynman, a very brilliant man, taught himself ancient Greek for that very purpose, and so did many others - why not have EVERY concept we want to examine dealt with in a SINGLE term? The original Greeks' elegance in expression (mathematically) has never been surpassed, but remember that with elegance also come speed aka efficiency and that as speed becomes crucial e.g. with communications to the little Mars rovers (up to half an hour at the speed of light when Mars is on the other side of our sun) very many applications on which we depend for our wellbeing on our original planet will become essential to our continued existence as a civilized society. Long answer, but complete.
