don't follow the rest. It's true that work on human language uses as evidence what is available, namely performance. And much of the work unfortunately is fascinated by the droppings, just as in other fields. But there is some work that seeks to discover the mechanisms, as discussed in the papers I sent you. From: jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected] Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2015 7:52 AM To: Noam Chomsky Cc: Subject: Re: Re: 1. if you would design a fair tax system. what goals would you suggest. I ve been researching how to start a new financial system for Zimbabwe. its now so broken it presents a clean petrie dish, exchange rate of a billion billion dollars equals one us dollar 2 berwick and yang. clever. solution hunters, . not sure if question raisers , sherman better 3 . taking sherman work . and my conjectures ug 's would be genetically created modules of "sense makers. " structures that were able to separate sense from non-sense. I think there would be a ug for vision . smell etc and probably similar or connected in some way. in previous emails I have been referring to "shapes" as a metaphor for those structures. shapes do not have an input /output . a failing of the computational analogies. let me try this , a cell membrane , has a shape, it separates inner from outer. it is easy to see what is inside or out. the shape of the membrane is determined solely by a probability distribution. nothing more. The tons of works on spoken language seem in vain to try to make of the mechanism from a minuscule sampling of the combinatorics . silly. in the elephant and the blind man story , they are not even close to touching the elephant they are fascinated by its droppings. On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 12:28 AM, Noam Chomsky > wrote: I wouldn't dare to run the show for money 101, but I'm sure I would learn a lot by sitting in. It's true that grammars stand outside of time, a fact that many linguists and psychologists don't understand. There are suggestions of something like a "universal UG," though not couched in just these terms. Notably Michael Sherman's theory that a universal genome appeared at about the time of the Cambrian explosion, and all forms of life are minor variants of it. From: jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 12:06 AM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: 1. dont you have any questions about money, . ? ? finance.. ? I owe you some knowledge . 2 .to say the shape can be" decribed " by language is redundant. the "shape" is the metaphor for an n-dimentional object , it stands outside of time. as do grammars , but sentences do not, they require time. the shape is somewhat like a fitness landscape? contrasted with communication which also requires a time dimension and biololgy that needs and uses energy . I suggest the mammal Ug is a subcategory of all UG.s . and that as biology prefers redundancy . the other modules, ie vision are small distortions of it. 3. during that UN period I often give a " money 101 to world leaders who have in many case.. little knowledge of a subject to which they give many speeches and policy directives , as they only have experinces such as that of a general , a politicitain, in some instancees a disk jockey, EFTA00637801

before having to run their country. I would love to consider some of what you thought was " fair " . with regard. allocations. if you were running the show. On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 11:13 PM, Noam Chomsky < wrote: I follow up to the point where you write "the organizing principle of the shape is language..." No doubt it can (partially) be described in language, but that's not what you mean. Zipf's law is a rank-frequency distribution. And also meaningless, as Mandelbrot showed 60 years ago. I hope Yang is clear about this. He surely knows. Noam From: Jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected] Sent: Sunday, June 21, 2015 2:48 PM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: it is my failing not yours. the old math requires numbers . too limiting. ( we can put a metric overlay on later in the chain) imagine a shape in real space. it is readily apparent if a line either fits on the shape or not . how do you know. ? you compare the line with the shape. your visual system allows the mental shape to either map onto or not onto the shape in a coherent manner. the shape is not an input device ,it is an object . the organizing principle of the shape is language, the shape is a collection of grammars. lines on the shape are either coherent or not. coherent ones are legitimate sentences . yang is flexible in his use of the term probability. . for example he in a number of papers refers to zipf as a probabiltiy distribution. i have checked a number of his papers after your last remark, I think it is a mistake. he means that after empirical measurement . for ex word frequency, . if ten times out of 100 the corpus has the word x. then he describes the probablility of finding the word as 10 percent . this is not correct. it is only the probablity of finding the word in the frequency list . but he is very accomplished at mathematical models. On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Noam Chomsky wrote: Interesting image, but I don't see what it tells us about language. The problem looks to me like this, roughly. Take, say, the human visual system. There's a genetic component that determines that humans will have a mammalian and not an insect visual system, and much else. Same with other subsystems of the organism — "organs," "modules." Language in particular. The technical name for this component, whatever it turns out to be, is UG. UG therefore determines that certain systems are possible (- languages for humans, others are not. I presume that is what the "biological organizing principle" for language is. It's plainly not an input system, though it determines possible input systems for human languages. I don't see how we improve understanding by looking at it from this perspective. A minor technical problem, not serious, has to do with distinguishing digital infinity from continuity, like continuous lines on the surface of a hemisphere. I think you'll find Yang interesting. Noam EFTA00637802