A Real Character, and a Philosophical Language
Language Log 2020-12-01
Summary:
A couple of decades ago, in response to a long-forgotten taxonomic proposal, I copied into antique html Jorge Luis Borges' essay "El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins", along with an English translation. This afternoon, a reading-group discussion about algorithms for topic classification brought up the question of a single universal tree-structured taxonomy of topics, and […]