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From: Nick Keighley on 5 Mar 2010 06:17
On 4 Mar, 22:28, Tim Streater <timstrea...(a)waitrose.com> wrote:
> On 04/03/2010 20:35, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
>
>
>
> >> And "x == 7" is much more readable than "7 == x".
>
> >> At least, for English speakers it is. I don't know; maybe there are
> >> languages in which saying "if x is equal to y" implies that x is the
> >> constant and y is the variable.
>
> > Nonsense. This is nothing to do with speaking English. There are plenty
> > of examples of English prose that use that ordering, from the King James
> > Bible through handbooks on baseball to Richard Dawkins. You only find
> > the ordering natural in C for purely circular reasons: It's natural to
> > (most) C programmers because that's how most C language code that they
> > have read is written. (And it's written that way because "It's
> > natural.") Nothing more, and nothing as a result of the English language.
>
> Rubbish. You don't say "if that chicken is an animal then I'll eat it",
> you say "If that animal is a chicken then I'll eat it".

"is a" isn't the same as equality. It's more like "is a subset of"

From: Jerry Friedman on 5 Mar 2010 10:26
On Mar 4, 5:54 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...(a)seebs.net> wrote:
> On 2010-03-05, Keith Thompson <ks...(a)mib.org> wrote:
>
> > I suggest that in cases where "is" is used to denote equality,
> > usage is more symmetric than you might think.  "My brother is Fred
> > Thompson" and "Fred Thompson is my brother" seem equally clear to me
> > (and equally false, since that's not my brother's name).
>
> They're both equally clear, but they are communicating different things.
> One of them is telling us something we might not already know, about an
> entity already known to be your brother.  The other is telling us something
> we might not already know, about an entity already known to be Fred Thompson.
>
> Similarly, there's a big difference between "the person who committed the
> murder was the butler" and "the butler committed the murder".  The former
> is giving you information about a murder you already know about, the other
> is giving you information about a butler you already know about.
....

For those interested in what linguists have said about this, the terms
seem to be "topic" and "comment" or "theme" and "rheme". In English,
the topic usually goes before the comment. Of course even in a single
language the matter is complicated, and different linguists use
different approaches and different terminology.

--
Jerry Friedman
From: Tim Streater on 5 Mar 2010 12:22
On 05/03/2010 07:18, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> [Interesting bunch of crossposts!]
>
> Keith Thompson wrote:
>> Tim Streater <timstreater(a)waitrose.com> writes:
>>> On 04/03/2010 20:35, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote:
>>>>> And "x == 7" is much more readable than "7 == x".
>>>>>
>>>>> At least, for English speakers it is. I don't know; maybe there are
>>>>> languages in which saying "if x is equal to y" implies that x is the
>>>>> constant and y is the variable.
>>>>>
>>>> Nonsense. This is nothing to do with speaking English.
>
> Correct. C and English are different languages, with different purposes
> and different idioms.
>
>>>> You only find
>>>> the ordering natural in C for purely circular reasons: It's natural to
>>>> (most) C programmers because that's how most C language code that they
>>>> have read is written. (And it's written that way because "It's
>>>> natural.") Nothing more, and nothing as a result of the English
>>>> language.
>
> Right.
>
>>> Rubbish. You don't say "if that chicken is an animal then I'll eat
>>> it", you say "If that animal is a chicken then I'll eat it".
>
> Tim, those two sentences don't mean the same thing. We're discussing
> value equality, not (as Keith nicely puts it) set membership. Closer
> example: "if that chicken's name is Edwina, I'll eat it" vs "if Edwina
> is that chicken's name, I'll eat it".

I think my example was not, in any case, a very good one. Where I'm
coming from is, I believe, this: an "if" statement is to be used where
one wants to test something. If I see a statement that starts, e.g.:

if (7==x ...

then immediately my brain is saying: "Hold on, why am I testing 7? I
know what 7 is equal to - it's equal to 7! So what's the "if" statement
for?". If I want to know what *x* is equal to, that's a different story,
and a valid question, because x is a variable. 7 is not.

--
Tim

"That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament
ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of
Parliament"

Bill of Rights 1689
From: Seebs on 5 Mar 2010 13:06
On 2010-03-05, Richard Heathfield <rjh(a)see.sig.invalid> wrote:
> Willem wrote:
>> Disagree. The semantic difference is that the first object is the item
>> that we're interested in, and the second is something we wish to know of
>> the first.

> Not entirely convinced. In each case, we wish to know whether [Fred] and
> [the man who shot my chicken] are the same person.

No.

In one case, we want to know what Fred did. In the other, we want to know
what happened to the chicken.

For another example: Consider the difference between...
That bottle contains a liter of water.
A liter is the amount of water in that bottle.

One is telling you something about the bottle; the other is offering a
definition of a liter.

Think of it in terms of definitions, and the relationship is clearer; when
you say "let x be any positive integer", that's not the same thing as saying
"any positive integer is x". Descriptions don't have quite as strong a
directionality, but they still do have a noticeable polarity.

In some cases, it's not just the relationship that's being expressed, but
also something about which participants in the relationship are of interest
to us. There is a substantial difference in focus between "the capacitor
grounded through Jim" and "Jim grounded the capacitor". One is a statement
about the failure of an electrical device to continue working, one is a
statement about the failure of a biological device to continue working. That
they describe the same circumstance doesn't mean they describe the same
*focus*.

-s
--
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nospam(a)seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
From: Nick on 7 Mar 2010 11:42
Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman(a)yahoo.com> writes:

> On Mar 4, 5:54 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...(a)seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2010-03-05, Keith Thompson <ks...(a)mib.org> wrote:
>>
>> > I suggest that in cases where "is" is used to denote equality,
>> > usage is more symmetric than you might think.  "My brother is Fred
>> > Thompson" and "Fred Thompson is my brother" seem equally clear to me
>> > (and equally false, since that's not my brother's name).
>>
>> They're both equally clear, but they are communicating different things.
>> One of them is telling us something we might not already know, about an
>> entity already known to be your brother.  The other is telling us something
>> we might not already know, about an entity already known to be Fred Thompson.
>>
>> Similarly, there's a big difference between "the person who committed the
>> murder was the butler" and "the butler committed the murder".  The former
>> is giving you information about a murder you already know about, the other
>> is giving you information about a butler you already know about.
> ...
>
> For those interested in what linguists have said about this, the terms
> seem to be "topic" and "comment" or "theme" and "rheme". In English,
> the topic usually goes before the comment. Of course even in a single
> language the matter is complicated, and different linguists use
> different approaches and different terminology.

(heading further and further OT) And one of the reasons that the
absolute "avoid the passive" rule is wrong is that sometimes it's much
easier to get the topic in the right place in a passive sentence than it
is in an active one.
--
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