is "eating" universal?

[Gregg Reynolds]

ontologists searching for the Holy Grail may find the referenced paper interesting,  esp. wrt events.

Lera Boroditsky (@leraboroditsky) tweeted at 3:03 PM on Mon, Sep 26, 2016:
Is 'eating' universal? In Maniq language, you hãw rice, kap meat, lik mangoes, paŋ yams, and hop soup. Cool paper:
https://t.co/biPLk74Iba
(https://twitter.com/leraboroditsky/status/780498004511956992?s=03)

Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

[Obrst, Leo J.]

Hmm. Indeed natural language does tolerate ambiguity, and so if there is no knowledge about what food is specifically eaten, languages do tend to permit a generic “eat”. I.e., “Mary ate something but we don’t know what it was.” I would indeed be surprised if in Maniq one couldn’t say something like this. It would seem that one then would be forced to some kind of disjunction of the verbal kinds of eats/ingestion, which gets unwieldy: “Mary chewed something soft, or bit on a hard object, or ate something with little biting or chewing, or ate something with spitting out of hard fibers, or consumed nutritious/savory liquids, or drank non-nutritious liquids, or inhaled medicinal smoke (without exhaling), or inhaled and blew out smoke”. Not to say that that is impossible, but it seems unlikely. And it seems this is about mostly putting things in your mouth, not necessarily “eats”.  So perhaps it’s a kind of incorporation of an object into the verbal? I don’t know. Think of some of our English verbal nouns: wood-working, basket-weaving, painting, sculpting, i.e., all working of some material with hands. Just a thought.

 

Joe: Do you know what Mary {disjunction of the above}?

Sally: No, I don’t know what Mary {disjunction of the above}. Do you?

Joe: I think she ate something with spitting out of hard fibers.

 

Possibly the ambiguity is pushed up higher, e.g., “Mary did something”. But it’s unclear whether Maniq has such a generic verbal, possibly indicating a generic event.

 

Thanks,

Leo

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[Gregg Reynolds]

good questions.

On Oct 1, 2016 3:46 PM, "Obrst, Leo J." <lob...@mitre.org> wrote:
>
> Hmm. Indeed natural language does tolerate ambiguity, and so if there is no knowledge about what food is specifically eaten, languages do tend to permit a generic “eat”. I.e., “Mary ate something but we don’t know what it was.”

or "Mary 'ingested' (or took or whatever)  something but we don't know if she ate it or smoked it or drank it etc.  (In Egypt one "drinks" cigarettes).

I would indeed be surprised if in Maniq one couldn’t say something like this. It would seem that one then would be forced to some kind of disjunction of the verbal kinds of eats/ingestion, which gets unwieldy: “Mary chewed something soft, or bit on a hard object, or ate something with little biting or chewing, or ate something with spitting out of hard fibers, or consumed nutritious/savory liquids, or drank non-nutritious liquids, or inhaled medicinal smoke (without exhaling), or inhaled and blew out smoke”. Not to say that that is impossible, but it seems unlikely. And it seems this is about mostly putting things in your mouth, not necessarily “eats”.  So perhaps it’s a kind of incorporation of an object into the verbal? I don’t know. Think of some of our English verbal nouns: wood-working, basket-weaving, painting, sculpting, i.e., all working of some material with hands. Just a thought.

Strikes me as a very general point.  wherever we (and I mean we English speakers, but maybe others too) can conceptualize a genus with species we can ask whether natural languages explicitly support similar divisions. it certainly  makes intuitive sense, but then again it's really a matter of scientific research.  what are the evolutionary advantages/disadvantages, either way.

>
>  
>
> Joe: Do you know what Mary {disjunction of the above}?
>
> Sally: No, I don’t know what Mary {disjunction of the above}. Do you?
>
> Joe: I think she ate something with spitting out of hard fibers.
>
>  
>
> Possibly the ambiguity is pushed up higher, e.g., “Mary did something”. But it’s unclear whether Maniq has such a generic verbal, possibly indicating a generic event.
>
>  

I'd love to know what the original author would have to say.

Given the demonstrably astounding variety of natural languages, however, I would expect to find very few universals along these lines.  it might seem odd to us not to have a generic eating term, but what is the cost of not having such a term, for particular societies? I have no idea, but if we did not have "eat" I'm not sure that would be a problem.

I'm trying to think of a comparable example in English.  there must be at least one, but I always find myself starting with a generic term!

howsabout "he scratched/rubbed/massaged/etc. his chin"?  He chinned? ;)

gregg

[Gregg Reynolds]

>
> I'm trying to think of a comparable example in English.  there must be at least one, but I always find myself starting with a generic term!
>
> howsabout "he scratched/rubbed/massaged/etc. his chin"?  He chinned? ;)
>

more generally: it's unclear to me at least that there is any kind of universal abstraction at work in natural languages.  put differently: languages drive abstraction, not the other way around.

toy example: "he scratched his chin", "he drank a beer".  in principle there is no reason a natural language could not subsume both of these under a single generic verb, say "fragished".  stranger things have happened.

Gregg

[Obrst, Leo J.]

Similar thing: he scratched his chin = > he chinned. It seems that the predicate if closing over one argument -- i.e., “saturating” it with a specific object: he scratched chin: scratch (X, Y) = > scratch(X, chin), and then lexicalizing the latter.

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[Obrst, Leo J.]

Correction: “is closing over”

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[John F Sowa]

Gregg and Leo,

That's an interesting article about the Maniq language in Thailand:
https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2016/papers/0463/paper0463.pdf
> Maniq does not seem to have separate general ‘eat’, ‘drink’ or
> ‘consume’ verbs. All mentions of eating/drinking actions involve one
> of several ingestion verbs with more specific meanings, selected
> based on manner of ingestion and/or type of ingested object.

Lera Boroditsky

> In Maniq language, you hãw rice, kap meat, lik mangoes, paŋ yams,
> and hop soup.

This does not imply that the English verb 'eat' is ambiguous.
It merely means that it expresses less information than the
verbs for eating in Maniq.

In German, there are two verbs, 'essen' for humans as subject
and 'fressen' for animals as subject.

In Russian, there is no simple verb for 'go'. The speaker has
to choose different verbs for going by some vehicle vs. going
by one's one power (i.e., walking).

You could say that the English verb 'eat' is underspecified
in comparison to Maniq or German. But it's underspecified
in different respects (object vs. subject).

You could also say that the verb 'go' is underspecified
with respect to Russian.

But there are other verbs for which French is underspecified
with respect to English. For example, French will often require
two verb forms for an English sentence that only has one verb:

She ran into the room -> Elle est entrée en courant.
She danced across the room -> Elle a traversé la pièce en dansant.

Gregg

> what are the evolutionary advantages/disadvantages, either way.

It all depends on what people find convenient to say for the kinds
of things they do in their culture.

John

[Ravi Sharma]

John, Leo and Greg

In diffeent south asian languages intersting verbs are used. For example like in Egypt, in Hindi Cigarette smoking is called Cigarette or Hukkah "drinking". In Bengali - Water is "eaten" in same sense as food is eaten.

Travel Related Digression:

I was visitng Andaman and Nicobar in 1975 for a week and took a ship for part of journey. I thought Dialects varied from Port Blair Andaman to Little Andamon, Car Nicobar and Nicobar. True, there was a tribe that did not wear clothes in west coastal areas of Little Andaman that opened to non-tribe human communications as late as 1960's and also contracted (Caught) diseases with food exchanges etc. Car Nicobar, later mostly damaged and lives lost by Tsunami, their community dwellings had large round straw hut and smaller huts for individual nuclear families (as is for some Native Americans)  and they spoke more developed dialect and sang Indian Bollywood songs. Visualize the Dance of about 300-500 mostly young couples wading in shallow ocean on moonlit nights and lighting bundles of straw and showing it towards water. Octopuses jumped up and they used spears to get them, thus this fire dance for octopus in the ocean was beautiful choreography along the coast of island for about a mile. This was their soup and dinner.

Dialects in the very tribal areas appeared to be less developed, while more so for Car Nicobar.

For more developed languages of South Asia such as Thai, rulers often were Tamil, Telugu from east coast of India and have ubstantive influence of Sanskrit as is for Indonesia, including their names.

In Sanskrit, Animals - including four legged ones - Eat and roam: Charanti, Humans and animal Eat and Drink - Khadanti and Pibanti, etc.

Regards.

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[Pat Hayes]

Same thing happens with prepositions. The English "in" and "on" are hugely underspecified compared to usages in other languages, some of which have, for example, distinct prepositions for the relationship of wearing clothes on the head, the torso, the hips and the feet.

While linguistically fascinating, none of this seems to be relevant to ontology engineering, as far as I can see.

Pat

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[John F Sowa]

On 10/2/2016 11:40 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
> While linguistically fascinating, none of this seems to be relevant
> to ontology engineering, as far as I can see.

I agree that these examples don't tell us anything that we haven't
seen before: People perceive, think, talk, act, and react to the
same kinds of things in many different ways.

The only people who might be bothered by it are those who still
hope to find some ideal, perfect, universal top-level ontology.

Doug Lenat had that hope when he started the Cyc project in 1984.
But by the 1990s, he admitted that the top level has little or no
effect on deduction or applications.

The microtheories at the mid levels are the most significant.
That's where the action is.

Caveat: But a bad top level can create problems farther down.
An empty top level is better than a bad one.

John

[Gregg Reynolds]

On Oct 2, 2016 11:08 AM, "John F Sowa" <so...@bestweb.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/2/2016 11:40 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>>
>> While linguistically fascinating, none of this seems to be relevant
>> to ontology engineering, as far as I can see.
>
>
> I agree that these examples don't tell us anything that we haven't
> seen before:  People perceive, think, talk, act, and react to the
> same kinds of things in many different ways.
>
> The only people who might be bothered by it are those who still
> hope to find some ideal, perfect, universal top-level ontology.
>

indeed.  I think such research is therapeutically useful wrt to ontology engineering.  being scientifically, empirically based, it cannot be (easily) countered by philosophical rationalizations.

[John F Sowa]

>> Pat Hayes:

>>> While linguistically fascinating, none of this seems to be relevant
>>> to ontology engineering, as far as I can see.
>>

>> John Sowa:

>> The only people who might be bothered by it are those who still
>> hope to find some ideal, perfect, universal top-level ontology.
>

> Gregg Reynolds:

> indeed. I think such research is therapeutically useful wrt to ontology
> engineering. being scientifically, empirically based, it cannot be
> (easily) countered by philosophical rationalizations.

I'm not sure what you mean. That linguistic research shows that
a universal TLO is unlikely, difficult, or even counterproductive?

Cyc has done the most theoretical and empirical work on the problem.
They have succeeded in developing many practical applications that
enable interoperability of their ontology with other systems that
have no TLO or TLOs that are inconsistent with their own.

And they admit that the TLO is less important than the microtheories.
This is a different kind of empirical research.

John

[Matthew West]

Dear John and Pat,
I think there is a difference between saying there is some TLO that is "correct" and that some (one or more) TLOs might be useful.
In my experience, integrating different domain ontologies without some TLO, whilst not impossible, is a good deal more difficult. A more useful TLO for integration is one that makes it easy to bring similar terms from different domain ontologies together, and provide a framework for analysing them to distinguish what is the same, what is different, and what overlaps. and provides a foundation for a single ontology that can be extended such that the two domain ontologies can be mapped to them.
Regards
Matthew West

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