From: "Jeffrey E." <[email protected]> To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2015 18:48:13 +0000 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 I-languages for humans, others are not. I presume that is what the "biological organizing principle" for language is. It's plainly no