Partly to prove I have been around for a long long time.

Partly because this is relevant to the discussion in a future sense.

Partly because I like seeing my words in print.

Note - I have resisted the temptation to edit my fat-fingered typos and the links may not work, but I have resisted.

Thus spake ZaraPortuno:

Portuno_Diamo Ragingbull #50691 Friday, 14 Jul 2000 at 4:35 PM EDT
OT: OFF TOPIC - Butnotreally.

Warning. Time to pi&& off the neighbors. Ingredients: 5 pounds Pre-Modern philosophy in here mixed with some Post-Modern for nostalgia.

"Each thing has a 'season'. Each time has a purpose." Severely paraphrased Hebrew teaching attributed to Solomon, King of Israel. Ecclesiastes 3:1, Copyright?

Word up.

Because words mean something, we understand what the above phrase means. It is a thought passed down in writing for near three millennia. A simple profound thought.

Ancient Sumerians invented writing by scratching and pressing stick figures (cuneiform) into palm-sized clay tables (R/W memory) and baking the tablets once the document was approved. A hot fire hardened these tablets into a permanent pottery archival record of the Sumerian Accountant's transaction. I have had the pleasure of seeing those tablets in the British Museum in London. (Footnote 1)

But the Sumerian cuneiform script was limited. "ATOK pay tax 1 fat cattle. Hammurabi rules!" was about the limit of Mesopotamian literature, although their language must have been very sophisticated. (Footnote 1B)

The Egyptians took the writing idea and made it graphic. Each figure in the Egyptian written language stands for a phrase or an abstract concept (logogram - Greek "thought" "message"). We see the reflection of this approach in modern computer icons. We navigate through our web-world by pressing mechanical buttons marked by pictures that are supposed to mean something.

Problem with that approach is that we end up with a large number of icons and compounding is clumsy.

A third group of people (Semites living in the same general area they lived in around the time of the Pharaohs) took the Sumerian character set concept and the Egyptian hieroglyphics method and produced something we call an AlphaBet. In fact, the first two letters of the Semitic AlphaBet were Aleph and Beth.

Aleph meant "cattle" and Beth meant "house". The characters look like a cow head with horns and a tent.

Two pretty basic abstract concepts conveyed in icon fashion. Rapid, compact transfer of a thought. But the Sumerian characters had a dual nature. The phonetic sound of the first letter of each letter (ah-haaaa - THERE is extensibility) could be strung together to record the sound of a new word (the extension). (Footnote 2) In fact, we know how to pronounce Aleph because each of the letters is a phonetic chart for the human voice. If you said "aleph beth gimmel (camel)" to Moses he would understand - but probably not approve.

The Egyptian and Sumerian languages tried to do essentially the same thing, but tried to do too much with each symbol. Each glyph would have to be modified to reflect vocal changes.

You and I speak A-E-I-O-U the same way. We make certain sounds and those sounds are not standard (otherwise we would have speech recognition). We have accents, but the written character base absorbs the uncertainty. Imagine. O-I-L. In Houston it's called "awl", in New Orleans they say "ahl", in Atlanta "all", Brooklyn "earl". The astonishment is that you can imitate these dialects by reading the metadata you (incidental information about the subject) I just gave.

Now imagine a graphic representation of O-I-L. In Houston it's a pump. In California it's a dump-circle-slash. Louisiana is in a sump. In Chicago it looks like money. A foreigner now depends on more data to further clarify (metadata just as above. The metadata is inescapable, but with text we also have relative directional and positional information - example: " positional" begins 77 characters before x. Numerologists take note. I cheated.).

With graphics you must create a special set of symbols to show the metadata. Sorry - can't do graphics here. Just us human key-peckers. With XML a machine could read this page as well as you. With graphics YOU (not the machine) would need a translator. Who's the boss here?

So Semitic technology (the first alphabet) and innovation (writing on durable sheepskin - parchment) passes the Wisdom of Solomon to readers of these words today with no more complexity than 26 characters (primitives). The thoughts of the wisest man of ancient legend for free. AND it was passed across three languages - Hebrew, Greek, King James' English. How's THAT for loose semantic coupling.

We're almost there on the web. XML and language translators promises to glue back what fell apart at the Tower of Babel (FOOTNOTE 1D). The tower will have cracks but it will stand once again.

The Greeks would later adopt this same concept with their Alpha, Beta etceteras (Sir Mix-a-lingua). We mixed it with Latin and voila', we have a powerful scripting tool we can use to pass extremely complex instructions (in the form of mental sounds). Most pure transfer however occurs in readers who are able to read without moving their lips mentally. (The string can be treated as a pattern. More about that as we go. Print this out and file it for the future.)

What must be remembered is that each of these systems was successful.

The Sumerians had the first civilization and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon must have been a dope crib.

The Egyptian neighborhood had some fine stuff and Cleopatra put J. Lopez to shame.

The little Semites? They got the crap kicked out of them. But, while they were slaves, they learned the Sumerian and Egyptian languages and refined both into a system (Footnote 4) of information transfer that ultimately put men into space. (When the Chinese put a man into orbit we can discuss the merits of both systems).

THIS? This was just a side tour on lingua street- the use of words - because words will become increasingly important in our technology soon. XML will to make HTML "pages" seem like paper faxes. Nice technology to have, but definitely not state-of-the-art. When that happens, the machines will become useful.

Portuno

(Footnote 1) Thanks to the looting and pillaging of southeastern Iraq (among others - and all the Indian brothers said "Amen") by the early British Empire. When I saw the tablets, I thought of the fused silica within the clay as a foreshadowing our use of silicon crystals to record our own business to business transactions. Not much of a metaphysical moment but I got a kick out of the thought.

(Footnote 1B) Etymologists believe the early Sumerian language is the root of all spoken languages. The "Tower of Babel" traditions emanate from this area. In fact, Arabic tradition holds that the area around Bahrain (~500 miles to the south of the Babylonian ruins northwest of Kuwait) was the Garden of Eden. The current area is a merciless desert where once it was called the Fertile Crescent and seen as the cradle of "civilized" life. It's probably a good thing the British were such efficient looters. They saved many artifacts from the anti-idolatry campaigns of Islamic zealots in the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

Many limestone jetties bearing 3YK old Phoenician merchant graffiti (ATOK leave home No pay tax Sail East.) were crushed and used to build roads in the region.

Aside: We owe our sense of time to the Sumerians - 60 seconds/minute, 60 minutes/hour, 24 hours/day - Sumerian timekeeping. English is spoken at an average rate of 180 words per minute - 3 per second.

(Footnote 1C) Phoenicians are also known as the Canaanites of the Jewish History. They were originally from Sumer. More complicated than a redneck family tree. It's still complicated over there.

(Footnote 1D)
I say that knowing full well the chaos in the XML standards community. The frustration with conferences and industry infighting may be typified by the following post on an XML discussion forum. http://metalab.unc.edu/xml/
"I have become increasingly worried about where the XML world is headed. The complexity seems to be growing exponentially and the XML schema stuff is about to bless the complexity for all time... Something ain't right. XML is about describing hierarchical data structured dammit! How hard should that be? --Sean McGrath on the sml-dev@egroups.com mailing list"
I agree Sean. I agree.

(Footnote 2) Human language is extensible by nature. We invent new words to mean different (or same) things and propagate them across our social networks. But the method of transfer may be limited. Speech takes time and resources. Graphics can be confusing. We work best when we see words that string together to form instructions.

(Footnote 3) No reference from above. I just wonder how language translation software handles some of my hokey idioms. Can't think of one right now to test it out though. This limitation is imposed by adoption of the English alphabet to represent uttered sounds of the human voice. The peoples of the Caucus mountains adopted the alphabet of Saint Cyril or Cyrillic (that’s why the Russian spaceships look cool - they have all that alien looking writing on them).

Funny that English is the culmination of uttered Latin language used to unite the diverse dialects of Anglo tribes. Thus Anglish is truly a modular framework having adopted the structure of Latin, the extensibility of character-based script in a sophisticated granular (well-defined thought-structures aka logic aka metaphorical reasoning). Fun with phonics. It may be difficult to assimilate the previous semaphores but somebody out there understands and that is the amazing power of text.

Conventional wisdom in the Artificial Intelligence community has held for many years machine "intelligence" will first be accomplished by graphic pattern based systems. GUIs are ubiquitous and Portuno is pompous. It's a fact of life that is greatly misunderstood. The package is designed to DO something, but you also pay for a mass of software created at great expense to build a picture for your eyes. A pit bull software package stripped of all its fancy human-machine interface (HMI) usually looks like a badly shaved Chihuahua.

Egyptian hieroglyphics are pretty pictures only curators now speak. It was eventually replaced because it didn't fit the lifestyle of the masses. If you could learn it, how long did it take to write a letter to Mom? The language was a vocation of priests and mystics. Reminds me of that bunch at early Apple. PLEASE sell to Disney, Steve (Doctor No) Jobs. Pleeeee-hee-hee-zzz. Give the graphic language to someone who understands virtual reality. One pass through Splash Mountain puts me in Red Dirt Louisiana. Love me some Monroe, Marilyn that is.

But for passing along instructions more poetic than the pretty picture I would always prefer ".

The ancient Semitic alphabet turned into the Semitic Hebrew alphabet from which we get the original words of Solomon. Imagine the Ten Commandments in graphic: LIE-circle-slash, CHEAT-circle-slash, STEAL-circle-slash. Where's the subway? SPIT-circle-slash.

The humble text string may well play out to be the findamental method for making machines "understand" us rather than dependent slaves. Here's three cheers for XML - sitting in the SGML toy chest for more than a decade. Here's to the future.

I know I'm going to get skewered by the Sanskrit crowd for being so Western-bent but that's OK. I can argue about semantics as well as the next guy.