The Wilkins rampage continues with these modifiers for English’s modal auxiliary verbs. These would be attached to a verb (built through Wilkin’s system), notice how the closely related verbs are similar in shape — with just the tip of the tail changed, and the overall collection of verbs are rotations of a single character.
For more detail on modal verbs, go here. It may also amuse you to read RFC 2119: Key Words for Use to Indicate Requirement Levels.
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2006 April 24 at 12:16 am
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2005 October 11 at 8:37 pm
Jordan Rule
Is this the kind of stuff you learn at ischool? Is it linguistics, or something else?
2005 October 13 at 12:23 am
corprew
Actually, I was first exposed to John Wilkins in a class on Classification Theory I took at the iSchool. One interesting article about classification by Borges is about Wilkins. Wilkins creates a system where everything in the world is divided into 40-odd basic categories, and everything is classified according to the system with various modifiers.
This system can be seen a couple of entries earlier. This particular article you’re commenting on has the modal verbs in it, I primarily put them here as a joke about the language in IETF RFCs.
So, it’s classification, which also includes taxonomy, cataloging, folksonomy, and generally getting an idea of how people perceive the world.
Generally, the sort of stuff we learn at the ischool is how humans interact with information. Wilkins was attempting to be more prescriptive than is generally the case in modern times, wanting changing how humans interact to conform to his model of how the universe works.
2005 October 13 at 10:01 am
Jordan Rule
The whole classification thing seems a bit forced. I thought the whole point of folksonomy is that it’s emergent classification; thus it wouldn’t be worth studying the experts.
But that’s why I bring up linguistics, what does seem worth studying is the way humans give meaning to the words they choose as classification signals.
Just a thought.
2005 October 13 at 1:00 pm
corprew
It’s more the case (imo) that folksonomy is a subset of classification theory than a separate entity, so the parts that look like linguistics, are actually part of that theory. The Borges article above goes into some of the reasons why Wilkins did the things he does, and comes to the conclusions.
If I was going to take a swing at defining it, it would be that classification theory covers the way humans give meaning to and organize the words and concepts they use for classification. and then there are several methods of applying that information and folksonomy, taxonomy, ontology, library catalogs, and how people structure websites are all done based on those ideas and/or objects of study.
At some point in the future, I’ll be putting up some pages about the ‘big picture,’ but they’re not publically publishable at the moment.