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Len Bullard wrote:
> Actually, the potential for infinite signfieds given a sign
> never seems to occur in practice. Semioticians puzzled
> over that one awhile and discovered that communities of
> interpretation with preferred readings always emerge to
> limit that infinity. signfied+ or signified* is just
> a notation for a code picklist.
There's room for lots of practice before the infinity problem takes
root.
English lets you say damn near anything using any grammar you please,
and pretty rough speling as wel. As wide-open as English is, it ain't
so tolerant - most readers ain't tolerant - of Chinese characters (or
other non-Latin forms except in parens with a translation) appearing in
the middle of English sentences. Logos and currency signs are
occasional exceptions.
We can have all kinds of weird spellings, mispronunciation is a common
fact of life, but there's a core set of signifiers for the written
language that isn't easily messed with. In reading English, we expect a
flow of these characters which appear according to roughly predictable
patterns (where are John's trigrams?).
Signifier sets are rarely infinite in practices, though that still
leaves plenty of room for nuance, ambiguity, and necessary chaos. URIs
and all their capabilities strike me as a misguided effort to reach for
the infinite by providing too many possibilities on the back of
signifiers with commonly-understood (location-based)) constraints.
--
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com
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