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Re: DTD Notation raises a question

• From: Rod Davison <rdavison@s...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 17:45:25 -0400

Not in the spirit I was speaking.  It is generally accepted that synonyms are 
not the same as different references for the same entitiy.  Thus "The 
President of the United States" and "George W. Bush" are not synoyms but 
different ways of referring to the same thing.

Synonomy is a matter of semantic meaning not reference.  In my example 
"middle" and "medial" are considered synomous based ontheir meaning, not on a 
reference.

I didn't raise this though as a theoretical nit-picky point.  I was thinking 
of the problem of given wo content models, asking what makes them equivalent? 
 What makes them synonymous?  Clearly at one level, they are equivlent if and 
only if they produce exactly the same set of "sentences".  what I was trying 
to ask, perhaps poorly, is that given a content model A, can we apply a set 
of transformations to it (e.g. adding "redundent" paraentheses) to produce a 
differnt content model B with the assurances that the models are equivalent.

Thanks

On Wednesday 11 July 2001 05:18 pm, you wrote:
> Rod Davison wrote:
> > In Linguistics, it is well known that true synonomy does not exist. 
> > Given two putative semantic synonyms (like "medial" and "middle") -- one
> > can always find a discourse pragmatic usage of one where the other would
> > not be allowed ("I am the middle child", *"I am the medial child.").
>
> Counterexamples:
>
> 	He has Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease.
> 	He has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
> 	He has subacute spongiform encephalopathy.
>
> These three terms may be substituted for one another in any context.

-- 
====================================================
Rod Davison @ Critical Knowledge Systems Inc
rdavison@s...
====================================================
"Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded 
their reinvention." - Larry Wall
====================================================

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