Linguistics,
Grammar and the Philosophy of Language
Rationale
My attention is too divided to really learn languages well, but over the last ten years of studying buddhist scriptures, I have learned some Tibetan and Sanskrit. For almost a year I have been taking Sanskrit lessons from a skilled teacher, translating the first chapters of the Bhagavad Gita, which I enjoyed very much. My knowledge of Tibetan and Sanskrit vocabulary is still very poor, but that will change over time, as the philosophical literature of buddhism (and hinduism) will definitely continue to have my interest.
While I was learning, I have made some parsing programs in MS Access and object oriented Lisp (XLisp 3.0) for analyzing Tibetan sentences syntactically, trying to produce various formal descriptions of the syntax of classical Tibetan, which was very educating.
About a year ago I have heen experimenting with a program in MS Access, Sicstus Prolog and PHP, containing some of the most well known Sanskrit dictionaries from which I extracted the lexical information for each lemma. This program is still helpful in translating Sanskrit sentences. One of the goals for this project was to apply more or less state-of-the-art HPSG to Sanskrit, a goal which was partly realized. HPSG syntax presents answers to some of the problems Wittgenstein addressed in his Tractatus in the beginning of the 20th century.
With this program my explorations in the field of the philosophy of language will be more or less at an end. I have gained some insight into the relations between language and thought, or at least I have a general idea of the fundamental problems of the area.
Here you can find the GramKit framework with Prolog HPSG parser.
My Sanskrit and Tibetan study notes of a few years ago.
A timetable of the Dene-Caucasian superfamily of languages.