Kontextmaschine

15th October 2018

Post reblogged from Nine Sixteen Twenty-Five with 440 notes

i know i’ve made this post before, but i just, really like how category theory tends to lead people to write sentences that use diagrams as clauses??
like, you look at
and it’s a completely normal sentence! which feels very natural to write or read! but, well, there’s no way to convert those diagrams to… words. there’s no order in which they’re supposed to be read, no convention for how it’s supposed to turn into sounds in your brain, and in fact it… just doesn’t, yknow? you switch between “read words” mode and “decrypt diagram” mode without even thinking about it and the whole thing somehow parses as a sentence in your brain anyways.
you also get incredibly cool stuff like
i mean just look! he put a semicolon after the diagram! a semicolon actually needs to be there or the thing won’t be grammatical! here after something that is not written to be expressable in words! it’s so! ugh! i love it!!!
in fact there’s like, multiple conventions as to where the punctuation is supposed to go after diagrams. johnstone above has been kind of old fashioned w/ putting the punctuation after the first line, these days people tend to write stuff like
where the punctuation goes after the rightmost symbol of the bottommost line of the diagram.
anyways. isn’t that neat? like, linguistically.