Indeterminate dimensionality

From: http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
 

Scientists like to be able to locate things by giving a ``vector'', that is, a list of coordinates in a space of known dimensionality. This is one of the reasons they like orthogonality--it means the various components of the vector are independent of each other. Unfortunately, the real world is not usually set up to work that way. Most problems, including linguistics problems, are a matter of ``getting from here to there'', and the geography in-between has a heavy influence on which solutions are practical. Problems tend to be solved at several levels. A typical journey might involve your legs, your car, an escalator, a moving sidewalk, a jet, maybe some more moving sidewalks or a tram, another jet, a taxi, and an elevator. At each of these levels, there aren't many ``right angles'', and the whole thing is a bit fractal in nature. In terms of language, you say something that gets close to what you want to say, and then you start refining it around the edges, just as you would first plan your itinerary between major airports, and only later worry about how to get to and from the airport.