Back to dimensionality. When you are saying something linguistically, it's like taking a trip. You know, when you take a trip from California to Netanya, you don't go straight south and then straight west and then straight north. It's not orthogonal. There are little bits at the beginning. Then you take bigger hops on the planes and then you take littler hops at the end. Language works the same way, it's fractal. There is little orthogonality. At least apparently; you can have orthogonal views of it, there are orthogonal subsets. But there are multiple orthogonal subsets. At first glance it just looks like a network, and you have to navigate the geography.
| Author | Larry Wall |
| Work | Present Continuous, Future Perfect |