Here's an interesting exercise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Weq_sHxghcg
It's a great demonstration of how critically important word order is in English ... and by implication, how much structural preparation must precede looking and hearing. I recently read an article on-line about computers, translations, and natural language. Unfortunately, I've lost the link. But one thing that struck me in the article was a remark the author made about how our concept of time is constructed by and deeply embedded in the way we express time in language, i.e., by what we call "tense" in English. English uses six principal tenses (two each of past, present, and future) plus several other manifestations of time (e.g., the use of the infinitive in the subjunctive). Other languages use different methods to express time (I don't even know how they are coordinated or correlated when making translations). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
