Jan Coffey wrote:
But you have to memorize math too - you don't just figure things out every time you do a problem do you? Unless you use your fingers every time you add, you have memorized basic addition. Do you figure out pi every time you need to use it? Commutative, distributive and associative principals? Is everything in math _easy_ to figure out?
I never memorized anything by rote and I always did lousy in school but has always been very good at taking standardized tests. Why? The questions can be analyzed and wrong answers eliminated logically.
You have to have a lot memorized (even if it is not -as I said- by rote) to
be able to do this.
You _can_ discover how to communicate.You can't learn the system and then be able to discover or "create"dictionary.
words based on that system which can then be found as valid words in the
Wrong again. You aren't able to create new words, but you most certainly can create sentences, paragraphs and essays. Just like in other systems that don't allow you to change the basic building blocks.
Actualy I am not wrong. I specificaly used the word discover. Let's use
mathmatics as an example. you have the number 0 and the successor function.
By applying the successor function to 0 you can aquire 1 etc. etc. Whether or
not you know what to "call" 1 you can ~discover~ it.
I agree that language is not as precise a system as mathematics, but there are many things in the scientific world that are counterintuitive - that one has to discover through experimentation and then _memorize_ unless they keep repeating the experiment every time they want to rediscover the phenomenon.
We are not talking about being able to ~change~ anything just the creation or ~discovery~ or something that is already a valid "building block".
We seem to be degrading into a discussion of linguistics. Ok.
Natural languages vary in how well formed they are. In the case of english the rules are not strict. You can not learn the rules and then use them consistently corectly. As such it is not what I would describe as a "system" using the assumed definition which you then overloaded. (case in point actualy). You have to memorize which rule applies in which cases, and the ~reasons~ these rulls apply in their particular cases has no basis. It requires memorization (whether it is rote or not).
Granted in cases where the most probable answer is based on the probabliity of one rule applying you can guess resaonably well. Of course the probabliity requires memorization as well, and this probabliity is most often based on the way the word is spelled not on the way it sounds. You would therefore have to be able to spell the word properly or at least to have some predjudice for one spelling over another. This again is the same type of degraded ~system~ without proper rules. You just have to memorize it.
And though math may be governed by stricter rules, we use language much more frequently and thus memorize through familiarization.
Doug
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