On 11/12/2016 12:55 PM, kirst...@saunalahti.fi wrote:
You wrote:
"Different languages have different options for the grammatical forms
that express such relations. The number of options could lead to a
combinatorial explosion, but the practical number is limited by human
memory."
I take your first sentence as a most important note. For decades I have
been systematically observing the limitations due to knowing only one
language.
Yes. That is a very important point. Following is an excerpt
from a note that I sent to a different email list:
JFS
Grammar is part of the Trivium that had been emphasized in elementary
school (formerly called *grammar* school). While teaching Knowledge
representation to programmers at IBM, I found that the knowledge of
English grammar by typical native English speakers is abysmal.
But the students from IBM Japan knew English grammar very well.
Their speaking ability was not as good, but they did their homework
assignments better than the natives.
There is a huge difference between knowing how to do something
(e.g., speak English) and knowing how to analyze that process
and map it to another language (natural or artificial).
KM
The second sentence you wrote, my comment is: You take human memory
as something well-known and well-understood. That is not the case.
It is only something commonly spoken about.
No. From a particular use of a word or phrase, one can assume
a limited number of direct implications. It's not possible to
assume that the speaker was unaware of other implications.
In fact, what I was thinking about is Terry Deacon's point in the
book, _Symbolic Species_: The primary constraints on the structures
of natural languages result from the fact that they must be relearned
by infants in every generation. Anything that a child cannot quickly
learn and use will not be passed down from one generation to the next.
KM
[Finnish is] not at all related to English (the modern Latin)
As an inflected language, Latin is closer (in spirit) to Finnish.
Since English lost almost all inflections, English syntax is more
closely related to Chinese. The dialect called "Chinese restaurant
English" results from a word for word substitution of English words
into a Chinese pattern.
Even though Japanese uses Chinese characters, its syntax is closer
to Latin: highly inflected verb-final sentences with "postpositions"
on noun phrases that allow them to be moved freely. As a result,
there is no dialect called "Japanese restaurant English".
In studies of first-language learning, psycholinguists have found
that infants learn some relations expressed by word inflections
earlier than the same relations expressed by word order. However,
a complete mastery of the syntax of a highly inflected language does
take longer than the word-order syntax of English or Chinese.
Historical linguists suspect that the loss of inflections in English
began with the Danish invasions: At that time, Anglo-Saxon and Danish
were sufficiently similar that the words were mutually intelligible,
but the inflections were different. As a result, the speakers
depended more heavily on word order. After the French invasion
of 1066, almost all the inflections were gone.
John
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