Re: THE QUIZ...

Franz Gnaedinger wrote: 
Colin Fine wrote:


You are of course free to use 'language' in this very broad sense. As
with anybody who uses a word in a non-standard way, you risk being
massively understood.

I meant 'misunderstood', of course. 


But "massively understood" was a nice one. So while you are consciously
declining my understanding of language, some deeper level of your mind
is apparently welcoming it  :-)

You old Freudian, you. 

I am sure you do think so. I don't think you have convinced anybody on
this list.



But perhaps your subconscious, see the above slip.


Grammar is what it is, irrespective of the theoretical approach or model.
Nobody doubts that one can make analogies between language and things
which are not (conventionally) language, such as animal cries,
pheromones, music, and indeed genomes. And there may be parts of those
analogies that throw light on one or other of the domains being
compared. But you are making a much stronger claim: that there is some
(non-trivial) supraordinate property shared by all these things. I am
yet to be convinced.



My view is that actual grammar, as processed by the mind,  is always
more complex than grammar in the textbooks. The only way we can
cope with that is by inventing several complementary grammars. There
is the practical grammar we learn in school, which is based on the
work of ancient scholars, and very fine, as long as we don't go into
scholastic hair splitting. There is the interesting generative grammar
by Chomsky, however, not a practical one; I remember having done
some of the Chomskyan homework for Uschi who studied linguistics
while I was a free wheeler, and upset by Chomsky for his denial of
language in animals - I did not study linguistics and Chomsky but I
did fill in the Chomskyan diagrams for Uschi who studied that sort
of linguistics. And there is the grammar by Pater Rupert Ruhstaller,
a grammar of budding circles, my favorite grammar so far. Ruhstaller
discerns among functors and arguments. Functors are in the center
of a circle, while the arguments are placed on the circumference,
and can become the center of a new circle. I explained his diagrams
at some length in the spring or early summer of 2004, as I recall
(in the thread Did the Trojan war really happen the way Homer said
it did?). Back in 1975 I explained sentences by complementary
equations and intersections of word fields. Actual language is
always more than any grammar, and we can only cope with that
by inventing several grammars that cover this or that aspect of
language. Classical grammar doesn't care very much about the
sequence of words. Ancient languages, as for example Latin,
allow almost any order of words. But not with Ruhstaller's grammar,
where there is a natural order of functors and arguments, and the
actual order in a spoken sentence is significant for the meaning:
if a word should come according to the natural order but you have
to wait a long time till it really comes, there is a lot of tension
building up, and then collapsing, so the word that comes too late
is a holder of meaning. Most gloriously this idea is explained by
Ruhstaller's diagram of the first lines of Virgil's Aeneid, which
condeses the epic into a few lines, and within them the words
of the highest tension are again a comprimation of the comprimation
- look up my messages on Ruhstaller's grammar if you are interested
in these questions. We had frequent discussions in sci.lang on the
word order, and I never heard anything the like. Classical grammar
can't say much on this issue, but Ruhstaller's grammar can. A pity
he died; today, with the help of computers, he could draw wonderful
diagrams ...

It's nothing to do with 'classical', or 'ancient', except for the accident that the older European languages, including the two main 'classical' ones, put a high functional load on inflection and a correspondingly low one on word order. Some real languages do this, some do the opposite. If Ruhstaller's grammar purports to uncover some special significance for word order, it doesn't sound as if it can be universal for languages (even in the usual significance of the term). Of course a similar criticism is one of those levelled at Chomsky ...

I don't wish to convince you, I am just appealing to your subconscious
that may appreciate my points ...


Why? I don't see any logical basis for that conclusion.
Consider cellular automata such as the Game of Life. Unless you are
going to count 'the total number of living neighbours in a time-step' as
a kind of communication, there isn't any. If you are, you have broadened
the meaning of 'communication' beyond all usefulness, in my view.



I can't consider Conway's Game of Life and his cellular automata
as living beings. Not at all.

I don't care whether they are living beings. I am challenging your assumption that there *must* be communication between individuals.



Because (assuming they are there) they are there? Because they will be
trying to communicate with us? Because they may have a way of
representing language, which the Magdalenian's didn't?



Language is language, whether "spoken" by a cell, a bacterium, an
animal, a human, a Magdalenian, a member of the Early Concrete Age,
or an alien.

So you say. I can say "Werbleplee is werbleplee, whether umptred by a cell, a bacterium, an animal" etc, and I have said just as much as you have - except that I have avoided the potential confusion that might be caused by people thinking you were talking about language.


Colin
.

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