Re: where do so many tenses come from?
- From: hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman Rubin)
- Date: 1 Apr 2006 16:05:09 -0500
In article <ZhOWf.20177$dy4.12130@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
John Atkinson <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Joachim Pense" <spam-collector@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote...
Am Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:11:22 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:
Now if you want to talk about grammatical simplicity, English has been
working in that direction by dropping cases.
And elaborating its syntax. No language's grammar is significantly
simpler than any other's.
Is that statement drawn from the observation of the existing natural
languages, or from pure reasoning?
A bit of each, probably.
If it is drawn from observation, then you must have the right metrics to
do
the comparison.
And what is the "right" metric? Give me two languages A and B, and I'll
guarantee you there's a metric in which A > B, and one in which B > A.
The appropriate metrics would be length of time needed to
communicate equally clearly, and the problem of learning
additional vocabulary. A system of highly regular cases,
with few (preferably one) class of declined object, and
similarly for verbs, is rather easy to learn or use. On
the other hand, grammatical gender and a variety of cases,
somewhat irregular, is much harder.
Dropping cases and conjugated tenses and using auxiliaries
raises the length of discourse. Having to use a plural
auxiliary instead of a simple plural ending is such an
increase. However, if the ending is long, this seems to
be vitiated; UN simultaneous translation is difficult for
those translating to Russian. Having to use a preposition
instead of an ablative form is not much of a lengthening.
Having a large number of distinct phonemes is an advantage
in speaking, but the most efficient known, using musical
pitch for those who have the ability, does not occur in
any natural language. Some languages have tones, some
languages have lots of consonant sounds, there are different
numbers of vowel sounds and diphthongs, and there is a
tradeoff between what can be easily understood and the
speed advantage of complexity.
Polynesian languages, with few consonants and vowels,
necessarily take longer, just as using base 2 takes
more space than larger bases. So how large should
it be? Too large, and the problem of memorizing the
characters and their values is a major problem. Too
small has the problem of time, and the difficulty of
even remembering the sentence. How many could handle
a reasonable sentence of 10 or 20 words spelled out?
What observation tells us is, that there's no "obvious" metrics (ones that
most people will agree are appropriate) for comparing languages in terms of
complexity. Every time someone says, Khinalug is more complex than Georgian
because it has 76 consonant phonemes while Georgian has only 28, the other
person can counter this with, ah, but Georgian has all those enormous
consonant clusters. OK, but aren't they both more complex than Hawaiian,
with 8 consonants and no clusters? More complex phonetically, no doubt,
but I bet there's someone out there who'll tell us that Hawaiian's uniquely
complex in its semantics, or something.
Hawaiian, and other Polynesian languages, are slower
because of the lack of phonemes.
If it's just pure reasoning, then I don't see why language A cannot have a
grammar that is more complex than language B. For example, morphological
systems can look like being arbitrarily blown up.
"Pure reasoning" suggests that the language organs in the brains of the
speakers of different languages are equally capable. If a language
presented to a language learner is more complex than the language organ can
handle, it'll get simplified. If it's less complex than others (e.g., if
it's a pidgin) it'll get complexified by new speakers as they learn it.
Assume, for example, that you replace the five conjugation paradigmas of
Latin (language A) by a single one (language B). Would you really need
additions _of roughly equal complexity_ to make up for the lost
expressiveness? I don't think so; the potential loss that I can see is
that
some words that were different before will be equal now. I don't think
fixing that will have as much weight as dropping four conjugation classes.
I agree that the expressiveness would not be lost. But
it would also not be lost if the Latin declensions were
simplified and regularized.
No, but all those neurons that are no longer required to deal with all those
conjugations are now available to do something else -- and they will.
Which is easier? Complications are added in many ways.
Anyone doing mathematics uses a vocabulary of several
hundred expressions instead of going back to the
definitions, which would be hopelessly long. The basic
language of mathematics has an infinite number of variables,
and a very small number of constants, and simple basic
rules. One uses the extensions for clarity and speed.
John.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
.
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