Re: where do so many tenses come from?

Joachim Pense wrote:

Am Sun, 02 Apr 2006 14:01:31 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

Ruud Harmsen wrote:

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 09:06:58 GMT: "John Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
in sci.lang:

Hawaiian, and other Polynesian languages, are slower
because of the lack of phonemes.

Are they slower?

One would expect them to be faster, in terms of phonemes per seconds,
because each of their phonemes contain fewer bits of information, as
there aren't so many different ones.

That means that each one carries _more_ information.

No, less. You need more phonemes to transport the same amount of
information, so each one carries less.

Syntagmatics vs. paradigmatics.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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