Re: unnatural languages

In article <1173411309.598672.291450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 8, 3:30 pm, hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman Rubin) wrote:
In article <1173354137.155781.136...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Jens S. Larsen <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Herman Rubin skribis:
Jens S. Larsen <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
phogl...@xxxxxx:

..................


I can see no reason why one needs to know a "natural language"
to learn a more structured one. Nor can I see a reason why
one needs to learn a natural language first.

Because if you abused your child by not exposing it to anything but "a
more structured" language (whatever that means), it probably would
never learn a language at all, since the human child is hard-wired to
learn a human language just from interacting with its environment.

If the people in the environment speak the structured
language, what is the difference? It already has been
found that children pick up grammatical structure with
small vocabulary, and then later have to often relearn
the irregularities.

However, I can
see a reason why one needs to learn structure early, and the
earlier the better. Even good students who have learned
details have substantial difficulty in learning the concepts
in mathematics, and I suspect in language as well; there is
a strong opinion that children learn grammar (in the extended
sense of structure) early. A large proportion of those who
learned to read by the whole word method never mastered the
phonic use of the alphabet. In statistics, it is even worse,
and this applies at all levels, including the PhD.

After all these years, you still do not understand the difference
between the languages people speak and the artificial constructs
taught in "English grammar" clazsses? or the difference between spoken
and written language?

The "artificial constructs" are closer to what I consider
to be "good English" than the conglomeration of idiolects
of which you seem to be fond. This is in the spoken language
as well as the written one, and with the internet, it is the
written one which is becoming the most important. If one can
struggle with the written language, one can communicate with
an educated person much more easily than handling some of the
recognized pronunciations of English.



--
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
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Try to calculate Your choroscope by substracting 6 years from
    ... making horoscope in a way I suggested that it is better. ... ignored partly for that reason and partly for the reason I gave above. ... If english is not your first language then good on you for posting here. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: elementary Sanskrit blunder by Harvard professor
    ... community is under the influence of more than one language - the form ... there isn't any reason why it would be uniformly ... (One might wonder how you think English has ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: elementary Sanskrit blunder by Harvard professor
    ... community is under the influence of more than one language - the form ... there isn't any reason why it would be uniformly ... (One might wonder how you think English has ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: OT - PatnTonys potatoes
    ... What you suggested above was making a new, alternative rule for apostrophes. ... The reason is, I think, that this is usually how we say it, which is the rule of thumb for most of these things. ... We may lose either the clarity or the beauty of our language, ... You only have to look at other internet forums (and I stick resolutely to the English plural here) to see how garbled and unclear and ugly English can become when it's carelessly used. ...
    (uk.media.radio.archers)
  • Re: OT - What is the plural of "virus" anyway?
    ... ]>]The Cherokee's written language is only a compiled group of symbols ... since you acknowledge that English ... ONLY if cactus is a latin ...
    (alt.os.linux)
Quantcast