Re: Armenian, Sumerian, Burushaski, and Turkic languages

On Jun 20, 4:09 pm, Franz Gnaedinger <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 20, 1:32 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



You don't realize that _every_ language has such word pairs???
Animals feed, people eat. (Tiere fressen, Leute essen.)

In German one doesn't have to say: ich fresse, Du isst.
Yet in Japanese one has to make a difference whether
I do something or you do the same thing. Another case,
making a discovery. I can humbly or humorously say:
I stumbled over something (when I made a discovery),
while I say: you discovered something (when you made
a discovery), but, and here is the difference: we are not
obliged to use two different verbs, whereas the Japanese
are or were obliged to use different verbs in such a case.
It's a grammatical rule, as the obligation to discern
between genders in German. In English you say the man,
the woman, the child. In German one says der Mann
(masculine), die Frau (feminine), das Kind (neuter).
In English you say the floor, the wall, the window.
In German you are obliged to discern artificial genders
of lifeless objects: der Boden (masculine), die Wand
(feminine), das Fenster (neuter). These artificial genders
have no reason, they don't reveal anything about the
world, and they have no function in language, so they
are a mere complication of the language. Whereas the
difficult English spelling has a function: it allows the
reading eyes to quickly discern among phonetically
similar words, owing to the different pictures of the
words in print.

Guessing is stupid when you can simply ask someone who knows.

Apparently nobody knows in sci.lang.

You do not have a single shred of evidence of that.

I heard that Japanese is dramatically changing
with the young urban generation, and it's quite
obvious that industrialization with standardized
production must be finishing off with the above
grammar of politeness: when I buy a CD by
a pop group and you buy the same CD by the
same pop group I can't pretend my CD is
lousy and your CD is bombastic - we got the
same CD and the same cover and the same
leaflet, industrialized products that do their best
in oder to eliminate every difference - my CD
is the same as your CD. It's quite obvious to me
that such a rule of grammatical politeness as
Feynman was taught can't be upheld any longer
in an industrialized civilization, a formerly feudal
society catapulted into a different age by modern
technology. Language changes in Japan, language
will also change in China where the ages old ways
of growing rice will soon give way to industrialized
agriculture. Technology changes a society, and
these changes are mirrored in language, not only
in the vocabulary, also in grammar.

But I guess we have some people here who
understand Japanese. Perhaps they can tell us
more?

Franz Gnaedinger


Here are some quotes from an American novel of the year
2007 that show how also modern English changes, according
to the following rule: leave out a word if the sentence can still
be understood - lean management, lean industrial production,
lean language ...

the thing I really want (the thing that I really want)

I know a guy at Random House you ever want an introduction
(if you ever want an introduction)

You going to the outlets tomorrow? (Are you going ...)

Goes with the territory, doesn't it? (It goes with ...)

You guys need a refill? (Do you guys need ...)

The chemo gave Bridget no-warning hot flashes (hot flashes
without a warning)

"Harrison," she said, hardly believing it was really he standing
before her (hardly believing that he was really ,,,)

And Bridget was glad Agnes didn't think her fragile (she was
glad that Agnes didn't think that she was fragile)

My God, I can't believe it's you (that it's you)

He believed himself to old for romance (he believed that he
was too old ,,,)

Language mirrors life, and in humans the level of technology
(a law of mine from 1974/75).

.

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