Re: Sentences without any subject

Peter T. Daniels schrieb:
On Oct 15, 10:15 am, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels schrieb:





Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
[snip]
What kind of function of communication does case serve, for example,
in German, that English fails to serve for communication?
Sorry, typo. I wanted to continue a point in my previous post and
not extend it to case endings. That sentence should read:
What kind of function of communication does gender serve, for
example, in German, that English fails to serve for communication?
There are two excellent "Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics," *Case*
by Barry Blake and *Gender* by Greville Corbett, that discuss these
phonemena cross-linguistically. (Corbett also wrote *Number* in the
same series, though you didn't mention it.) Go there for such
questions.
As layman I quickly browsed through the book of Corbett on Gender.
I saw there materials about many languages whose names I didn't
know. On the other hand there seems to be nothing directly
handling the redundancy issue I questioned. What I like to know
is, to be concrete: what would French and German loose in there
power/capability to express ideas, if the gender difference of
nouns were removed? Anyway, that would certainly render these
languages somewhat easier for non-natives to learn in my
conviction.

Presumably they would not lose in "their power/capability to express
ideas," but the information provided by gender/number/case concord
would presumably have to be provided by other means instead, so that
the net amount of information did not fall and the general amount of
redundancy did not fall below the threshold needed for successful
communication. (Hockett estimated redundancy in spoken language at
~50% but never said how he arrived at that figure.)

French has 2 genders, German has 3. On the other hand, if I
haven't wrongly read somewhere, there are languages that have
round 50 cases. Redundancy is a nice thing, for the natural
channel of communication we have is often rather noisy. But
perhaps a more rational redundancy, i.e. one that can be put
into simple grammatical rules, would be more desirable.
(Certainly, natural languages have never been designed by
someone with rationality in mind.)

M. K. Shen
.

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