On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 05:55 , Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> Hardly. As shown by the passion displayed by certain parties for
> getting it "correct" in particular languages. Plural formation,
> as any other morphological or syntactic rules that a particular
> language may have, is simply part of the required grammatical apparatus
> for that language.
But let me also point out that grammatical correctness has nothing to do
with contextual correctness. I mean syntactic sugar as how much grammar
is needed to pass the context. "She get many boyfriend when she is
young" is totally incorrect in grammar but you still can get the picture
(but how funny it feels when I try to make up a sentence like this!
That's what I mean by 'sugar';).
> You overlooked the pronominal plurals in both languages. :-)
>
> Both languages also have group numeric classifiers ("a group of actors",
> "7 bundles of sticks", etc.) that are inherently plural.
But they have no singular to match. I agree numeric classifiers are
tough in both languages, however.
> Nope. In some historical sense all natural languages are equally old
> (except those originating in creoles). Whether they have simple or
> complex morphology and syntax is a contingent matter of the interaction
> of their systems of grammar through time and the nature of their
> contact and interaction with similar and different languages.
This sounds like all lifeforms on Earth is 4 billion years old, except
the ones genetically engineered in vitro :)
>> I can
>> brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is
>
> It isn't. ;-)
>
> Try this one on for size -- the opening sentence in the dedication of
> Sanseido's Unicode Kanji Information Dictionary:
A little correction in Kanji Reading. And to help all audience, I
reverted Katakanized word back to English. I am not going to translate
all of it because it's a killjoy :)
> Nihon de Yunikoodo no namae o kanshita Kanjijoohoojiten ga hakkoo
Unicode
> sareru koto ni taishite, Yunikoodokonsooshiamu no purezidento to shite,
Unicode Consortium president
> o-iwai to o-rei o mooshiageru koto wa, watakushi no tainaru yorokobi
Ooinaru(*)
> de ari meiyo na koto desu.
"de arimasu" or "to zonji agemasu" would make it
even better :)
(*) Kun-yomi instead of On-yomi. Though some people use on-yomi
deliberately.
This one is not grammatically hard, though it's sociologically hard.
I'd say Japanese is grammatically easy and socially pain in the arse
(even for natives, especially young ones like myself :).
> Incidentally, such sentences are not at all unusual in Japanese.
Though few can make up such speeches on the fly. Usually a paragraph
like this is templated and you just fill in the variable. English is
definitely the same to more or less extent. At any rate, it is really
hard to come up with the original phrases in any language.
>> but it seems Chinese
>> have us all beat with respect to that.
>
> Not really. Chinese has a minimum of formal morphological apparatus
> in its grammar -- it is often termed an "isolating" morphological
> type. But it has its own syntactic subtleties in complex sentence
> construction. Don't underestimate it. It just isn't the kind of
> arbitrary tables of case, tense, and number endings for irregular
> nouns and verbs that European language learners are more inclined
> to focus on as causing difficulties.
As I mentioned above, grammatical simplicity has little to do with the
total complexity of a language, natural or artificial. This is so true
even for computer languages. See how simple assembly languages are!
But how come I feel far more comfortable with such complex ones like
perl and ruby :)
Anyway, one thing for certain. Learning more languages not only gives
your mind more breadth, but gives your own language a depth.
Dan the Singular, not Single, Man
P.S. So if you want to learn both Perl and CJK, you are welcome at
perl-unicode@perl.org :)
P^2.S.We are still in need of testers for Korean! Anybodeeee?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Mar 26 2002 - 17:29:31 EST