Re: THEORY: Question: Bound Morphemes

At 01:12 06/07/99 -0700, you wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>> Well, in oral, I can't see any difference between the English article and
>> the Basque one. The only one I can see is the fact that when phonological
>> changes happen, it's on the article in English, and on the stem before the
>> article in Basque. For the rest, they behave exactly the same. But since
>> I'm no native speaker, maybe I'm misleading.
>
>I guess you are right.
>
>> Don't you think "the" remains
>> a "separate word" only because it is written separately?
>
>What a horrible thought!
>
>> Don't forget that
>> many people confuse the linguistic reality with the written reality (it
>> took 2000 years for grammarians and linguists to stop making this mistake).
>
>For me, text is as important as sound. Same for many others who
>can only read a language, such as Latin/Greek or maybe English.
>In literate societies, one should not under-emphasize spelling.
>I even visualize text when listening to speech ... uh, is that sick?
>
        Well, if it is sick, then most educated people are sick :) (even me). But
it is not linguistics. The language and its written counterpart are very
different things and confusing them is a mistake. And when we are talking
of points of structure like the nature of 'the', it is its use in speech
that is important, not its use in writing. The written language is only a
(generally false) representation of an oral reality that is the language in
itself, so it is irrelevant when talking of the structure of a language (as
if an entomologist studied only dead butterflies hung on a table to
understand the behaviour of butterflies). Even with dead languages, the
first work of a linguist is to find out what the written evidence
represented, and where the written evidence was different from the oral
reality (think of the written Latin which is very different from the oral
Latin that gave birth to the Romance languages).

>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html