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Re: LIFO languages (was Re: "Theory informs practice" - OK?)

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Saturday, November 15, 2008, 20:22
Hallo!

On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:10:51 -0500, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> The Fith may routinely spout utterances that a human has no hope of > deciphering in real time, and a human with time on his hands may of course > put together such devious utterances, but I see no reason why two humans > couldn't have a real-time conversation in Fith. They just wouldn't use the > language to its fullest capabilities... but most real-time conversations > aren't the epitome of eloquence in any language.
Indeed, if you restrict stack depth and disallow most of the stack conjunctions, you get a human-parsable language. See <shameless plug> http://www.langmaker.com/shallowfith.htm </shameless plug> for a human-speakable subset of Fith. Shallow Fith is very unsophisticated from a Fithian viewpoint, but this "unsophisticatedness" makes it accessible to humans. On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:05:52 +0100, Lars Finsen wrote:
> Den 15. nov. 2008 kl. 17.53 skreiv Jörg Rhiemeier: > > > In a LIFO language like Fith ( http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm ), > > a simple clause looks indeed quite much like one on an SOV language, > > but that is only a superficial resemblance because the language is > > processed in a way completely different from human languages. > > Not completely, I'd say. In a SOV language there's also some > stacking. You need to stack both arguments, including attributes, > before you 'process' them with the verb.
Hmmm... all human languages require some kind of temporary storage for sentence constituents in the brain, perhaps indeed some kind of "stack", and indeed, LIFO stacks are used in computer-processing of languages; but I don't think any human language works as explicitly LIFO-based as Fith, and its stack-manipulating tricks are way beyond what kind of syntactic transformations occur in human languages. ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf