Re: Hypersimple & Dreadfully Unnatural Grammars

On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Edward Heil wrote:

> I've been thinking about this, and while at first I thought of these
> RPN-ish grammars as dreadfully unnatural, they seem to be variations on
> the following theme:
>
> As symbols come in through your ears, you're sitting there building
> conceptions.  You try to fuse the meanings of those symbols together as
> they come in.  Sometimes a given meaning has several possible places
> where other meanings could fit into it -- multivalent verbs are examples
> of this.  That's where you need things like case marking, morphological
> or syntactic.
>
> It strikes me that natlangs are probably nothing more than examples of
> this process, optimized according to parameters we don't understand to
> maximize communicative value and ease of use.
Both RPN and SOV orders may seem unnatural to those who speak
English, French, Spanish, or other mostly SVO or VSO languages,
even though the "parent" languages were actually SOV.
The relation between high- and low-level programming languages
is similar in that most assembly langs are OV, etc.

I am attracted to OV order because relative clauses are easier
(maybe) and machine parsing/understanding might be also.
Another reason is the spontaneous Nicaraguan sign-language
invention event, and the "elegant" way it first defines
its objects and assigns them to a spacial location,
then references them by simply pointing to that spot.
(A sort of switch-reference.)

Just for amusement, here is Mark Twain's humorous dissection
of German, which is infamous for its verb-lastness:
http://eserver.org/langs/the-awful-german-language.txt