Re: USAGE: Language revival

Quoth John Cowan:
> Ed Heil wrote:
> > Because, neurologically, lookup is always more efficient than
> > computation, and there are no known storage space constraints on human
> > memory (your hard drive never "fills up" and it doesn't get harder to
> > recall things as you learn more things), forms will always be recalled
> > from memory rather than computed formulaically, if that is possible.
>
> I said that was contrary to the linguistic evidence before, and I
> say so now.  If it were true, we would have retained "dwerrows" as the
> plural of "dwarf" (Tolkien's example), but we have created the analogical
> plurals "dwarfs" and "dwarves" instead.  If we could memorize everything,
> every language would be a morphological nightmare: every noun and verb
> irregular.
That's not true at all.  Once learned, we can remember these irregular
forms, but we still have to learn them in the first place.  If they are
in common use at the time we're learning the language, we'll learn them
without any difficulty, irregularities and all; but later on, we'll be
forced to generalise from one example (e.g. "dwarf") in order to get
that word's other forms (hmm, I guess the plural must be "dwarves").

--
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
No one is listening until you make a mistake.