Re: My Three Assertions

Sai Emrys wrought:

>> stack syntax
>
>Isn't that just a matter of staying within 7+-2 bounds? I don't see
>anything inherently more difficult about the *syntax* that makes it
>human-incompatible.
There's the problem of the stack order, at least if you're going with the
whole Last-In-First-Out concept like Henning's Fith*. Even you can keep all
"seven give or take two" things in mind at once, keeping them in the right
order is something else. Especially if I understand the whole
stack-conjunction part of that right, where things are referred to solely by
their order in the stack, which itself can be shuffled by conjunctions etc.
Maybe it can be done by humans in real time, but it'd be a very very
unnatural way for us to process info.

*Yes, I'm aware that Fith is not a "human language", but remember with
conlangs all that is required for it to be a human language is that its
creator calls it one!

>(Arguably though, you could design syntax to ensure maximum immediate
>chunking ability, so you never have an unchunked set of items of
>longer than 7 or so, and pref. shorter...)
You could, but then you'd have to either be counting in your head all the
time or develop some kind of automatic sense of when you'd hit seven things.

It's great stuff for speculation, but my point was that studying/speculating
on this kind of speech system wouldn't give insight on how humans process
the world, because there aren't any who actually speak this way.

M

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