Re: THEORY: Natural language change (was Re: Charlie and I)

Charles wrote:

> Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > > > even putting verbs strictly last ...
> > > > but maybe that is really a major advantage of SOV typology.
>
> Now, carefully excising Tom's reply's punctuation ...
>
> > i dont think sytntax or morphology have much to do
> > with orthographical conventions spoken speech rarely
> > has highly marked punctuations anyways its just a
> > string of phonemes operating according to particular
> > rules the orthographic conventions are quite
> > separate if you think about it
>
> ... and you can see how it starts to melt.
> What started me on this was the example where
> punctuation made a very critical difference,
> and both Nik and I had trouble deciphering
> the simple idiomatic expression of a child.
Granted, but that's not what you said.  You made a general
comment about Ancient Roman and (supposed) modern
Japanese spelling habits.  Spelling and writing systems in
general are abitrary assignations of sound to a graphical
form.  It's just not so simple as to say that writing without
punctuation is "hard", because you, and I, and everyone here
has been socialized into a written language which uses it.
We're accustomed to it, and so, on the face of it, anything
that deviates from that will naturally be hard.  But it doesn't
have to be that way:  the Chinese and Japanese -- cultures which
for most of history were not only more populous but also richer
and more literate than Europeans -- seemed to do well for millennia
without it, and only introduced it at a time when the rest of their
*spoken*  languages (statistically the hardest part of a language to
impose changes on from the outside) were undergoing similar
Westernization (supposedly, the current Chinese use of plural
marking in pronouns is a direct result of their exposure to Western
languages in which the distinction is obligatory).  In fact, the
Roman (and early Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) system of
doing things is in some ways more natural, since, like I said,
no -- one -- breaks -- their -- spoken -- sentences -- up --
into -- discrete -- segments -- when -- they're -- talking.

> So, I'm talking about attachment ambiguities.
> Punctuation and intonation help a whole lot.
But, if intonation is so important to remove ambiguity,
how do we manage to understand each other (for the most
part) just fine here in this forum?  Neither sentence level,
nor word-level, nor even pitch marking occurs in written
English except for the final word in any given phrase,
nor in many European languages which otherwise have
punctuation.  Why don't we just mark all the *other* places
that have intonational changes, too?

I don't mean to be brash here -- I was just expressing my
viewpoint on the matter, that it's quite easy not to have
punctuation marks.  They're useful, yes, but then, no one is, or
has been, questioning that.

=======================================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

Denn wo Begriffe fehlen,
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
   -- Mephistopheles, in Goethe's _Faust_
========================================================