Re: THEORY: Natural language change (was Re: Charlie and I)
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <artabanos@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 21, 1999, 21:56 |
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Charles wrote:
> I can't see how the Romans lived without punctuation, or
> the Japanese today,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time I saw a modern
Japanese text, it included Western forms of punctuation.
> even putting verbs strictly last ...
> but maybe that is really a major advantage of SOV typology.
Well... how is that any different from putting subjects
strictly first? That's pretty close to the current state in
English. Besides, I don't think sytntax or morphology
have much to do with orthographical conventions. Spoken
speech rarely has highly marked punctuations anyways:
it's just a string of phonemes operating according to
particular rules. The orthographic conventions are
quite separate, if you think about it.
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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
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