>From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Subject: Re: interrogative tail or head ?
>Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 02:55:08 +0200
>
>En réponse ?claudio <claudio.soboll@...>:
>
> >
> > you state: the head of a sentence is the most important part and i
> > agree. thats the principle: importance comes first.
> > but i cant agree to the argument about the unwitting miss of the first
> > words of a sentence.
> > why ?
> > it contradicts your first statement.
>
>Of course. But language is a bunch of contradictory elements:
>recognisability
>and speed of speech, precision and shortness of statements, intended
>meaning
>and received meaning. Each language tries to get around those
>unreconciliable
>elements in the optimal way (in short, it's probably impossible to do
>better
>than what has already been done. If you do, your language ceases to be
>human
>and people will have a hard time learning it).
>
> > when people tend to miss the "head", but still place important words
> > at the head, then the miss is abviously not relevant.
> >
>
>Well, I can check every day that when the important part of my sentences
>(the
>most meaningful part) is at the beginning of the sentence, I get more
>questions
>like: "what did you say?" or "can you repeat?" than when the important part
>is
>at the end. But the other problem is that the beginning of a sentence is
>stronger than the end (because we generally breathed before beginning the
>sentence), so that at the end things can get a little mangled. To speak in
>a
>signal-processing way, as for emission, the beginning of a sentence is less
>noisy than the end, but reception is more sensitive to the end than to the
>beginning. Each language has its own ways to reconcile those two
>incompatible
>elements. Usually, the strength of emission at the beginning of a sentence
>is
>enough to override the lack of sensitivity of the reception, so that
>fronting
>stays an important feature of languages. But it's not always true. If it
>was,
>French would never have got such long expressions to begin questions with,
>which seem to waste the strong beginning of sentences without conveying
>anything meaningful.
>
>Also, as for the psychological problem, I will contradict you on this one.
>For
>me, and for most people I know, questions with the rising intonation seem
>more
>comfortable for the hearer than questions without. Questions without the
>rising
>intonation sound nearly like orders, which is psychologically more
>offensive
>than a simple request shown by a rising intonation.
>
>Christophe.
>
>
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr