Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Nik Taylor wrote:

> Raymond A. Brown wrote:
> > The pro-complements in a verbal string in modern French are all bound
> > morphemes and come in a very fixed order; the speaker has the option of
> > inserting the bound morphemes in the required places.   That neither makes
> > modern French a "Stone Age" language nor 'computer-like'.
>
> I thought his description of "computer-like" human languages was fishy...
> However, he may have a point about polysynthetic being more common with
> stone-age peoples.  Agricultural people *would* trade more, and there'd
> be people speaking it as a second language, that would tend to slightly
> creolize the language.  So, the fact that polysynthetic languages tend
> to be associated with stone age peoples isn't evidence that it itself is
> a "stone age type".
>
There's a world of difference between a language which _permits_  polysynthetic
expressions (like French) and a language which _requires_ them (like Cheyenne).

How can you (Nik) and Ray blithely ignore that difference?  It's the difference
between being free to express a particular thought in a variety of ways (as in
what I've called "modern languages") or being forced to express it in only one
way (as in what I've called "Stone Age languages").

-- Tommie