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Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

From:Mathias M. Lassailly <lassailly@...>
Date:Friday, October 23, 1998, 19:39
At 3:09 pm -0700 22/10/98, charles wrote:
> ..... > >So, a holophrase can take an argument, > >as in "allgone shoe!" or "ticket, please?" ? > >Then it would seem like an idiomatic formula. > > Yep - I suppose that's about it. > > >Jesperson said that "originally" languages would > >have been "holophrastic." On the auxlang list, > >we tried to make sense of this, and failed (I think). >
That's right. Eskimoan is holophrastic and yet not quite 'original' :-) Maybe because Jespersn did not tell how far he thought presentative was from holophrastic structure ;-) (I'd bet he couldn't).
> If he's using holophrastic this way then he'd be saying that language began > with the sort of unstructured utterances children use as they are beginning > to acquire language. >
I never read anything about that but I can tell you my little cousins went : 1. word 2. theme/rheme (usually reversed : amazing for French children !) 3. predicate/argument (or reversely) 4. verbal structure (svo for French). They're the most lovely guinea-pigs I know :-)
> On the principle that ontology encapsulates phylogeny, I guess that at some > stage this is very likely to have happened. The main difference between > theorists, as I see it, is whether this proto-language development took > place before homo sapiens sapiens or in a "pre-sapiens" period. > > Ray. > >
Yes, indeed : holophrastic structure exists only if there no predicative presentative structure. And presentative is already a structure differentiating perception (what I know/feel) and affirmation. Therefore the term 'sapiens' is very well-come here :-) Language of those who 'know' vs. language of those who don't know yet :-) Mathias ----- See the original message at http://www.egroups.com/list/conlang/?start=17672 -- Free e-mail group hosting at http://www.eGroups.com/