Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Tommie wrote :

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > I agree with you that only purely
> > polysynthetic is restricted to stone age peoples, but I see no reason to
> > think that polysynthetic is "less sloppy" than other types, and there's
> > absolutely no evidence that I can see to say that it was the *only* type
> > spoken before agriculture.  Polysynthetic would probably have been more
> > common, and perhaps the relative ratios of the other types may have been
> > different, who knows?  But on what evidence do you say that the human
> > mind "may be predisposed to creating purely polysynthetic structures"?
>
> When we are tiny children learning to speak our native language, nobody teaches us what
> its morphemes mean: We figure out their meanings by ourselves, from the various contexts
> within which each morpheme appears.  And a morpheme typically has a rich constellation
> of meaning, so that what a typical morpheme means in one context isn't quite the same as
> what it means in other contexts.  (I'll grant that some morphemes -- such as pronouns
> and numerals -- may have invariant meanings, but nearly all other common morphemes
> don't.)
>
> The reason why a typical morpheme means something different in one context than it means
> in other contexts, is that different  portions of its "rich constellation of meaning"
> come into play in different contexts.
>
> What purely polysynthetic structures do -- and other types of grammatical structures
> don't do -- is provide a strictly limited number of contexts in which any morpheme can
> appear.  So, if the human mind is "predisposed to creating purely polysynthetic
> structures", that means it is predisposed to limiting the variety of meanings that a
> morpheme can have.
>
> That tendancy would logically go hand-in-hand with the tendancy to give morphemes "rich
> constellations of meaning" -- since giving them rich constellations of meaning
> automatically leads to them meaning different things in different contexts, so that the
> only way to limit proliferation of a morpheme's meanings is by limiting how many
> contexts it can appear in!
>
> Of course, any type of linguistic structure keeps a morpheme from appearing in some
> contexts, and hence limits proliferation of a morpheme's meanings to some degree.
>
> So I have to agree with you: There's no reason to believe that *all* Stone Age languages
> were purely polysynthetic until the advent of trade languages.
>
> -- Tommie
>
>
I strongly agree with you. Also, these languages often refer to one specific
context by means of a locution made of several morphemes. For instance, 'to
give' would be referred to as 'hand...give' and 'cow' as 'animal-cow'. I think
that Europeans often underestimate these 'classifiers' as 'redundant', whereas
I do believe they are an inherent part of the concept evoked. It's not a
question of compounding but of limiting and identifying the concept meant.
Maybe 'grammar' originate from some of these parts of words having gained
mandatory syntactic role ?
Mathias


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