Re: English syllable structure (was, for some reason: Re: Llirine: How to creat a language)

 --- Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:
> Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >While this seems to be question of education style
> and ideology rather than
> >of anything language-related*, I'd like to point
> out that I know several
> >people who now the table of elements by heart (in
> Swedish, but from the
> >Mandarin point of view Swedish is essentially
> English). Also, it's very
> >questionable whether the average person NEEDS to
> know all the elements.
>
> Alas, I knew most of it during highschool
> chemistry...and wish I could
> remember even a bit of it now.  Since I always liked
> useless and otherwise
> marginal things, I was quite fascinated by the "Rare
> Earths", always printed
> off to the side and ignorable. Even the teacher
> couldn't say much about
> them.  What, I still wonder, are the uses of
> ytterbium (??)  and all those
> other strange elements?
Answer: I think the ELL give a better answer than I
P4538 said: “S.C.Gilfillan argued that technology
develops through gradual evolution and accretion of
details, and that the idea of a distinct invention is
conceptually ambiguous. Therefore, ‘invention’ is a
matter of language, not physical reality. “
“Ogburn held that the accumulation of inventions
followed an exponential curve, because many new
inventions are mere combinations of preexisting
elements and the more such elements exist the greater
the number of new ones that can be achieved by adding
them together. But the individual human mind is
limited, and thus there is a limit to how many
technical ideas a person can remember.” “As
anthropologist Leslie A. White puts it, like all other
aspects of culture, technology depends upon the human
capacity for symbolling. Language, he says,
transformed the nonprogressive, noncumulative tool
process of anthropoids into a cumulative and
progressive process in the human species.” P4536 said:
“A substantial fraction of all words used in ordinary
speech, and perhaps a majority of all nouns in modern
languages, are technological. That is, they name
elements of tools, machines, chemical processes,
agricultural techniques, transportation systems and
electronic communications network. More than a million
species of animals and plants have been named, but
George Basalla noted that three times as many
inventions have been patented in the United States
alone.” “Even under more restricted definitions,
technological terminology constitutes a substantial
portion of lexicon, and the processes by which these
terms emerge present interesting challenges for
linguistics.”
Su Cheng Zhong

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