Re: Conlang book report: The Unfolding of Language

On 1/2/07, Amanda Babcock Furrow <langs@...> wrote:
> His first premise: that there existed a stage where language consisted
> of 2 or 3 word sentences, where the words were simple invariable words
> which probably did not pattern as nouns and verbs, although they would
> naturally have referred to objects and actions due to our experience of
> the world.
Sounds like the "language" my daughter (2y 4m) speaks... "Baby - bed"
and "baby - sleep" are both likely sentences, for example. The first
looks like noun-noun while the second like noun-verb, but I'm not sure
whether this is a useful distinction to make at this point.

> He does allow a basic world order of SOV (not sure how he
> squares this with "no nouns or verbs"!).  There are no adjectives,
> prepositions or other frippery.
Hm. My daughter may be ahead of him here, at least if we apply English
part-of-speech categories to "Amyish": she has "zusammen" (together)
and "mit" (with), which look like adverbs and/or prepositions. Again,
though, not sure whether it's useful to use those labels in her
syntactically simple sentences. (The second is (nearly?) always in
connection with "kommen", so I'm not sure whether to analyse "mit -
komm" as the German verb "mitkommen" (to come with, to come along) or
as two separate words.)

She's also got "an" and "aus" (on and off, for lights); "ein" and
"aus"/"out" (in and out, for getting into semi-enclosed spaces such as
her egg chair, for example), which seem more
adverb/preposition/adjective-like to me. And for about amonth or so,
she knows colour names, though since she doesn't seem to use them
predicatively or attributively, those might better be considered nouns
at this stage.

Oh, and of course "no" -- that's certainly not a noun, and not really
a verb, but something I imagine most language users will come up with
sooner or later :) And "okay" (and sometimes "ja") for the opposite.

On the other hand, she grew up listening to people speaking German and
English, rather than "me Tarzan"-ish, so she's simply borrowing words
she hears from sentences with higher syntactical complexity.

For the most part, though, her speech is one-word or two-word
(occasionally three-word) sentences composed of invariable words that
look noun-ish or verb-ish -- more frequently the former.

Perhaps the most interesting word, though is "ah", which can mean,
depending on the situation, "What is the name of this thing I'm
holding here/pointing at?", "I can tell you're asking me for the name
of this object, but I don't know it", "I can tell you're asking me for
the name of this object, but I can't think of it just now" (typically
repeated once or twice and then often followed by her name for the
object once she's remembered it).

> Let me quote his initial example story, and perhaps you will see why I
> found it a bit patronizing-sounding:
>
> girl fruit pick     turn     mammoth see
> girl run     tree reach     climb     mammoth tree shake
> girl yell yell     father run     spear throw
> mammoth roar     fall
> father stone take     meat cut     girl give
> girl eat finish     sleep
That actually sounds a bit more "developed" than Amyish; I imagine her
version would involve a fair bit more repetition of actors, rather
than "pro-drop" sentences such as many of the ones here.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>