Re: Natural Order of Events

Christophe:
<<
It's a very important difference between how French and English approach
actions. Aren't people in French class taught it?
 >>

Ha!  No.  I even took a relatively good French class (while at Berkeley,
which has its own French department, and I learned a lot), and I didn't
learn that.  Where I did learn it, oddly enough, was in a Cognitive
Science
class I took at Berkeley.  French would be called a "non-satellite"
language,
and English a "satellite" language.  The non-satellite language I'm more
familiar with is Spanish.  In Spanish, you may only enter or exit a
room.
If you want to enter or exit it walking, trudging, running, etc.,
that must
be appended to the end, as in French.

The difference they showed was demonstrated with an experiment.  In
this experiment, they showed speakers of either English or Spanish a
video where a cowboy is trudging (or "making his way with difficulty")
through a muddy street, and then comes upon a saloon and falls through
the saloon doors.  When English speakers recounted this story, they
would use words like "trudged" or "fell through".  In Spanish, the
equivalent
sentences left out the manner, as it was seen as non-essential, so
all they
typically got was a guy "moved" down the street and "entered" the
saloon.

In the course of the class, this was one of the pieces of evidence
that the
weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds: that language affects
the way we conceptualize or describe the world in some way, albeit
small.

Christophe:
<<
I agree. This is why my proposal was not a primitive language, but a
language for "primitive people" as in "people having just reached
sapience",
whatever that means (I treat "sapience" as "the capacity to treat
abstractions on the same level as concrete things", but that is a
personal
definition). It wouldn't surprise me if the "original language" was
fully
spoken (primates have enough vocalisation capacity that I don't
believe in a
gestural origin of language) but followed closely a "natural order of
events" as I described it: Setting-Action-Consequence (something that
in no
way prevents complex utterances).
 >>

Ah ha!  Now I understand.  Yes, this makes sense.

Charlie:
<<
BTW, the Mexican bishops' conference has recently announced that the
Usted forms can be used in place of the vosotros forms.
 >>

Surely you mean "Ustedes", no?

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.conlang.org/

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