goldberg@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Jeffrey Goldberg) (11/03/87)
I am cross posting this to sci.lang and am directing follow-ups there. For the benifit (?) of the sci.lang readers I am quoting this entire message, with a few annotations. >In article goldberg@russell.UUCP (Jeffrey Goldberg) writes: >>In article <1699@pdn.UUCP> alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy) writes: This is Jeff Goldberg >This is Alan Lovejoy <1705@pdn.UUCP> >>This is Jeff Goldberg <568@russell.STANFORD.EDU> >>>This is Alan Lovejoy <1699@pdn.UUCP> The story so far: A discussion of another but related topic lead Alan to write in article <1699@pdn.UUCP>: >>>Many, if not most, human languages encode syntactical structure in >>>suffixes, prefixes, infixes or other root modifications and >>>transformations. The more primitive the culture which uses the >>>language, the more likely this is to be true. I respond in <568@russell.STANFORD.EDU> with: >>Do you have any reason to believe this? Alan answers (<1705@pdn.UUCP>): >Sure, having studied Linguistics extensively, and having seen the >grammars of numerous third-world and/or American Indian languages, >I feel quite justified in saying what I said. >Your question implies doubt. Why do you doubt? If the examples I gave >from English did not suffice to convince you, how about Russian? (I >*know* that language). Yes, my answer implicates doubt. In fact, I had been tempted to originally write "Bullshit". But I will explain. I agree that a very large number of languages have much freer word order then English. The languages rely on affixation (case marking, agreement, incorporation, etc) to encode the kind of information that is incoded in word order in the more word order oriented languages. To draw statistical conclusions you need to factor a number of things out. If you are able to somehow determine a working definition of "primitive" you might find that a very large number of "primitive" people use free word order languages (Or loose constituent order languages). But when you go counting up languages you had better take into account historical relation and areal relation. This is, two languages may be of similar type because they derive (historically) from the same language. Two cultures may be of the same type because they derive from (historically) from the same culture. Two languages may be similar when the people who speak them have had long term contact. So, if you want to add all the austronesian languages up (I think it is the largest language family in terms of number of languages) I will count that as one. The same, I would hold for the languages of Papua/New Guina. Once we eliminate these 2000 or so languages. We are left with anecdotes and nothing that is statistically significant. And anecdotes can be dangerous. It is very to look at a strange language and notice all kinds of things about it that one ignores in ones own language. For example, Benjamin L. Whorf had noticed in one of the languages he studied that the marker for the future tense was related to forms for "intention" and "desire". He concluded from this that these people had a notion of time that was nearly beyond the understanding of us Standard Average European speakers. He never seemed to pay much attention to the English future marker "will". >"Igor' lyubit svoyu s'istru" and "Svoyu s'istru lyubit Igor'" both mean the >same thing (Igor loves his sister). Word order is irrelevant, except >to signal whether Igor or his sister are the topic of conversation. >This is not an isolated example, but is paradigmatic of Russian >sentential sytax. But if you want anacdotes, fine. Why is French so similar in word order and topicalization to Chichewa. Or Irish to Biblical Hebrew. Or Enlish (in word order) to Chinese. While English and Russian differ (your example). Are the Siamese a primitive culture, what about the Lao? Are (East) Indian cultures primitive? Has it always been that way? Depending on what your definition of "primitive" is we could each through out example and counter example. The "winner" would be the one who knew about the most languages. I don't want to get into that kind of fight. It would prove nothing except who was willing to spend more time in the library. They view you hald may be seductive because under some possible definitions there are just a handful of non-primitive cultures. Most of these are from one language family. I will take your claim seriously if you do the following: (1) Devise a sampling method that factors out things that should be factored out. (I linguist named Matthew Dryer has done some excellent work on this problem, and has consturcted a method that I would certainly trust.) (2) Provide a definition of "primitive" which would yeild the same result when applied by a number of anthropologists. (That is, your definition must be explicit enough so that an arbitrary anthropologist could determine what what "primitive".) (3) Provide a definition of what ever grammatical property you wish to test for which would yeild the same result when applied by a number of linguists. (That is, your definition must be explicit enough so that an arbitrary linguist could tell whether it is "free word order" (or whatever).) (4) Apply standard statistical techniques to determine significance. Until you move to do something like that your claim is like claiming: "People with big feet like tometos". And basing this on the fact that you have met a couple families with bigger feet then yours who served spaghetti with tomato sause and one even put tomatoes in the salad. This will probably be my last posting on this subject. >--alan@pdn -- Jeff Goldberg ARPA goldberg@russell.stanford.edu UUCP ...!ucbvax!russell.stanford.edu!goldberg