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NL-KR Digest Volume 04 No. 12
NL-KR Digest (2/01/88 23:48:21) Volume 4 Number 12
Today's Topics:
Re: words order in English and Japanese
RE: word order and culture (the Final Theory)
Submissions: NL-KR@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU
Requests, policy: NL-KR-REQUEST@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 88 07:21 EST
From: Gilbert Cockton <mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert@uunet.uu.net>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU> nakashim@russell.stanford.edu (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
>I came up with a theory to explain the difference in word orders
>between English and Japanese. This is a very naive theory. Any
>comments are welcome.
>
>Now, English (probably I can say Latin) speaking people are basically
>hunters, while Japanese are basically farmers. Hunting is a real-time
>job while farming is not.
>
>I don't think this explains all the difference of language features,
>but at least I find it interesting. Any comments?
i) Latin, negation most often with verb (haec libram non amo)
but variable, e.g. nihil (never), nemo (no-one)
ii) German negtives go at the end near the verb, so ambiguity until
end of sentence is the same. (Ich ko"nne Deutsch sprechen nicht).
iii) Economic history and diachronic linguistics (Philology)
don't support you. The move towards farming in Europe and Asia is
roughly contemporary. Furthermore, the active piracy of many
Japanese sailors (Dynastic China's 'Dwarf bandits') required
real-time clarity of intention in their speech! As for philology,
the diversity within European Indo-European does not mirror
differences in socio-economic structure (social status affects
variations within A language). Much philology appears to be the
chaotic application of a few regular behaviours (e.g. narrowing,
widening, consonant shift).
--
Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Heriot-Watt University, Chambers St.,
Edinburgh, EH1 1HX. JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci
ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hci!gilbert
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 88 00:40 EST
From: Clive Steward <clive@drutx.ATT.COM>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
in article <143@blic.BLI.COM>, inspect@blic.BLI.COM (Mfg Inspection) says:
> Try opening a book and doing some research before proposing arrogant and
> specious theories.
Actually, you might want to consider your own arrogance with such talk.
There is something quite Japanese (perhaps what is often seen as vague) in
Mr. Nakashima's original posting, and you have missed it entirely.
Perhaps there is something really different about the organization of
information from generality to heuristics, as it is done in the east.
Perhaps this is interesting to someone doing creative work. Even in
the positivist side of ai technology.
I hope it gets to be something you can appreciate better than to be rude.
Clive Steward
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 15:39 EST
From: alan geller <sabre!gamma!pyuxp!pyuxe!pyuxf!asg@faline.bellcore.com>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <3580@bcsaic.UUCP>, rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP writes:
> In article <236@pyuxf.UUCP> asg@pyuxf.UUCP (alan geller) writes:
> >...
> >Also, historically, Old English often follows the word order of modern German.
>
> Indo-European was probably SOV, but verb-last word order in modern
> German is a recent development in that language, I believe. Historically,
> German went through a verb-medial stage just like English. Someone
> please correct me if I am wrong about this.
Anglo-Saxon (Beowulf, Maldon, Caedmon, etc.) was, like modern German, a
language that tended towards a medial helper verb (to be, to want, to intend)
coupled with a final action verb (to throw, to fight, etc.). In some
circumstances, of course, the action verb is medial, with no helper verb
at all -- something that even happens in modern German, at times -- but
the combination was more frequent. If I remember correctly, this is also
true of Old Norse, but I haven't studied Old Norse for about 10 years,
so I may well be wrong.
> > - Do languages whose grammars were frozen earlier tend to have
> > later action verbs than those whose grammars were frozen
> > more recently? Note that English grammar is still changing.
> >
> English grammar is still changing, and so are all the others--except
> maybe for dead languages. Give an example of a language with a frozen
> grammar.
Sorry, 'frozen' was a poor choice of words on my part. What I was
refering to is the phenomenon in certain languages of a body of
literature that defines a 'classical' version of the language, such
as the Qu'ran does for Arabic, or the Talmud for Hebrew, or Dante
for Italian, or Cervantes for Spanish. Obviously, the only frozen
languages are dead languages -- I was refering more to languages that
have a 'Classical' version which influences its development, something
which English lacks.
> The original issue that triggered this debate--whether or not word order
> could in principle be explained in terms of culture--has been
> convincingly answered in the negative. ...
No, I beg to differ. Certain aspects of culture have been shown to have
little or no influence on word order. Not all aspects of culture have
been considered.
Also, remember, there has to be some reason for the word orderings that
exist, unless you want to argue that grammatical structure arose by random
chance. No one has yet proposed any alternative influences. Giving a
good explanation for word order that doesn't depend on cultural factors
would be the best argument against a cultural theory.
> Those who wish to continue
> supporting such a notion should at least try to respond to arguments
> against their position. ...
I hope that's what I'm doing ...
Alan Geller
{princeton, rutgers}!pyuxp!pyuxf!asg
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 16:05 EST
From: alan@locus.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <3580@bcsaic.UUCP> rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) writes:
.
.
.
>No. The language with the longest written record--Chinese--is currently
>verb-medial and shows evidence of moving towards verb-last word order.
.
.
Just curious, could you please tell me what the evidence is? Thanks in
advance.
_ Yih-Jih Alan Wang
\ --- _____ alan@CS.UCLA.EDU
\ -|- ---- / Computer Science Department
/ --- /____ University of California, Los Angeles
U.S.A.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 88 19:39 EST
From: Not playing with a duck <nucsrl!coray@oddjob.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Reddy writes:
>In making theories of languages, we have to first remember that
>languages EVOLVED.
...
[he goes on to suggest that there is an ordering to the evolution
of different phrase structures. First verb, then subject and verb,
then subject verb and object. ]
--------------------------
Linguistic evolution is hard to measure. Some interesting things have
been done with the evolution of color terms. Berlin and Kay used to
be the source, but that's probably pretty dated.
You have fairly sophisticated phrase structures from pretty sophisticated
modern languages when you look at "subject" "verb" "object". Can't imagine
that these grammarical segments arrive separately and sequentially. Things
tend to evolve contemporaniously by virtue of differentiation as you move
a level down on the tree. At the root of the tree you might imagine that
there are command words and question words and statement words. (The
builder yells to his assistant "Slab".--yes, I know, I stole that from
Wittgenstein--I have no original ideas...)
Maybe linguistically ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. For instance,
a friend of mine (who is about 2), says "chicken". This means "Put
on Warren Zevon's `Werewolf in London' again". Now, most people might
not recognize that as such, but it shows a certain economy of language
at the root of the development tree.
-Elizabeth
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 88 13:46 EST
From: GODDEN@gmr.com
Subject: RE: word order and culture (the Final Theory)
I have to laugh at all the recent postings about word order and culture.
After thinking hard for nearly five minutes I have discovered not 'a' new
theory to explain wandering verbs, but 'the' definitive theory which covers
not only verbs but all of language in its entirety. The theory is neatly
summed up by one word: entropy. As we all know, or should know, the entropy
of the universe constantly and inexorably increases. Language, being a
phenomenon found in this universe, cannot hope to be an exception. Hence,
some languages are verb initial, some verb medial, and some verb final.
Randomness tends toward maximization. Just because there are vastly more
languages where the subject still precedes the object is no counterexample,
for the universe is still not at maximum entropy. This is why languages
evolve. It is an old joke in linguistics that there is only one phoneme,
/a/, and all other speech sounds can be predicted by rule, yet it is not a
joke for entropy dictates that all speech sounds are moving toward one
universal yawn. CV syllable structure dominates because this tends to even
out the distribution of consonants and vowels in word structure. More
compelling evidence. I leave the reader to disinter more examples from all
subfields of linguistics.
Those of you who may remain unconvinced are surely revealing your puny brains.
Who are you to disagree with the laws of thermodynamics that govern the
universe?
Now that I've cleared this up, I suppose we can dispense with nl-kr list,
eh?
[:-) see, I really *do* read these things... BWM]
-Kurt Godden, linguist extraordinaire
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 88 09:04 EST
From: Gilbert Cockton <mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert@uunet.uu.net>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <1729@russell.STANFORD.EDU> nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
>I DON'T MIND HOW MANY CONTER EXAMPLES THERE ARE
>AS LONG AS POSITIVE EXAMPLES OUTNUMBER HTEM.
Your understanding of the corpus problem in scientific linguistics seems
non-existant. I may be wrong, but nothing in this posting suggests
familiarity with the methodological problems of linguistic theory
formation. Given this cavalier approach to relevant disciplines and
methodological dilemmas, I presume you must be in AI :-)
--
Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Heriot-Watt University, Chambers St.,
Edinburgh, EH1 1HX. JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci
ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hci!gilbert
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 88 13:42 EST
From: Mfg Inspection <inspect@blic.BLI.COM>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <6565@drutx.ATT.COM>, clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) writes:
> in article <143@blic.BLI.COM>, inspect@blic.BLI.COM (Mfg Inspection) says:
> > Try opening a book and doing some research before proposing arrogant and
> > specious theories.
> There is something quite Japanese (perhaps what is often seen as vague) in
> Mr. Nakashima's original posting, and you have missed it entirely.
After spending a year with a Japanese man, (13 years ago, no bitterness then
or now) I am not unacquainted with this "vagueness" you mention. I found
HIM as transparent as glass. Now, Mr. Nakashima proposed a theory that the
language structuring differences might have evolved because he believed
that the Japanese were "basically farmers" and the Europeans were "basically
hunters". What's to miss? It was his lack of prior research and his asser-
tation that the Japanese were more attuned to nuance and people's moods that
I found arrogant. Having lived in the San Francisco area most of my life, I
have been exposed to many cultures and people from "elsewhere", that and a
rather voracious appetite for eclectic reading have led me to believe that
there are no superior cultures or "races". There are those in the US and
abroad who maintain that there ARE superior cultures and "races": theirs.
Even the implication, my own inference if you prefer, that one group is over-
all superior to another is repugnant to me.
> Perhaps there is something really different about the organization of
> information from generality to heuristics, as it is done in the east.
No argument. But the farmer/hunter premise is invalid.
> Perhaps this is interesting to someone doing creative work. Even in
> the positivist side of ai technology.
The 10% inspiration is laudable, but the 90% perspiration is required to
make the difference between day-dreaming and research. I know, I am a day-
dreamer and diletante; knowing this forces me to research ideas before
offering them to newsgroups. Mr. Nakashima was given several paths to
explore and information on the history of agriculture in Europe and in
Japan: his farmer/hunter premise was wrong. This should be a whole new
starting point for his continued research, if he so chooses. Being in-
volved in creative work has its risks and one of those is being wrong. I
took constructive critisms for my own creative works and, you know, the
critics helped me improve a lot of my work. Once one rubs away the first
stings of criticism, it can feel good to follow a more effective path.
> Actually, you might want to consider your own arrogance with such talk.
> I hope it gets to be something you can appreciate better than to be rude.
I was dubious about my second posting on the subject, as regards rude remarks,
but as Mr. Nakashima insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that his
theory had merit (regarding the farmer/hunter premise), I made a concious
decision to write what I did. Ignoring the facts in favor of maintaining a
pet theory is arrogant and specious and bad research. However, it was rude
of me to point that out, and I apologise.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 88 12:36 EST
From: Arnold Zwicky <russell!zwicky@labrea.stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
There is no reason to think that everything in language is there "for a
purpose" any more than there is to think that everything in nature is.
There *is* an enormous amount of randomness in the world, both natural
and cultural.
In the linguistic case, there is a huge amount of variability in expression,
both across languages and within languages. Within a language, there is
a purpose for much of this variability (though surely not all of it);
different word orders, constructions, intonations, pronunciations, etc.
are associated with different discourse functions and serve as
sociolinguistic markers. But these functions are largely arbitrarily
associated with linguistic form - the same form can serve different
functions in different languages, and different forms can serve the
same function in different languages. (This is not to deny that
certain forms are particularly good for certain functions, like
rising intonation for asking questions. It *is* to deny that this
form is locked onto that function; if the form is already taken for
some purpose, then any other form available in the language can be
pressed into service.)
None of this posits any universal scheme of association between language
(in particular, syntax) and other aspects of culture. The bits of a
language have to fit together, elegantly or clunkily, as the particular
case might be, into a complex system with many purposes, but to ask
WHY these particular bits are assembled in particular languages is to
invite the answers: Just because. Whatever is, is right.
What I have just said will probably seem pretty unsatisfying to some
readers. Lots of people would like to believe that there have to be
deep reasons for why things are the way they are, that historical
accident is never a satisfactory account of the panoply of nature
and culture. If those are your beliefs, then I'm not likely to change
your mind. But I'd like to try to change your mind, at least if you're
going to be thinking seriously about language. Looking for the big WHY
answers is a bad research strategy here; it leads you to overlook much
of the essential complexity of the phenomena. The question of WHAT there
is in language is a tougone, and insofar as we know the answers they
seem to require an intricate system oconpts and hypotheses, most
of them with no detectable connection to matters of culture or
geography or ethnicity. If you attend only to phenomena that you can
plausibly interpret by reference to culture etc., then you're going
to miss most of the relevant data.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 88 17:02 EST
From: Hideyuki Nakashima <nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <161@blic.BLI.COM> inspect@blic.BLI.COM (Mfg Inspection) writes:
>Mr. Nakashima was given several paths to
>explore and information on the history of agriculture in Europe and in
>Japan: his farmer/hunter premise was wrong.
I was wrong in two points:
1) supposing Europe was primarily hunting culture.
2) supposing Latin was verb-middle.
Being both of them negated, isn't there still a chance to corelate
real-timeness to word order?
(agriculture - Latin/Japanese - verb-last,
hunting - English - verb-middle)
(I admit that German is an exception.)
(BTW: Is Latin head-last?)
The original intuition of the theory comes from that it is very
difficult to communicate in "really" real-time situation in Japanese.
I can say "dame" which is something like "no", but I cannot transfer
information of "no what" at the same time.
How could such a language survive if it were used in hunting?
I just wanted to explain and still want to explain this fact.
--
Hideyuki Nakashima
CSLI and ETL
nakashima@csli.stanford.edu (until Aug. 1988)
nakashima%etl.jp@relay.cs.net (afterwards)
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 88 02:27 EST
From: Richard A. O'Keefe <quintus!ok@sun.com>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>, nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
> I was wrong in two points:
> 1) supposing Europe was primarily hunting culture.
> 2) supposing Latin was verb-middle.
>
> Being both of them negated, isn't there still a chance to corelate
> real-timeness to word order?
> (agriculture - Latin/Japanese - verb-last,
> hunting - English - verb-middle)
> (I admit that German is an exception.)
E hoohaa ana teenei koorerorero.
A recent issue of Scientific American had an article on the prehistory
of agriculture in Europe. It is even older than I had thought.
English started out as a Germanic language like Old Norse or Old
Icelandic, was phonologically influenced somewhat by contact with
Welsh, and then was hit by the Norman conquest: the Normans being
Scandinavians who had recently adopted French. Hunting had not been
of primary economic importance for any of these groups for a long time.
Before trying to find explanations for features of English or any other
language in the culture of its early speakers, would it not be wise to
take the not-very-difficult step of finding out what that culture WAS?
Let me quote a sentence from King Alfred's preface to "Pastoral Care".
(Sorry about the transliteration into ASCII; suggestions welcome.)
' v ' '
Tha gemunde ic hu seo ae waes earest on Ebreisc
Then recalled I how the law was first in Hebrew
' ' ' '
getheode funden, and eft, tha hie Crecas geleornodon,
language found, and in turn, when it Greeks learned,
' ' ' '
tha wendon hie hie on hira agen getheode ealle,
then translated it they into their own language entirely,
' ' 'v
and eac ealle othre bec.
and also every other book.
The time period we are talking about is the very late 9th century,
about 1100 years ago. Note the position of funden and geleornodon.
This is recognisably English, but the word order is rather different.
My own suspicion, for what it is worth, is that the loss of inflexions
has had more influence on Modern English structure than any strictly
cultural phenomena (testable, perhaps, by looking at non-English
pidgins?). Modern French is SVO, and the development of French out
of vulgar Latin is pretty well documented. Did the French drop
agriculture and switch over to hunting? Pull the other one, it's
got bells on.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 88 06:47 EST
From: Gilbert Cockton <mcvax!ukc!its63b!hwcs!hci!gilbert@uunet.uu.net>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <3579@bcsaic.UUCP> rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik) writes:
>We can also take nouns into verbs, as in "Your statement impacted our report"
>and "They proxmired us again". Some languages appear to tolerate this
>kind of functional shift more freely than English does.
Namely American English! The arbitrary conversions of nouns to verbs
is more a feature of American than British English. The vocabulary of
the latter is sufficiently rich to not require the spawning of ugly
neologisms :-) (though British Trade Unionese does verbify a lot)
.. and yes, I *DID* split that infinitive!
--
Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Heriot-Watt University, Chambers St.,
Edinburgh, EH1 1HX. JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci
ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hci!gilbert
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 88 11:28 EST
From: Gary Fritz <fritz@hpfclp.HP.COM>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Regardless of the validity Nakashima-san's linguistic theory, I must agree
with him on one of his points:
> >It was his lack of prior research and his asser-
> >tation that the Japanese were more attuned to nuance and people's moods that
> >I found arrogant.
>
> My appology for your misunderstanding.
>
> But I never said that Japanese people are more attuned to whatever.
> I just said that Japanese language is. The example is the honorific
> system which English lacks.
>
> By the way, to see how Japanese is complecated in expressing ones
> mood, it is not sufficient to have conversation with Japanese people
> speaking in English. You should speak Japanese yourself.
I have been studying Japanese for well over a year now, and if there is
one thing that is clear to me, it is that Japanese excells at vagueness
and expression of one's mood. Many times my teacher (who speaks excellent
English) has tried and failed to explain the subtleties involved in
seemingly unimportant changes of phrasing. It appears that Japanese
is more finely tuned for subtly expressing one's feelings about a subject
than for actually conveying hard information about the subject. This is
probably part of the reason why English-speaking people are considered
(by Japanese people) rather rude, because they come right to the point and
convey information directly, rather than hinting at what they feel.
Obviously a year's study does not make me an expert in the language, but
I felt Nakashima-san had received enough flames and needed some support
on at least one of his points.
Gary Fritz
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 88 11:51 EST
From: Rick Wojcik <rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In article <243@pyuxf.UUCP> asg@pyuxf.UUCP (alan geller) writes:
>for Italian, or Cervantes for Spanish. Obviously, the only frozen
>languages are dead languages -- I was refering more to languages that
>have a 'Classical' version which influences its development, something
>which English lacks.
>
I know of no reason to believe that English differs from other languages
because it lacks a 'Classical' version, and I don't understand what it
means to say that classical authors such as Dante and Cervantes
influenced the development of their languages. Furthermore, it seems to
me that Chaucer's Middle English or Shakespeare's Early Modern English
could qualify as 'Classical' in your sense. Or maybe the King James
version of the Bible. What does all this have to do with word order?
Classical Hebrew and Arabic were pure verb-first types, whereas romance
languages descend from a verb-last type.
>chance. No one has yet proposed any alternative influences. Giving a
>good explanation for word order that doesn't depend on cultural factors
>would be the best argument against a cultural theory.
>
I make this point a second time. The question of word order and its
evolution has been exhaustively studied and debated by linguists. As
far as anyone can tell, word order types are randomly distributed across
cultures. A few months ago, this subject was debated on the net, and
the point was made that word order evolution may be driven by phonology.
There is still plenty of room for speculation, but it would be much more
interesting it were grounded in some knowledge of linguistic theory and
word order typology. To get a feel for how word order types are
distributed, you might glance at Merritt Ruhlen's A Guide to the
Languages of the World. I would also recommend that you find a copy of
Bernard Comrie's book on word order typology.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 88 11:51 EST
From: Bill Henneman <hen@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
In message <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>, nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU
(Hideyuki Nakashima) asks:
> (BTW: Is Latin head-last?)
Latin, being fully inflected, allows fine distinctions in emphasis by
switching word order. I dimly recall a study (probably by Roland
Kent) concluding that "normal" word order was used less than half the
time in formal Latin, and much less than that in colloquial usage.
> The original intuition of the theory comes from that it is very
> difficult to communicate in "really" real-time situation in Japanese.
> I can say "dame" which is something like "no", but I cannot transfer
> information of "no what" at the same time.
> How could such a language survive if it were used in hunting?
My limited experiance with hunting in groups is that any form of
spoken communication is counter-productive. Prey generally have
pretty sharp hearing. Hand signals are the most common form of
communication.
------------------------------
End of NL-KR Digest
*******************
