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From: alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Why can't my cat talk?
Message-ID: <1699@pdn.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 31-Oct-87 13:47:43 EST
Article-I.D.: pdn.1699
Posted: Sat Oct 31 13:47:43 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Nov-87 07:47:38 EST
References: <11967@decwrl.DEC.COM> <12400006@iuvax> <4337@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida
Lines: 36

In article <4337@well.UUCP> wcalvin@well.UUCP (William Calvin) writes:
>What's special about human language beyond primate language isn't the
>mellifluorus quality of our sounds -- it is our ability to string together
>individual sounds (phonemes, etc.) into a meaningful order.  Human left
>brains are specialized for handling sequencing problems like hand movements,
>and that has probably made left brain a natural home for our word-order-ruled
>language.

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.  Syntax is a
two-dimensional tree structure, not a one dimensional sequence.
Sequence variations are more often used to signal thematic (theme-rheme)
structure.  The difference between "John Smith purchased a Ferrari" and
"A Ferrari was purchased by John Smith" is a thematic difference;  the
syntactical relations are signaled more by the word-forms than the word
positioning.  The two different meanings of "Flying planes can be
dangerous" have nothing at all to do either with word order or
ambiguities in the constituent words.

Also, the proposition that human hand movements are significantly more
sophisticated than a racoon's seems specious to me.  Do you have proof?

Current attempts to explain human language have about as much chance of
being correct as Newton had of discovering superstring theory.  We don't
know enough yet.  Maybe next century.

--alan@pdn

P.S.  "Purchased by was John Smith Ferrari a" can probably be correctly
unscrambled by most native speakers of English.  This also shows how
much information is contained in the words themselves and not in the
word order.