Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!ucbcad!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!decwrl!labrea!russell!nakashim
From: nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 14 Jan 88 19:53:23 GMT
Reply-To: nakashim@russell.stanford.edu (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 42

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.

In English, verbs come very early in the sentence.  Second position in
declarative and the first position in imperative.  In Japanese, verbs
come at the end of sentences.  In general, in English, head features
(dominant information) come first while in Japanese they come later.
Another example is negation marker.  In English it comes very early
while in Japanese it comes at the end.  You cannot tell if the sentence
is positive or negative until you hear the very last, in Japanese.

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 combined those two observations: In real-time communication,
possibility of misunderstanding is fatal.  If you say "DON'T touch
it", there is no possibility that the hearer try to touch something.
But if the order were "it touch NOT" which is the case in Japanese,
the hearer may touch it when he hears upto "it touch".

To avoid this kind of real-time misunderstanding, English must
transfer essential information first, refining it later.

In farming, on the other hand, there are lots of time.  Planning and
cooperation among people is more important than real-time-ness.  That
will allow development of language which fits to express very delicate
things, like person's mood.  (I think this is why Japanese has very
complicated honorific system.)  So, in Japanese, you can specify lots
of objects first and then combine them together at the end with
several modifications added further.

I don't think this explains all the difference of language features,
but at least I find it interesting.  Any comments?


-- 
Hideyuki Nakashima
CSLI and ETL
nakashima@csli.stanford.edu (until Aug. 1988)
nakashima%etl.jp@relay.cs.net (afterwards)