Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!ames!ucbcad!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!decwrl!labrea!russell!nakashim
From: nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <1729@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 17 Jan 88 17:16:33 GMT
References: <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU> <2617@calmasd.GE.COM>
Reply-To: nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 71

I've got many (negative :-) responces to my postings.
Thank you.

Now, I know that the issue I raised was too simple minded.
Nevertheless, and respite of lots of exceptions, I still think
it is one of the POSSIBLE explanations.

In article <2617@calmasd.GE.COM> wlp@calmasd.GE.COM (Walter Peterson) writes:
>
>Not only does Japanese ( and Korean, which is *VERY* close to Japanese
>grammatically and which I know far better than I do Japanese ) "delay" the
>verb until the end of the sentence, but it is also *Post-positional* rather
>than *prepositional* as English is. One would say "store to going am I" 
>rather than "I am going to the store".


The above point is closer to what I wanted to point out.

In (one of) Japanese phrase structure grammar(s), there is only one
syntactic rule:  phrase --> prefix + head.  Any important thing comes
in the second position in the binary tree.

In the cases of English or German, I think there are several rules.
Some of them are counter examples to my theory.

I DON'T MIND HOW MANY CONTER EXAMPLES THERE ARE
AS LONG AS POSITIVE EXAMPLES OUTNUMBER HTEM.

In the area of AI, I believe you should first attack the center of the
problems and leave the details or exceptions out.  The problem you are
attacking is too complicated to worry about the boundary conditions.

Words ordering in a syntax is not chosen at random.  There must be
some explanation to it.  If you know a better one, please let me know.

>There is a serious flaw in any arguments like this.  They all assume that
>the culture comes first and that the culture directs the development of the
>language.  I don't know that that is actually the case.  The language may 
>define the culture or there may be such a complex feedback between language
>and culture that it is not possible to tell which has the stronger effect
>on the other.

Of course they are bi-directional.  I canNOT imagine that culture had
NO effect on language.

>From: inspect@blic.BLI.COM (Mfg Inspection)

>  Your theory could have some relevance, but you would make a better
>  argument for it if you were to compare the word orders of present
>  African hunter-gatherer languages to Japanese. There you would have
>  two modern languages to compare with each other, one a genuine non-
>  hunter language (Japanese) and one genuine hunter language. If your
>  theory has any validity, the African hunter language should have the
>  same word order as English. This would not, of course, be proof, but
>  it would be better research.

I think that this is a good point.
Does anyone has data?

However, I am more interested in the origin of the language, than its
current form.  My view of language is that it is developped by the
need of communication.  What you want to communicate with others is by
no means linear (one dimentional) like an uttered sentence.  You must
linearize it.  What do you do if you do not have predefined syntax?
Pigin is one of the good examples.

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