Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!rwojcik
From: rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <3532@bcsaic.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jan 88 23:18:21 GMT
References: <1671@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: rwojcik@bcsaic.UUCP (Rick Wojcik)
Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle
Lines: 31
Summary: There is no relationship between word order and culture

The original comment was that Japanese and English word orders are
somehow affected by the type of culture that the speakers have.  The
question of what causes different word orders is very interesting, and
it is covered in great detail in the linguistic literature.  The issue
is not just between English and Japanese, but between global language
types.  Verb-first and verb-medial languages tend to have very different
syntax from verb-last languages such as Japanese.  For example, the
former tend to have prepositions/prefixes and the latter
postpositions/suffixes.  Auxiliary verbs precede the main verb in the
former, but they follow in the latter.  In other words, there is a kind
of "head-first/head-final" dichotomy among the world's languages,
although this is an overly simple way of putting it.

It is easy to show that the hunter/farmer distinction is irrelevant to
the question of word-order typology.  Word order types are distributed
randomly over all types of cultures as far as we can tell.  Furthermore,
Indo-European languages, of which English belongs to the Germanic
branch, appear to have descended from the verb-last type--i.e.
structurally parallel to Japanese.  So the change to verb-medial
structure would have to be connected with a cultural shift from farming
to hunting, according to the hypothesis offered.  Verb-last languages
are so common in the world that it would be very difficult to find a
cultural common denominator to explain their existence.

Finally, this topic really belongs in sci.lang.  It has little to do
with AI.  In fact, there has been much discussion on this topic in that
newsgroup.
-- 

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Rick Wojcik   rwojcik@boeing.com