Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!aurora!labrea!russell!nakashim
From: nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Message-ID: <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 28 Jan 88 22:02:45 GMT
References: <143@blic.BLI.COM> <6565@drutx.ATT.COM> <161@blic.BLI.COM>
Reply-To: nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 63

I first appologize that the first half of this article is not ment to
appear at comp.ai.  I just couldn't send a mail directly to
inspect@blic.bli.com.

The real stuff comes in the second half.

In article <161@blic.BLI.COM> inspect@blic.BLI.COM (Mfg Inspection) writes:
>
>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.

By the way 2:  I don't like THAT complicated aspect of Japanese.

So, I ment no offence.

> 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".

I totally agree with you.  Is surprises me that you infer the opposite
from my discussion.

>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)