Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!hen
From: hen@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Bill Henneman)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: words order in English and Japanese
Summary: Hunters don't talk
Message-ID: <19500@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 29 Jan 88 16:51:49 GMT
References: <143@blic.BLI.COM> <6565@drutx.ATT.COM> <161@blic.BLI.COM> <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: hen@bucse.bu.edu (Wm. H. Henneman)
Followup-To: comp.ai
Organization: Boston Univ.
Lines: 21

In message <2026@russell.STANFORD.EDU>, nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU
(Hideyuki Nakashima) asks:

> (BTW: Is Latin head-last?)

Latin, being fully inflected, allows fine distinctions in emphasis by
switching word order.  I dimly recall a study (probably by Roland
Kent) concluding that "normal" word order was used less than half the
time in formal Latin, and much less than that in colloquial usage.

> 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?

My limited experiance with hunting in groups is that any form of
spoken communication is counter-productive.  Prey generally have
pretty sharp hearing.  Hand signals are the most common form of
communication.