[87089] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: pu'jIn
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghunchu'wI')
Tue Nov 24 21:58:31 2009
In-Reply-To: <a1173fff0911241708m1427c241x2855ec3c35cc3040@mail.gmail.com>
From: "ghunchu'wI'" <qunchuy@alcaco.net>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:56:50 -0500
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
On Nov 24, 2009, at 8:08 PM, Christopher Doty wrote:
>> Loading up on nouns in a noun phrase may make logical sense, but it's
>> often difficult to parse.
>
> I'll probably get in trouble for this, but it is difficult to parse
> for English speakers because we have two genitive constructions, and
> we do our best to keep them separate.
That's an interesting proposal, but I'd venture that long strings of
nouns are difficult for us to parse mostly because none of us is a
native speaker of Klingon. The cognitive load on my brain when
speaking Klingon is definitely a bit higher in general than when I'm
speaking English. Simplicity is easier to handle than complexity,
and small numbers of things are easier than large numbers of things.
I don't think a difficulty with phrases consisting of many nouns in a
row is due to any more than that.
It was probably ten or twelve years ago when a few of us tried to
quantify our mental "stack size" for parsing nested relative
clauses. In English, six or seven levels was not a big problem. In
Klingon, we started getting lost around four or five. I wish I had
documented it at the time. Maybe we should repeat the experiment the
next time a group of us gets together; it would probably make a good
research project.
-- ghunchu'wI'
