[87090] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: pu'jIn
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Tue Nov 24 22:03:43 2009
In-Reply-To: <2A599568-F837-48FF-AEE3-ACF32B1B20A6@alcaco.net>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:01:37 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
> 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.
Yeah, that's basically what I meant. It just seems harder to parse
these kinds of things for English speakers. I imagine a Finn would
have no trouble with it...
> 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.
It would be interesting to compare it with other language-learners,
too. This four- or five- thing could be an effect of a second
language, or it could be because Klingon word order is OVS, and might
be generally harder for people to process...
