[87100] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: pu'jIn
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Doty)
Tue Nov 24 23:40:08 2009
In-Reply-To: <1BB7E7E9-067E-4E57-B09B-4AE15301FE47@georgetown.edu>
From: Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:37:47 -0800
To: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
Errors-to: tlhingan-hol-bounce@kli.org
Reply-to: tlhingan-hol@kli.org
> The cat [(that) the dog [(that) the cow kicked] bit] meowed.
The problem here, as I see it, is that you can't have a relative
clause inside a relative clause... But that's just a description, not
an explanation why...
> ...and it just sounds like a string of words, with no discernible meaning. "Word salad."
>
> It's not a limitation of grammar, it seems to be more a cognitive limitation.
This could be a cognitive limitation, I suppose, but I wonder if it
has more to do with the fact that languages tend to emphasize initial
or final position, and a sentence like the above puts stuff in the
middle that should be peripheral? Although this is, in and of itself,
a cognitive issue, so...
There are lots of languages that have stuff like this that ends up
looking like word salad when translated, but is fine in the respective
language: "take chopstick eat noodle" is Chinese for "Pick up the
chopsticks and eat the noodles." And some African (and other?)
languages do a same-object construction that always strikes me as
strange: "fish buy skin bone cook oil" for "Buy a fish, skin it, bone
it, and then cook it in oil."
