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Ancient Greek is one of those inflected languages where every word has a different function in the sentence depending on the prefix and suffix and then the verb is last. The structure of the language forces you to know what you are going to say before you say it. I hear that German is the same way. Do you think it affects the culture? American language is like Jazz, if you know the key changes, you can make it up as you go, change your mind mid-sentence. I wonder how that effects American thought, whereas Ancient Greek is more systematic and rigorous and requires a fully formed thought almost before you write a word. I wonder about the sociological effects of those language structures. If German is the same way, do you think it manifests in society? Are their correlations betweeen a lazy grammar and lazy everything else.
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I read a sci-fi story about a language that was so ridiculously precise that if a person could be hypnotically taught to think in that language, their thoughts would work much faster than normal. For instance, we have the words "orange", "cat", "on", "chair", "toy", and "mouth" in English. In this fictional language, there would be a single word for "orange cat on a chair with a toy in its mouth".
So a person who thought in that language would be able to analyze an image of an orange cat on a chair with a toy in its mouth in the time it took an English-thinker to notice the color orange Intersting idea, anyway ...
Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000
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I don't know enough about the differences between German and American culture to speculate on that...
But I find the idea of comparing American language to jazz to be extremely interesting. I never used to be much of a talker, but I've become a little more verbose in the last few years, and I think the biggest reason for that is that I stopped worrying about what the end of my sentence was going to be. I learned to improvise. I don't think it's a very fundamental change, though -- it seems more like a method to let me communicate faster and more smoothly. And (at least for me) it only applies for speech, not writing.
Another related thing that I like about the English language (as opposed to, say, Russian, with its case endings and loose word order) is that you can set up ambiguities based on whether, for example, a given noun is an object or a subject. I particularly appreciate when a sentence overall is not quite grammatically correct, but the first two-thirds work and the last two-thirds work (note the overlap). Makes for some interesting poetry. Though I can't think of an example at the moment. Posts: 1810 | Registered: Jan 1999
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Of course, it occurs to me that either the words would be totally different (and there would be twenty or thirty times the number of words one had to learn, or maybe many more), or they would be composed of elements representing the individual concepts (orange, chair, and so forth)--in which case I question whether there's a fundamental difference at all.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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ARatNamedDog's offering sounds more like some überDeutsch-on-steroids in which the words in common phrases are alljammedtogetherintoonelongandnearlyunreadableword and then speltaljamtogezerntonlonganearlunredblord.
I doubt that the average AncientGreek had to put any more thought into writing than I need to think about being gruntled to express my disgruntlement with the proposition that there exist "correlations betweeen a lazy grammar and lazy everything else"
Ancient Greek's construction is probably more the result of being a direct transliteration from oral-tradition grammar and the conquering tribes forcing their language upon the conquered. Not speaking AncientGreek by the grammatical rules of oralAncientGreek meant that one was designated a barbarian. And being a barbarian automaticly made one eligible to be enslaved. Even if one wasn't enslaved, one would automaticly be under the authority of AncientGreek speakers. With no chance of improvement of ones lot until one learned AncientGreek. If I remember the theories correctly... In oral-tradition cultures, grammars tend to tightly correlate subject, object, and action through past/present/future/hypothetical/etc meanings because there is no permanent record of what was actually said. Since much of what was remembered between generations was about things which needed to be remembered: grammar acts as a form of error-checking. So a sentence similar to "I will remembered what I has eat tomorrow" is automaticly recognized as nonsensical; and hence self-marked as the incorrect version of what was supposed to be remembered.
While unimportant in my example, in a culture without a method of making permanent records, the what needs to be remembered includes all the basics of survival: how to make bread; how to brew beer; how to make a fire under unusual circumstances; how to make a normally ignored&toxic acorn/cassava/etc into edible food when a drought causes a crop failure; how to make a life-saving elixer out of poisonous herbs; etc. That being so, error-correcting grammar, chants, poems, beats, and other mnemonic devices are necessary to make it easier to remember all of the various what needs to be known so that the tribe can prosper.
The problem being that such a rigid language structure slows the appearance of innovative thought.
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Intersting idea, anyway ...
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