It's all Greek to me
I missed my Greek class yesterday because of a migraine. That bums me out; the class keeps me sharp. However, as penance I did sit down and work through several exercises on my own this morning.I have this (neither original nor very remarkable) observation to make: knowing grammar makes language acquisition easier.
It doesn't matter if the language in question is as familiar to the Anglophone as French, or as alien as Indonesian. At this point, our grammar is surprisingly capable of organizing nigh on all extant linguistic forms. And that leads to a question: was Chomsky more right than I've ever been willing to credit? I mean, clearly small children utter ungrammatical phrases all the time, strongly suggesting that grammar is more emergent than innate. But if I can draw a sentence tree for well-formed sentences in any language, then maybe we really are constrained to think in terms of subjects, objects, and adverbs nonetheless. Are these categories merely successfully descriptive of the languages we have encountered thus far? Or are they rather indicative of necessary constraints on the kinds of grammatical relationships of which people are able to conceive?
posted by Skay @ 10:39 AM
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