LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.18 (03) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 17 July 2008 - Volume 03
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From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.17 (02) [E]

Thanks, Heather,

for your very brilliant and illuminating excursion about grammar. Like Ron I
specially found your explanation about the Chinese concept very interesting.
My oldest son just spent some weeks with his girlfriend (she had made a
practical work placement in Shanghai, as an employee of Volkswagen) over
there and told me some interesting things about the 'ideas' behind Mandarin
language.

But let me have another look at sign language. You wrote:

 > This I think is why sign language, little as I know of it, appears to be
able to 'cut to the chase' and express directly and often so succinctly
> from the thought. It
> seems to be able to create a whole concept in a single gesture or a series
of gestures still fewer than the words or phrases linguistic language
> would need to
> express the same idea.
Couldn't this, among other reasons, also be a consequence of the fact that
people corresponding via SL, have much more eye contact to each other? And
additional: they implant much more gestics and mimics as an average speaker
of 'normal' language.
Isn't it a matter of fact that it is easier to understand a 'lively'- not
fast!-speaking person facing you than one who, in extreme, is standing with
his back side to you? Since my youth I always have had a little defect
to follow a speaker on the background of a party where several people are
talking 'higgledy-piggledy'. The same is valid for music- I'm mostly unable
(very often lucky me!) to understand texts, maybe German or English.

> So what is there essentially about the concept of trotz: in spite of  /
wegen : because of   that requires a genitive??
An hazardous and vague theory of mine: both, 'trotz' and 'weg[en]', also
exist as a noun. So in archaic time the genitive could have pointed out the
relation between two nouns...???

Allerbest!

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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.17 (06) [E]

Perhaps I should make it clear that I'm not advocating speaking or writing
English like that!

My points were:

1) You can understand quite mangled versions of your own language, even when
neither word order nor inflexions give direct clues to subject or object; as
Sandy rightly points out, that depends on somebody having a good knowledge
of the language.

2) If both speakers are "manglers", using poorly understood mutual second
language as their only common one they will pretty rapidly build their own
rules and complexity, incrasing as more players come on board.
Paul Finlow-Bates

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Grammar

Sandy brought up the issue of precision versus vagueness in connection with
grammar.

My simplified, big picture is that languages with grammars that are by
default vague have capabilities for more precision if needed, while
languages that mandate a lot of grammatical detail, i.e. precision, rarely,
if ever, allow you to be vague.

Sometimes it's convenient to be vague, not necessarily for lying or cover-up
purposes as in Sandy's example. A lot of detail is oftentimes irrelevant and
clutters the message.

I personally find vagueness and even ambiguity very useful and appropriate
in literature, especially in poetry. This is particularly useful in
minimalist approaches, were you let the reader's or listener's own
experience and imagination take over. I have a far easier time with this in
English than in German, and Low Saxon is somewhere between the two in this
respect. Yet, in technical prose, for instance, English is capable of great
precision and at the same time relative conciseness.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

•

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