LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.20 (01) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2008.07.18 (03) [E]

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

I think it can be interesting how literary forms are influenced by
language forms. Would rhyming poetry ever have caught on in Europe if it
hadn't been for the Arabic language? How come modern Czech uses
stress-driven prosody when older Czech poetry used syllable length? Did
it catch it from languages where stress is more important, and how?
Could anything even vaguely like haiku ever have come to be written in
English without the influence of Asian languages?

Is it actually easier to develop and use technical vocabularies in
English than in some other languages, and if so, is this at least partly
_because_ of the sparseness of grammatical inflection? In English
wholesale borrowing (especially from Greek, in scientific fields) is
normal, making it possible to build layers of technical vocabulary, but
do foreign loans actually help technical precision because the
scientific or taxonomic meaning isn't influenced by pre-existing
semantics? And is this borrowing encouraged by the fact that inflections
are so sparse and regular that you can borrow or make up any new word
and not have to worry about whether it can be pluralised or take
participial endings, because it can always be done quite easily and
naturally?

Those are just questions, not theories!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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