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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's Grammar, Anyway?
Message-ID: <D4Ir9L.32G@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <1995Feb23.142706.3877@oracorp.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 19:24:56 GMT
Lines: 32

In article <1995Feb23.142706.3877@oracorp.com>,
Daryl McCullough <daryl@oracorp.com> wrote:

Mostly I agree with what you write, but the statement below has put me
into "devil's advocate" mode:
:
>Well, here we disagree slightly. I think that there is a feedback
>effect, rather than strict cause-and-effect. Having a complex content
>makes a grammar of a certain complexity necessary, but *also* having a
>grammar allows the expansion of the content. As far as I know, most of
>the basic grammatical features of modern language were pretty much in
>place thousands of years ago, although what people have to talk about

Are you sure of this? How do you (we) know this? I am not sure how old are
earliest Greek writings, 2500 y? Are any Hebrew writings older than these?
As far as I know knowledge of even older languages is comes only from
hieroglyphic inscriptions, like Egyptian or Babylonian. It seems to me that
it is very hard to say much about grammar in case of hieroglyphic writings.
I rather suspect that in the process of translation they are being 
interpretted using present day grammar. 
Perhaps I am wrong, I'll appreciate if someone sheds more light on this.

>Daryl McCullough
>ORA Corp.
>Ithaca, NY

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
