Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!news.mathworks.com!news.alpha.net!uwm.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: What's Grammar, Anyway?
Message-ID: <D4rpGo.722@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <1995Feb23.142706.3877@oracorp.com> <D4Ir9L.32G@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <longrich-2602951530500001@longrich.student.princeton.edu>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 1995 15:24:24 GMT
Lines: 54

In article <longrich-2602951530500001@longrich.student.princeton.edu>,
Nick Longrich <longrich@princeton.edu> wrote:
>In article <D4Ir9L.32G@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>, pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca
>(Andrzej Pindor) wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>   Pretty much all humans use language and are capable of reading any
>language. Native Americans hit North America over ten thousand years ago,
>and the Aborigines made it to Australia maybe fifty thousand years ago.
>The fact that you can teach any of these people any other language argues
>that, while grammar and language have been developing, our inherent
>hard-wiring has not changed over the tens of thousands of years since
>these people diverged. Our languages evolve, adapt, and change, but out
>ability to create and use them probably goes back to the origin of our
>species. Our language capacities probably are very ancient and goes back
>to the origin of modern Homo sapiens- something like 100,000 years.

I think you are missing the point. It is not the question if language
capacities are ancient or not, but whether grammar of present languages is
ancient. In a sense mathematical capabilities are also ancient, but it does
not mean that few thousands years ago people were using mathematical
structures we use today.  Is grammar learned or hardwired? Is logical
inferencing learned or hardwired? In the latter case a lot of it is probably
hardwired as correct inferencing is crucial for survival, but this argument
does not seem as strong in case of grammar.

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
