At 10:43 PM 4/3/2001 +0100, Simon Cozens wrote:
>On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 05:20:11PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > Dunno--the older a language is, the more regular it seems to be. (The
> rough
> > edges get worn off, I assume) While Latin had a reasonably complex set of
> > rules, it was more regular than English. Japanese feels the same, though
> > I'll grant I've little enough experience with it that my impression might
> > be wrong or incomplete.
>
>In my experience of Japanese (and other languages) it's quite the opposite.
>Speakers get lazy. They cut corners. They omit things. They corrupt verb
>forms. Latin was pretty regular; languages derived from it aren't.
Latin wasn't all that regular to start with. I'll grant that it may be an
outlier on the graph, though, given it was used mainly by the Roman
Catholic Church for the past millenia or so, putting it in the
"intellectual" language category for an awfully long time.
The complexities of language seem to get worn down with age and people get
sloppy with it, but the regularity generally seems to increase because of
that. The odd forms of words or different cases/tenses/declensions get
beaten down and more of the language gets wedged into fewer boxes. The
number of rules for a language seems to tend towards a local minima. (I've
watched that happen as my kids have learned to talk) Heck, the amount of
entropy in a language seems to tend towards a local minima.
IANAL, though (and I don't even play one on TV) so I'm not sure these
observations really hold in the general case. Probably not really
perl6-language appropriate anymore, either. (I think--might be wrong on
that one)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
