= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChristianKl comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (130)
I'm not so sure.
Knowing a word's part of speech is of limited use if you don't know its actual meaning. Learning a word's meaning generally tells you its part of speech too. If by some chance you have an idea of a word's meaning but not its part of speech (because of ambiguities as with "ship", or because you worked out what kind of thing it has to mean etymologically), that's often enough to work out what's going on anyway. What's the real benefit here of making the part of speech more visible? It sounds nice, but when does it actually help much?
I'm not so sure.
Inside view: there are really quite a lot of preposition-functions, and prepositions want to be short words, so if we insist on a separate preposition for every preposition-function we'll need to allocate a lot of short words for them. Short words are a scarce resource. The language will have to be clumsier in other ways.
Outside view: every language I know enough about (admittedly a small subset of the world's languages) overloads its prepositions. That's got to be some evidence that doing so isn't a terrible idea.
I think it's evidence that it's not easy for prepositions to get added through natural language evolution. It much easier to add new verbs, adjectives and nouns.
While that's true when it comes to conlang design, if you look at English there's plenty of open space of short words. A lot of two letter combinations that are possible with English phonetics aren't valid English words.
That doesn't necessarily mean there's spare space. You don't want every possible combination of letters to make a word, because then it becomes easier to mishear.
Someone in this thread mentioned that there are 37 different meanings in English for
post. It's easy to mishear between those 37 meanings. You could easily move a third of those topistand another third topust. That would make it easier to get the right meaning.To the extend that context allows you to choose the right of the 37 meanings of post, it should also help you prevent mishearing.
If you take the preposition of
withwith it's nine different meanings, move a third towuthand a third towoth. People might make a mistake to mishearwithwhen the other person sayswuthbut at least they have a change to hear the right meaning and don't have to guess based on context which of the many meanings is meant.This basically cannot happen in real life, because most people do not think clearly about which sense of a preposition they are using. So if you divide up those meanings of "with", all three words will start to take on all nine meanings, and you will just have uselessly multiplied words.
The fact that people don't reflect about the sense in which they use a preposition doesn't mean that they can't learn to use a specific preposition for a specific purpose. In reality people can say "on Monday" while saying "in July" and "at night" without getting confused.
If you have the sentence "Galileo saw a man with a telescope" people do mentally distinguish two cases of with that could be meant. There nothing natural about all the meanings that "with" has in English being bundled together via the same word. Other languages bundle things together in different ways.
There's a very old and very silly debate in Spanish because some people refuse to acknowledge that "a glass of water" means what it intends to mean, instead of the ridiculously literal "a glass made of water", so they switch to the awkward "a glass with water", which in real life can mean a glass on a tray with a jar of water next to it.
So the result is that snobbish people insist on saying "a glass with water," and ordinary people plus meta-snobbish people keep saying "a glass of water", and both sides hate each other passionately.
So is it, basically, a status signal by now?
Yes, but in a complicated way. "A glass with water" is hypercorrection, which gives the speaker the opposite status from the one he believes he's displaying.
In that case it seems that a short preposition for "containing" is missing.
Language isn't easy. If you just know the rules, it's hard to know that a teacup might not contain tea while a cup of tea does. It get's even more confusing because the same object that's a teacup when it's intended to store tea liquids suddenly becomes a bowl when it's intended to contain soup.
Nope, it does not. Teacups have handles and bowls don't.
It might very well be true that there are English dialects where teacup means a cup with a handle but that's not general usage. Wikipedia start by it's description of teacups by saying: "A teacup is a cup, with or without a handle".
I'm in the process of reading Anna Wierzbicka's Imprisoned in English where she makes the claim that the intent of usage is what distinguishes a cup from a bowl.
Or... do they?
Strangely, the same people who object to "a glass of water" have no problem with "a bottle of soda," "a pot of potatoes" or "a truck of pigs".
But is a bottle of soda still a bottle of soda if it's empty?
(I think it would also be nice, if you add the spanish translation for those terms you are speaking about)