Timeline for Did case systems dissappear to make embedding easier?
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:49 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Aug 16, 2015 at 7:12 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Cerberus: Cases make it a little harder, and anyway, Ecclesiastes is in perfect Hebrew and sometimes is as recursive as Greek, so it's not the language, it's the author. The stuff I did is what they do in Genesis and Exodus, they don't do that in Ecc. Even Genesis has number recursion and tail recursion, it's just not very center embedded. | |
| Aug 15, 2015 at 20:10 | comment | added | Cerberus | @RonMaimon: And how do you feel about my suggestion that using cases for nouns and adjectives and gerunds and participles makes it easier to embed such phrases? I'm sure it is very different from (and probably much easier to do than in) Hebrew. | |
| Aug 15, 2015 at 18:00 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Cerberus: Greek culture invented this early, Homer is different from other pre-literate cultures. I don't read Greek, but others have pointed this out. It is possible that the historical authors identified as Homer were the first to invent this style, leading to the golden age of Greek literature, I don't know. But it's definitely unique, and it biases people who study ancient stuff, because they study Homer and not other things. Look at the epic of Gilgamesh or the Hebrew Bible for non-recursive texts (I don't know Gilgamesh, from hearsay). | |
| Aug 11, 2015 at 16:30 | comment | added | Cerberus | @RonMaimon: Hi Ron! When you look at the examples I gave, notably Homer, do you still feel later writers invented hypotaxis / subordinate clauses in the middle of a sentence? Homer reflects oral culture. | |
| Aug 10, 2015 at 22:05 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | It's not just the bracketed part--- an ancient Hebrew style for this sentiment would read like this: When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water, that water which was made wine, and the ruler knew not whence it was. But the servants, those servants who drew the water knew. Then the governor of the feast called....", it would not have the long flowing complex sentence structure as it does above, with modern implicit attachment rules. The bracketed part is nothing special, the whole of John is flowing and recursive, and later Hebrew texts like Ecclesiastes are recursive in similar ways. | |
| Aug 6, 2015 at 0:44 | history | edited | Cerberus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 5, 2015 at 21:05 | comment | added | shuhalo | @RonMaimon: Reading that passage of John aloud, I cannot help but using different intonations, in particular the bracketed part about the servants with a different voice. Maybe some sort of concurrency rather than recursion serves to memorize such hypotactical constructions. | |
| Jun 17, 2012 at 2:29 | history | edited | Cerberus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jun 17, 2012 at 2:20 | history | edited | Cerberus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 8, 2012 at 11:19 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | This answer is not correct--- according to Karlsson's analysis, which seems to be correct, Greek and Latin writers seem to have invented deep center recursion, and the reason it works the same way in all European languages is that the Latin speakers transferred it through their style manuals and translations of these to all other local languages. Center recursion was not restricted to upper-class folks: (John 2:9) When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called... | |
| Mar 7, 2012 at 3:25 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Gaston Umlaut: All common languages have center embedding! Cased or uncased. That's universal grammar. I am not saying you can't embed with cases, only that embedding drives cases to disappear, because cases are inconvenient for embedding. it is correct that humans have a hard time coping with deep center embedding, so what. By the way, third sentence below is a 5 level center embedding that's easy to parse: "I wanted you to read me the book. You took it upstairs. If you tell me what you took the book I wanted to be read to out loud from upstairs for, in your own words, I'll forgive you." | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 21:42 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | @RonMaimon No, that's incorrect. Humans cannot cope with arbitrarily deep centre embedding. This is a much studied area, see (eg) "A usage-based approach to recursion in sentence processing" by Christiansen and MacDonald, in "Language as a complex adaptive system". Also you'll find there mention of centre-embedding in Finnish, a strongly case--marking language. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 15:11 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @GastonUmlaut: I didn't mention limits to embedding depth--- only in Piraha is there a clear limit--- at most one embedding (and that's because there is no actual embedding). In real embedding languages there is no upper limit to center embedding, other than good writing style, which is identified by native speakers. With effort, and time, a native speaker of a true embedded language will eventually identify arbitarily nested center embeddings are grammatical. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 8:55 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | @RonMaimon But surely centre embedding is more relevant to your mention of limits to embedding depth as it's much harder to comprehend deep centre embedding than deep side-branching embedding. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 6:56 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | @Gaston Umlaut: yes, center embedding is more interesting, but for the purpose of casing annoyance, it doesn't make much difference, so I didn't bother with it. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 5:31 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | @RonMaimon That kind of side-branch embedding can repeat many times and still be pretty comprehensible. I think centre-embedding is much more interesting, as well as harder to process--it's usually said that humans can't cope with more than three levels. Eg: 'This is the bus that the car that the professor that the girl kissed drove hit'. | |
| Mar 4, 2012 at 0:49 | comment | added | Ron Maimon | I am not offended. I don't speak latin, so please provide a gloss, like you did in the comments. I am interested in multiple levels of recursion only, so I prefer highly embedded artificial examples, like "I know of Mary that she knows of John that he knows of Martha that she knows that I am not dead." I disagree with you from personal experience with languages that I happen to personally know, and Hebrew has some cases, so I know how they work. The issue is that word markers that muck up clauses don't play well with transformations. | |
| Mar 3, 2012 at 12:14 | history | edited | Alenanno | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Mar 3, 2012 at 6:59 | history | answered | Cerberus | CC BY-SA 3.0 |