[lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein's "Lateinisch" (or Lack of It)
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:35:23 +0900
On 10/16/07, Judith Evans <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Declension's important, but word order is too, (Probably -- again --
> English speakers have to be told about declension and its importance, and
> perhaps, after the very early stages (of being pushed to put the verb at
> the end),
> are encouraged to think it, not word order, important,
>
>
>
The relative importance of word order and inflection vary from language to
language. Linguists distinguish between primarily syntactic languages
(English and Chinese, for example) where, since individual words are not
inflected, word order is more important, and inflected languages (German and
Latin, for example) where grammatical information is expressed in the
inflections, making word order less important.
Cheers,
John
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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