[lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein's "Lateinisch" (or Lack of It)
- From: "Judith Evans" <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 01:50:37 +0100
That is. the issue was whether word order was of any importance at all in Latin.
----- Original Message -----
From: John McCreery
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 1:35 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Wittgenstein's "Lateinisch" (or Lack of It)
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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