The perils of relying on English glosses to indicate meanings of
morphemes in another language are often mentioned but the depth
of our reliance on our native "background vernacular" is I think
seldom really appreciated. Same principles apply in spades to
invented metalanguages for semantic representation.
Here's an interesting case in point excerpted from the Linguist Digest.
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6)
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 92 12:05:20 EST
From: cowan@uunet.UU.NET (John Cowan)
Subject: OVS
I have never really understood the necessity for talking of object-first
languages, using this term as a cover for OVS, OSV, and VOS languages.
What reason is there to believe that such a language actually has a different
order rather than believing that it takes a different view of what its
verbs mean? Using Okrand's study of Klingon as the readily-available
example (:-)):
puq legh yaS
child sees officer
The officer sees the child.
What reason is there to gloss "legh" as "sees" rather than "is-seen-by"?
It seems to me a mere prejudice to believe that seeing is "inherently"
more natural, and more deserving of a single morpheme, than being seen.
So talk of the rarity of object-first languages can be reduced to talk
of the rarity of "is-seen-by" as a single morpheme with "sees" as the
derived form.
--
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
e'osai ko sarji la lojban
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Linguist List: Vol-3-262.
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This brings us rather sharply back to the old Whorf-Sapir(-Humboldt)
hypothesis. Do differences in language correspond to differences
in the world of perceptions in which we live and move and have our
being? And the epistemological toughie: whatever your answer, how
can we know that?
Bruce
bn@bbn.com