[b-greek] Is it Greek or English Grammar?

From: Wayne Leman (wleman@mcn.net)
Date: Sat Dec 02 2000 - 22:07:15 EST


Carl concluded:

>
> I am clearly out of my terrain here, and I'm sure that sooner or later an
> authentic linguist will come and explain all this intelligibly.

Carl, I don't know if I'm authentic enuf, but I've spent a lot of time in
the linguistics classroom, both formally and in the school of hard knocks. I
can tell you that linguists themselves struggle over this very same issue of
whether or not morphological and syntactic categories define semantic
categories for speakers of a language or whether there are some kind of
"deeper", more psychologically real categories and universals that are
mapped, to a large degree, to morphological and syntactic categories, but
the mappings are not perfect. (In terms of the coming and going of
linguistic theories that have wrestled with these issues, Generative
Semantics was an "in" theory in the '70s; it broke lexical terms down into
smaller semantic and syntactic categories. More recently Anna Wierzbicka
continues to try to isolate universal semantic primitives. Of course,
Chomsky's deep and surface structure was a way of separating surface
syntactic and morphological categories from some "deeper" semantic
realities. But American Descriptive Linguistics (pre-Chomsky), since the '40
has concentrated more on just what's there, what you can hear phonetically,
and discover the categories to be by simple comparison techniques. Nothing
deeper psychologically. Many of us still do basic descriptive linguistics,
even if we are fascinated by other ideas about other possible
psycholinguistic categories which may or may not correlate with clearcut
morphological and syntactic categories.)

As you know, Plato raised the question of which is more real, the thing
itself or the shadow of the thing. When it comes to the topic at hand, I'm
getting that feeling of deja-vu all over again! <g>

So, like Tevya who sang it so well, in "Fiddler on the Roof," I'll tell you
what the answer is: "I don't know!" <g> I *do* know that speakers all over
the world find ways of shoehorning a great deal of data in the universe into
a relatively small number of linguistic categories. Cheyenne, the language I
work with, puts every noun into either an animate or inanimate class.
People, animals, and trees are animate, which makes sense to those of us
with a "Western scientific" worldview. But stars, rocks, kidneys, brains,
and several other body parts are also animate, whereas sticks, grass, other
body parts, etc. are inanimate. Is there a reality to the categories. Yes,
to a large extent, but, as with many linguistic categories, including our
struggles with Greek case, there are things that don't fit as neatly as we
would like.

We generally don't go very far wrong if we stick to the linguistic
categories themselves which people use. At least those are "real"
linguistically. They are empirical; we can hear or read them. I think you
are right in suggesting that sometimes it is best just to let the categories
be, and not try to divide them up into smaller subcategories that make
better sense to us (altho such smaller divisions can help us understand
things better sometimes, but there is the law of diminishing returns and the
question of how much we are trying to impose our own reality upon theirs,
when language "realities" often are rather arbitrary anyway--we don't have
to make sense of everything in the world, as much as we crave to do so). The
speakers of the language already grouped their world into those linguistic
categories. Who are we to question how they did it? It just is. We often had
to teach this lesson to our children: It's not necessarily right, nor wrong,
it just is.

Well, as it is often posted on bulletin boards in linguistic departments:

"Used to was I couldn't spell "linguistics"; now I are one."

Wayne
---
Wayne Leman
Bible translation site: http://www.geocities.com/bible_translation/




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