you learn something new every day
I just got done with my Human Communications tutorial, which is, hands down, my favorite class. I don’t find it super challenging, as I have a knowledge of some of the elements of the course (grammars, turing machines, basic linguistics, etc.) from other courses I’ve taken that the other students lack, but I do find it incredibly interesting, and a good synthesis for some of those aforementioned elements of study.
I was reading through the course notes and found a really interesting mention of how arbitrary rules of “proper” grammar really are. For instance, take the rule about not ending sentances with a preposition. The historic basis for this? Some people wanted to model English after Latin, which does not allow trailing prepositions. Completely arbitary. Similarly, the perception of double negatives as being “improper” in English. Well, it seems that other languages, such as French, allow forms both using and excluding double negatives. However, in French, it is the use of double negatives that is considered more formal. Again, a display regarding how arbitrary grammar rules really are. More precisely, it exhibits how detached society’s perception of language is from it’s actual function.
It’s interesting to approach natural language from the perspective of a computer programmer. A programmer will often have to frequently switch programming languages due to the particular strengths and weaknesses of a given language. The syntax for programming languages may differ, but after programming for a while, this almost becomes invisible and one is only aware of the utility of the language. I’m not sure if one could learn to use natural language in such a way, since the languages are much more complex, and it doesn’t seem like one natural language offers any more utility than another, but I wonder how the ability to abstract away syntactic differences in natural language indicates an individual’s ability to perform other tasks. Furthermore, I’m interested to learn how grammar is taught in inner-city and rural schools. I’m guessing that much time is spent trying to break students from their “bad” grammatical habits, rather than exposing students to more language features and making people more litterate.