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Minor Deity |
As a manner of speaking, we can say: 1. "two plus three is five" 2. "the sum of two and three is five" 3. "two and three sum to five" It would seem all three say the same thing. Mathematically, (I think) they translate to something like these: 1. 2 + 3 = 5 ==> "in-fix" notation 2. + 2 3 = 5 ==> "pre-fix" notation 3. 2 3 + = 5 ==> "post-fix" notation My question is this: As "manners of speaking" go, if we look across all known human natural languages and dialects, is one "manner of speaking" more popular than others? If so, which one, and why? Any idea? (If "it's complicated," where can I start looking for answers?)
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana  |
That's a toughie because you are asking for a view across ALL languages (I assume, dead or alive). And dialects. Aren't there well over 100 dialects of spoken Chinese alone? And I don't know that I would consider this one feature to be part of a definition of a dialect, so various speakers of one recognized dialect could use more than one of the modes you list. So, I wouldn't say it's "complicated". I would say it's huge. I would also say that while it works for commutative operations, I would be curious how those same modes express subtraction and division. "The dividend of three and six is two"? Or one half? I guess you'd have to say "the dividend of three into six" or something that better establishes the roles of the operators. It is an interesting question. I deal with similar puzzles all day, every day in writing about technical concepts for a global audience.
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| (self-titled) semi-posting lurker Minor Deity  |
Actually what you’re talking about is word order, and while most languages have a particularly “preferred” or “most common” word order, there is general flexibility, with some languages having much more flexibility than others. For example, English is known as SVO (subject, verb, object) but it isn’t SVO 100% of the times (w.g. word order can change for questions). Japanese is known as SOV (subject, object, verb) but often the subject is omitted, and because Japanese is also a topic prominent language, word order can be changed to make something the topic.
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| (self-titled) semi-posting lurker Minor Deity |
By the way, to address your question a little more closely, SOV is the most common word order, followed by SVO. Together these two patterns make up most languages and the other word order types are much less common (like, verb first or object first) But again, in actual language use, there is much more variety within one language than these word order descriptors suggest.
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| Minor Deity |
Pardon my ignorance ... using the same examples, there are “two,” “three,” “plus/sum”, “five.” I suppose “plus/sum” is the verb, right? Among “two,” “three,” and “five”, Which one is “subject” and which one is “object”?
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana |
1. subject = "two plus three", verb = "is", appositive = "five" 2. subject = "sum", adjective modifying "sum" = "of two and three", verb = "is", appositive = "five" 3. subject = "two and three", verb = "sum", indirect object = "to five" Correct, SK?
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| (self-titled) semi-posting lurker Minor Deity |
I don’t actually do syntactic linguistics, so I’m sure there are more specified ways of talking about this question. Also the subject-object-verb terminology is really just a short-hard, because obviously most sentences have other elements beyond these types. Also, if you think about a sentence like “two plus three is five,” or “Mary is a student,” these kinds of sentences are quite different from “Sally built a bookshelf” or “Pat ate the last piece of cake.” These last two have true objects, the others don’t. Or a sentence like “it is raining” — what is “it”? So, Ax, what is it that you’re trying to figure out?
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Has Achieved Nirvana |
Well, it wouldn't be #3. That's just bad style.  | |||
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| "I've got morons on my team." Mitt Romney Minor Deity  |
Oh c'mon, Ax. Everybody knows that #2 and #3 are forms of Polish, and the rest of the world uses #1 ...  | |||
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| Minor Deity |
Whether there is a natural (maybe neurologically driven) inclination for humans to use "infix", "postfix", or "prefix" notation/"manner of speaking", or if it's all nurture ("because that's what we were taught").
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| (self-titled) semi-posting lurker Minor Deity |
Ah, yes, the 10 million dollar question. It’s also a Chomskian question. I think there are some linguists who still lean towards nature, but in the face of the realities of linguistic diversity, I think more and more are leaning toward nurture. Me included. I think Chomsky’s ideas about universal grammar are falling out of favor.
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| Pinta & the Santa Maria Has Achieved Nirvana  |
Wow, it's been years since I've read anything about Chomsky, universal grammar and linguistics. It was a hot topic when I was in grad school. I found it interesting but way too much for me to really understand as a sideline dilettante. At the time (may have been disproven since) there was the start of an idea that the language(s) you learned as a baby caused your brain to develop in different ways. Yes, I'm old enough that mapping brain activity via cat scan was a new technology and there were a lot of cool experiments doing just that. | |||
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Foregoing Vacation to Post |
I don’t know which of three manners of speaking, pre-fix, in-fix, and post-fix, is the most popular amongst all the world’s languages. It sounds like a topic for an advanced college degree research project. Maybe someone has done it already? Use a search engine to search for academic research topics. I forgot the name of it but I used it in college. Software engineers and programmers that work with digital telephony might have some insight into what the most common sentence constructions are. Digital telephony programs parse spoken words to route telephone calls. | |||
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| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana |
Hmmmm... I wonder where we could find someone who works in digital telephony.
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| (self-titled) semi-posting lurker Minor Deity |
By the way, these are not the terms for Ax's question. Affixes (which is what pre-fix and in-fix etc. are) are related to morphology (word formation). IIRC infixes are less common in the world's languages than other kinds of affixes... ETA although, I'm not sure about this (not my specialty). Also, it's said that English doesn't have infixes, but that's not entirely true, they are just very uncommon and tend to contain the f-word, as in abso-f*cking-lutely...
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