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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Natural Language Deficiencies in Hopi
Message-ID: <3410@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Oct-84 11:52:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.3410
Posted: Thu Oct 25 11:52:00 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Oct-84 09:38:23 EDT
References: rocheste.2479 sri-arpa.12582 uicsl.12300003 oliveb.194 gloria.619 aplvax.801
Lines: 33

<>
> > It is well-known that the Hopi (American Indian) language only has a
> > present tense, there are no past or future tenses for their verbs.
> > Surely this is a language deficiency.
> 
> The same is true of AMSLAN (AMerican Sign LANguage), but whether you are
> talking about the past or future is clearly communicated by setting up the
> context in advance. For example, one might say "Yesterday, I see Bill.",

Chinese is so purely analytic that it lacks inflection 
altogether.  Nouns are the same in plural and singular, verbs 
carry no tense, pronouns even lack gender (he, she, and it are 
all the same word).  A Chinese friend, Dr. Shiang-Tai Tuan, is 
fond of pointing out that English does the same for nouns like 
"sheep," verbs like "to hit" (except in the present participle), 
and pronouns like "we" and "they."  Finno-Ugric languages like 
Estonian and Hungarian (if memory serves) are highly inflected 
but lack gender in pronouns.  It's remarkable how structures we 
tacitly consider natural or even essential are so radically 
discarded by non-Indoeuropean languages (and, presumably, vice 
versa).

By the way, Czech inflects so determinedly that verbs carry 
gender, even in the first person.  But no distinction is made 
between leg and foot, arm and hand, or toe and finger.  So a 
naive machine translation from English into Czech and back might 
convert "the fingers of both hands" into "the toes of both arms"! 


D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-4146
USENET:  {decvax,ihnp4,akgua,etc.}!mcnc!ecsvax!dgary