From: Lucien Carroll (serapio@attbi.com)
Date: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 11:30:49 EST
On Thursday 31 October 2002 09:56 pm, Paul wrote:
> There still are no tenses,
> persons, cases. I suppose if one considers something like "man buy two
> white oxen, oxen eat barley, man sell one ox" a narrative, narrative was
> possible before 3000 BC, but was "Now the serpent was more subtle than any
> beast of the field which Jehovah God had made. And he said unto the woman,
> Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden?" I don't
> think so; and I doubt that the expert in Bern will say that Gen 1-5 could
> have been written originally even in the stylized pictographs of 3000 BC.
I don't know much about Semitic grammar, and nothing about Sumerian, but its
still quite possible to do with out tense, persons, and cases. Chinese for
example has some other grammar but none of these, and its quite common for
pidgin languages to have only sparse grammar. Yet these languages are still
quite capable of poetic narrative.
Here's my attempt to render your quote with minimal grammatical content:
"Now serpent be subtle over all field beast Jehovah God make. And he say
woman, 'Yea, God say, Ye eat of no garden tree, or no?'"
If someone were used to reading English without the more grammatical words
and morphemes, they could probably adjust atleast as well as if you took out
all whitespace and punctuation.
Lucien.
-- Lucien Carroll serapio@attbi.com / ucarrl01@umail.ucsb.edu "This is my favorite ride. One seems to move so far, and yet in reality one gets nowhere." -Tortoise
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