tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Mar 08 20:46:23 1999
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Re: parsing
ja' charghwI':
>Interesting. I'm often fascinating to hear people describe how
>they process language. We share language among people who use
>vastly differing mechanisms to process that communication. I
>can't read without hearing the sounds in my head, so I'll come
>to a complete halt when I encounter a word I don't know how to
>pronounce. I can't understand it until I can "hear" it.
I myself am fascinated by the way some people have to send what
they read through the "hearing" part of their brain before they
can comprehend it. It's exactly the other way around for me --
if I'm reading something while simultaneously listening to someone
speaking it, or if I read out loud, I generally don't remember
a whole lot about what I have read a moment later. My "language-
processing" mechanism seems only barely related to either sight
or sound, and can't deal easily with simultaneous input from both.
It is more of a "tactile" concept for me, I guess.
>A friend
>has often stopped others to ask the meaning of the word the
>other person just said, even though she was very familiar with
>the word from reading it. She makes no connection whatsoever
>between what she reads and what she hears. It is like her
>reading and speaking are two different languages for her.
I had that happen to me a few times, with the words "rendezvous"
and "depot". I knew them separately by sound and sight, and it
was quite a revelation when I discovered the connection between
the spelling and the pronunciation.
>And now your description... I definitely process language from
>memory. We all have to. I just begin processing it while I hear
>it. I don't wait for it all to come in before I start digesting
>it.
You're describing a typical "pushdown automaton" parsing method.
The piece-at-a-time processing is like a little scanner having an
input and a "memory stack", and your detailed explanations of how
you get meaning out of sentences fits that idea well.
I expect that you don't understand English in quite the same way.
I suppose it's possible that you do go through the same explicit
parsing of grammar for an English sentence, but that would be a
*very* odd thing for a native speaker to do.
Early on, I had to focus on Klingon phrases word by word, affix
by affix, pulling them completely apart in order to find meaning
before putting them back together again. Now, when I see or hear
a simple phrase, I do something akin to comparing how well it
fits with "sample templates" that have structures I recognize.
-- ghunchu'wI'