tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 24 19:03:06 2009
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Re: pu'jIn
> That's an interesting proposal, but I'd venture that long strings of
> nouns are difficult for us to parse mostly because none of us is a
> native speaker of Klingon. The cognitive load on my brain when
> speaking Klingon is definitely a bit higher in general than when I'm
> speaking English. Simplicity is easier to handle than complexity,
> and small numbers of things are easier than large numbers of things.
> I don't think a difficulty with phrases consisting of many nouns in a
> row is due to any more than that.
Yeah, that's basically what I meant. It just seems harder to parse
these kinds of things for English speakers. I imagine a Finn would
have no trouble with it...
> It was probably ten or twelve years ago when a few of us tried to
> quantify our mental "stack size" for parsing nested relative
> clauses. In English, six or seven levels was not a big problem. In
> Klingon, we started getting lost around four or five. I wish I had
> documented it at the time. Maybe we should repeat the experiment the
> next time a group of us gets together; it would probably make a good
> research project.
It would be interesting to compare it with other language-learners,
too. This four- or five- thing could be an effect of a second
language, or it could be because Klingon word order is OVS, and might
be generally harder for people to process...