4 ms·
"if grammar books have to be "thousands of pages long," then at some point they're no longer listing rules but exceptions to them." I've never seen a grammar b
by mcswell 5y ago
"if grammar books have to be "thousands of pages long," then at some point they're no longer listing rules but exceptions to them." I've never seen a grammar book that was thousands of pages long, and I've looked at lots of them. The longest ones I know (for English, naturally) are still well under 1000 pages.
I have co-authored one (the Cubeo language) and edited or typeset lots of others, some of them running into the hundreds of pages. And the reason they're that long has nothing to do with exceptions, it has to do with verbal explanations for the reader, examples, excursions on semantics and pragmatics, citations, discussions of alternative analyses, and so forth. If you boiled it all down to rules--phrase structure rules, say, and morphological rules for languages that enjoy morphology, plus tables of exceptional paradigms (probably the only real exceptions), you'd probably end up with grammars on the order of 20 pages.
And fwiw, I don't think any linguist would consider the paradigm of English "to be" to be even remotely regular.
- 4cao 5y agoThank you for your comments, it's been a pleasure to read all of them. For the record, the quoted parts were taken from the post I was originally responding to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023467 Also, I definitely agree (quoting from your other post) that: > The line between spoken and written language isn't really a question of writing. Transcribed speech is still an oral language. This is a very good point. Perhaps I shouldn't have written so categorically about this in my original comment. I only had in mind that due to the way some of the examples in the PDF are constructed, the focus seems to be more on the writing conventions than on the languages itself.