WHOSE SHOULDERS DID SHE SHRUG?

But a computer is only a tool, in this case proving that the idea was correct. (It was also used by a linguist from Ohio to write the grammars of some Micronesian languages.)

Then come the real insights that you do not find in the grammar books. For example, English grammar says that all parts of the body must be attributed to their owners whenever possible. A real stupid ride, students of English think. It leads to absurdities like "She shrugged her shoulders." In all other languages I know of you say "She shrugged the shoulders," because to all but mad dogs and Englishmen it is pretty clear whose shoulders she probably shrugged.

But look at language as an error correcting code, and the rule is not stupid at all. The possessive adjective is, in fact, a very good and necessary check morpheme in English and in English only.

In no language that I know of other than English can you simply take any noun and turn it into a verb without changing it. (Exceptions: gold, to guild, and some others.)

This is especially true of parts of the body. You nose around, mouth an opinion, foot a bill, head a committee, shoulder a burden, hand me a note, eye a girl, etc., etc. In any other language that I know of eye, to eye and the adjective (as in eye glasses) all have distinct forms.

What the "her" does is not indicate whose shoulders she shrugged; it is a check morpheme that says "what follows is a noun."

Here is another insight. It is well known that church, schools, literature and general "culture" will standardize and therefore brake the development of a language. To the contrary, the illiterate people, when unhampered by such institutions did a marvelous job of streamlining the grammar and general structure of their language.

When Cicero's eloquence stopped begetting elegant Latin structures and the lights went out in Rome, the common people in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy threw out the Latin inflections bag and baggage, though they were most excellent check morphemes. They must have overdone it for soon they would not have known what is a noun without some help from a check morpheme of a different kind. That's how the article arose in these languages, all descended from Latin, which had none. Instead of the Latin virgo, virginis, virgini, virginem, etc., the French just used the far simpler mob-language la vierge, de la vierge, a la vierge, la vierge,...

Same thing happened in the Slavic languages, which inflect heavily to this day. (Czech pays the price of having an old literature by having one more case than Russian.) All except Bulgarian. The Bulgarians came under Turkish rule for 300 years and emerged with a simple language without inflections and with articles.

The third case, of course, is English. For one and a half centuries after the Norman Conquest in 1066 the "better" people spoke French, while the illiterate Anglo-Saxon serfs threw out the inflections (except the "Saxon genitive"), and they made the most beautiful job of streamlining the grammar of a language. When Chaucer and other writers began to stir, they emerged with a bastard French-Saxon language that had the simplest grammar (and the most horrible spelling) in the world.

These and many other points were made in my book The Structure of Language (1973), now out of print.

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