Tuesday, August 12, 2008

William Bouguereau The Wave painting

William Bouguereau The Wave paintingWilliam Bouguereau Rest paintingWilliam Bouguereau Cupid and Psyche as Children painting
Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As ... Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next—its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc., etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use. (Though a phrase, not a sentence, this quotation nicely exemplifies the point: To be or not to—.)
It appears that in the language of the Nna Mmoy, not only the choice of word—noun or verb, tense, person, etc.—but the meaning of each word is continuously modified by all the words that precede or may follow it in the sentence (if in fact the Nna Mmoy speak in sentences). And so, after receiving only a few syllables

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