Linguistic universals

 I guess I could look up linguistic universals and find out what linguists think they might be.  Maybe negation, words for spatial and temporal relations, words for things and qualities of things. Actions. Ways of ordering words. I'm thinking the beginning and ends of utterances are going to be important. That all languages will have units or phrases.  They will have questions. 

There are other ways of asking questions in Chinese.  Putting a question word at the end like 'na li' (where?). Another one that means "what."   

There are some verbal and temporal things: zai + verb for present progressive.  Le after the verb to make it past.  

It's not like you need some universal grammar at a deep knowledge. It's more that languages have things that they want to do, and then there have mechanisms for doing those things.  So suppose negation is a thing you would expect a language to want to do.  Then you would have some words that negate, or an affix, or whatever. Then a rule for where to place the negative element. 

Tedium and bewilderment

Chinese lessons I have done already seem tedious to repeat, but beginning a new lessons seems alien. I make myself drill the old material for a long time before going on. Then I realize I don't know the characters well enough and have to spend a long time drilling those too. Some I know more from gestalt than really knowing each stroke. 

Hey, ho, hey, ho

 I remember hearing that Jesse Jackson was at Stanford leading a chant of protesters saying "hey ho hey ho / Western Civ has got to go."This was in 1987.  There is something in me that broke when that happened. I don't know hoe to describe those kind of feelings, where you feel alienated from an otherwise progressive cause. 

I know it's not as catchy a chant to say "hey, ho, hey, ho / let's diversify the syllabus a little bit mo."  

A few more things

 I do know a few more things: two words of negation, mei and bu. Where to place these words. Chang chang will be frequently, so bu chang will infrequently. zai + verb will be doing that (progressive), not doing it will be mei zai + verb. 

"My daughter is not reading the newspaper."  I know how to construct that.  

There are two other tag phrases to ask question, ni ne, and bui dubui.  How about you, and is that right? 

Wo shi is I am, shi wo, it is I. 

Language learning

 I like Chinese grammar. So far, I know some basic word order, three ways of asking questions. 

Putting ma as particle at the end. Using haishi to ask about alternatives. Putting another particle at the end to ask "what."

I know how to make a progressive: the zai  before a word. 

Plural pronouns:

Wo / women

Ni / nimen 

Ta / tamen 

I know how to express possession with de. 

Putting ba at the end makes it into "let's do something" 

There's a lot of reduplication for family members, mama, baba, yeye... 

So a basic sentence:

Now / yesterday / In the summer 

Pronoun or noun 

There are demonstrative pronouns / this / these / those 

An adverb of intensity, like "very." 

Verb 

Verb can be preceded by an auxiliary, like to, is able to, etc...  

In the summer, people extremely like to go the Korean bookstore. 

There are several elements, and a particular order they have to follow. 

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It looks like vocabulary is the big challenge. Learning thousands of anything is difficult. There are 88 notes on the piano, so we aren't learning thousands of musical notes. Dozens of ingredients will make a lot of different culinary combinations. We don't need thousands. Syntax is more conceptually abstract than vocab, but I have no problem with abstract thought. The lexicon, with each lexical item being written in a unique and unpredictable symbol, and also difficult to hear / pronounce, is difficult.  

Reviews

 I was thinking of those amazon reviews that say "the book came in bad condition." They seem to miss the point of a book review, oriented toward the content of the book, not the condition of any particular physical book. 

(There's a funny meme about people leaving reviews of on-line recipes, where the reviewer will alter the recipe in significant ways and then complain that it did not come out well.  "I had no eggs so I substituted honey. Horrible recipe; it was too sweet and didn't have the right texture."  That kind of thing. Once again, a kind of misapprehension of the function of reviewing.

Another form of recipe comment: the recipe is a "non-recipe recipe," labelled as such, with amounts deliberately omitted. Then someone will ask in the comment for exact quantities. There are hundreds of recipes with quantified ingredients. Look for one of those rather than commenting on one of few that doesn't.)  

I guess what got me here was thinking that the physical properties of the book do not determine its effects on the reader, except in a comparatively minor way. Sure, we like nice paper or a readable type-face, or an undamaged book arriving in the mail. But the meaning of the book is in the symbolic system of its language, which cannot be reduced to its molecular structure.  Symbolic structures seem to have an autonomy, even though every step in the process is the result of purely physical actions. 

Determinism

What if some form of strong determinism were true?  That is to say, the course of events is determined by some primeval event, and everything after is a physical consequence of that.  the Big Bang determines what parking space I will choose at the grocery store; every word of Dante's Commedia, every word of every commentary on Dante, etc... This could be literally true but absurd at the same time, like a Borges story.  

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Another way of putting it: free will might be an illusion, but we are incapable of seeing ourselves as not having free will, in that we will always distinguish between choices that seem free and actions that do not involve choice of any kind. The person who believes in free will can answer the determinist by saying that s/he (the free will believer) HAS to believe in free will, by the determinist's own logic.