No, it really is, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. At least that’s what it says in my copy of Transformational Grammar, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, thirteenth printing 1978. God only knows why, but I have it with me in my office, where my job has nothing to do with linguistics, and I pulled it out because I was going to refute Andygirl’s assertion that it’s ideas and not dreams. I would have sworn it was dreams, but I stand corrected.
Spanish speakers: Why isn’t a sentence like “Te lo dio” considered object-initial? Is it because of the understood subject pronoun (“El te lo dio.”)?
I’m totally lost. I’ve dabbled a bit in Linguistics, but could someone explain the “dreams sleep” (and others) to me? Please?
I wanna be smart too.
Oh,
I aslo lvoe taht I cna tpye lkie tihs adn be preftcly (or csloe to it) unrdetoosd.
Film: the idea was to show that a sentence can be perfectly grammatical and yet meaningless - and that we can recognize that a sentence is grammatical even though it is meaningless.
I have NO idea what you guys are talking about!
How about tones in Chinese? A lot of adult, would-be Western learners run up against a huge brick wall of not “getting” tones–or so they say.
I think the four tones are’nt that difficult. There are some parralels in western language, intonation of question and “flavor” or “stress”. Big difference being it doesn’t change the meaning of the word as in chinese. It just takes a little training of the ear and tongue.
Wow, thanks to the linguists for answering my question. The examples really make it clearer. So the issue isn’t that I can’t hear those sounds at all (like they would sound like silence or something) but that the different “k” sounds, for example, are categorized by my brain as the same sound. Or something. Now that I’ve read your explanations, I can tell a difference between the sounds, but it takes a conscious effort on my part. I could see how having to sit and ask myself, “was that k aspirated or not?” could impede my learning a language.
Recently read an anecdote in this book that blew my mind.
Author goes to talk to a linguistics professor and his grad student. After 10 minutes of conversation, the professor looks at his grad student and asks, “Well?”
(Paraphrased) Grad student says, referring to the author, “Well, he was born in New York, but moved to Georgia at a young age. Then he moved to Maryland at around 10 before finally settling in New Jersey as a teenager.” And the author claims that this chronology is pretty much right on the money.
Apparently, where we’ve lived is stamped pretty hard on our language and linguists are able to decipher this code. Amazing.
The Hell you say!
The Star Wars movies you have never watched? Yoda-syntax you do not understand? 
Well, the whole SVO thing in PDE (present-day English) is one of the things that differentiates it from its common ancestor German.
In Old English (from which both modern English and German sprang), nouns and verbs were inflected, meaning they had some kind of special marking on them that demonstrated their function in the sentence. The subject of the sentence could come way at the end, even after the objects, as long as it was inflected properly to show it was the subject.
After the Norse and the French invaded, OE shifted into ME and many inflections were lost. It became so that you had to use SVO to understand the subject of the sentence.
That’s why it can be so hard for native speakers of English to learn an inflected language. Take German for example: 16 different ways to say “the,” and you have to memorize which definite article goes on which noun!
Gotta love those cognates: “jeans” in Eng is “die Jeans” auf Deutsch!
This is why we should all take classes in Proto Indo European. Very cool stuff.
Yeah Grimm’s law!
As for the voiced/unvoiced ‘th’ thing, there is at least one example in English where that difference conveys meaning:
thigh (unvoiced/th) vs. thy (voiced/dh*)
I came up with that example once for a friend who just didn’t get the difference. Now she does.
*Sometimes “dh” is used to represent this sound (such as in Tolkien’s Caradhras), which makes sense considering d is a voiced version of t, just as dh is th+voice
The “th” in thigh is unvoiced??!!!?
All these years I’ve been saying it wrong.
Can one take classes in Proto-Indo-European? Is enough known about it that people can actually speak it? And, if so, does it make it easier to learn other Indo-European languages?
Nichol, it depends on your dialect.
Sunspace, I took a course on PIE last year. It’s not a spoken language- what you learn is how to reconstruct wordforms and phonology and how daughter languages developed and all kinds of cool historical linguistic stuff.
You do learn some words, though. gwhen means smite. 
andygirl, there are dialects in which ‘thigh’ is voiced?
PIE sounds quite interesting. Are there any inscriptions in it? From my very limited reading, I get the impression that it has been reconstructed.
A while back, I started a thread about linguistic radiation called “When did French stop being bad Latin”, but unfortunately it was lost in the great board crash of '01. Got some interesting answers in it too… I really wish I’d printed it out.
OG GHWEN!!!
No, there are no actual writings or physical traces of PIE. You’re right, it’s all reconstructed. It might be that the reconstructed words are way off, though I’m betting some come close to the real thing.
No one knows who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, though there are theories. One is that Kurgan horsemen brought it into Europe and the Near East circa 6000 BP (before present), and another is that PIE expanded with agriculture as it spread from Anatolia c. 8000-9500 BP.
All you linguists, especially andygirl, might be interested in looking in Nature v. 426 (27 November 2003), pp. 435-439, for the article, “Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin,” where they analyzed linguistic data using techniques derived from evolutionary biology. Sure, the computational methods they used is open to debate, but it’s still interesting.
Oh, here’s the abstract for non-academics:
Languages, like genes, provide vital clues about human history. The origin of the Indo-European language family is “the most
intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant, problem of historical
linguistics.” Numerous genetic studies of Indo-European origins have also produced inconclusive results. Here we analyze linguistic data using computational methods derived from evolutionary biology. We test two theories of Indo-European origin: the “Kurgan expansion” and the “Anatolian farming” hypotheses. The Kurgan theory centers on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the 6th millennium
BP. In contrast, the Anatolian theory claims that Indo-European languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around 8000-9500 years BP. In striking agreement with the
Anatolian hypothesis, our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2449 lexical items produced an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence between 7800 and 9800 years BP. These results were robust to changes in coding procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees, and priors in the Bayesian analysis.