Syllabic division of words

[Richmond Mathewson]

capellan wrote:
> Randall Reetz wrote:
>   
>> I should clarify.  Stochastic (counting and statistical) methods of
>> meaning
>> acquisition are employed often to avoid structural grammatical parsing. 
>> Some adherents go further and posit that brains don't use grammar anyway,
>> why should computers?
>>
>>     
>
> Actually, i believe that language came first and grammatical rules were
> collected later to explain and formalize the language conventions.
>
> Only languages of recent creation have this relation inverted. 
>   
Of course.

What is rather funny is how, in the 19th century, philologists tried to 
apply
Graeco-Latin grammar to non-Indo-European languages (leaving us with
some sub-Saharan Africab languages being described as having 13 genders
- which, quite obviously they don't ; they have 13 categories) leaving us
with the lasting impression that "one size fits all", stopping people being
aware of how large the differences between some languages are.