The Gods Must Be Crazy ( LM 10)

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, grammar is ‘the set of rules that explain how words are used in a language.’ From this simple definition, we understand that language has rules and it would be impossible to discern a message when everything is scrambled. In the essay, ‘Some languages have no grammar’ by Winifred Bauer she emphasizes that all languages have grammar. I totally agree with this point because otherwise the recipient of a message would have to waste time decoding it. Then again on the other hand that decoding would involve following some rules which would thus represent it’s grammar. She also reiterates that the existence of grammar in a language does not depend on a grammar book. This means that grammar exists in all languages whether it is written or not and some might be complex than others depending on the language.

I remember watching the movie, ‘The gods must be crazy’ several years ago. At the time I found it funny the way the Kung (South African) language was portrayed. Kung is a South African language that is spoken by the bushmen, each sound is a click followed by an exclamation mark. I was pretty sure they had no grammar, all one had to do was produce a number of clicking sounds when speaking it. On the other hand, these clicking sounds had to have some sort of pattern (grammar) for one to be able to understand and distinguish the different messages.

4 thoughts on “The Gods Must Be Crazy ( LM 10)

  1. I agree with your pints made. If language didn’t have grammar then there wouldn’t be different languages. I have seen parts of that movie too and I thought that they were just speaking without a set of rules. After reading this myth I realized that can not be possible. Good entry.

  2. I liked how you related your own personal experience to this myth. It helped show that you understood what the author was saying and how you could relate to it. You also stressed how even the idea of trying to decipher grammar shows some sort of rule of grammar and therefore would be considered language, which is, what I think, the main point the article is trying to portray, good job!

  3. This is exactly what I thought! I can’t seem to understand how some people think that a language can exist without grammar. If they are implying that a language doesn’t have grammar because they can’t understand it, might they as well be saying that the language in question just isn’t the one they speak? If a language didn’t have grammar, it wouldn’t exist in the first place.

  4. I am strongly agree with you, and I think about that even if a language doesn’t have a grammar book which records prescribed grammar explicitly, there is still a “descriptive” grammar explains how people communicate in daily lives, or there is no such language in the world.

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