Consciousness and how it got to be that way

Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Linguistics of Bugs Bunny




We can infer that Bugs Bunny's native language probably has a small phoneme inventory, so that most utterances in Bunnese would be longer than their counterparts in English (as his first statement is). I always thought this was clever and it probably is one of the things that interested me at an early age in how languages differ.

There's also a great Porky Pig cartoon where Porky insists to Daffy Duck that "buenos dias" just means "bonjour" and vice versa. The self-referentiality of this implies through comedy that something like Pinker's mentalese must exist, but I can't find the clip.

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