How come you know so much about animals?
My wife and I have bred cats, dogs, several species of parrots, and we once successfully rescued and raised an unweaned baby songbird that had fallen out of her nest.
It is just my personnel POV, but I do not think a bird should be confined to a cage. - Nature intended them to fly.
Nature is not conscious and has no "intentions." Many of the things that result from nature are just plain stupid.
Not all birds have a strong urge to fly. Parrots in particular are very well "designed," as it were, for an arboreal life, clambering around deftly on the branches and eating the nuts and seeds (and occasional invertebrate) they find there. With their zygodactyl toes and prehensile beak they're as well suited for an acrobatic lifestyle as primates. Our parrots rarely take wing, even when we take them outdoors. One of them walked all the way from the back door, across the patio and the lawn, climbed up one side of a fence and down the other, and kept walking to the edge of the forest before we spotted her and prevented a disaster--a distance of about 200 feet without bothering to fly.
However, all birds have a reflex center in their shoulders and if they are startled their autonomic nervous system will send signals to their wings to start flying in order to escape whatever danger initiated the process. A bird who has spent his life inside a house and perhaps exploring the yard will eventually get his body under control and land in a tree three blocks away, having no idea how he got there or how to find his way home. This is why it's so important to keep a pet bird's flight feathers clipped short. He needs to be able to get enough lift to avoid crashing if he falls off a table, but not so much that he can gain altitude and fly away involuntarily if startled. Every bird lover loses a bird before he takes this advice seriously. Every subtropical American city--and even a few in the temperate zone--has a huge colony of feral parrots of several species.
Anyway, whether a bird likes to fly or not he should have several hours a day when he's not inside his cage. A few species like canaries have been captive-bred for so many centuries that the surviving bloodlines are not very active any more and they're content so sit in a small cage and sing all day. Other small birds like finches that are not tame and can't be allowed to fly around the house, because they can't be gotten back into their cage for the night, should simply be given large cages that give them room to fly around.
He does have mixed feeling about her as he is clearly jealous of her when she is affectionate with me. I am only "his." – “She is to keep hands off.” is Sunshine's POV.
You have to do whatever is necessary to stop this behavior because one day in an emergency it will be a big problem.
Nah, pet birds not my scene. I'm more of a 'big huge Alsatian dog' kind of girl.
We have an Anatolian, an even larger dog. She keeps the bears and cougars from coming after our Lhasa Apsos. In America we call Alsatians "German Shepherds."
lets ask Fraggle, but I am afraid that he may not know. To me, Fraggle seems like a very knowledgeable "Pre- Chompski" linguist. I think you are asking are Chompski's ideas nonsense or correct.
I haven't read Noam Chomsky, but I know how to spell his name.

I'm not much of a philosopher and have only a passing interest in psychology, so his line of study never caught my eye. I'm an accountant by training so I enjoy details. Nonetheless I suspect that, as in most controversies, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I have no trouble with the idea that some elements of language are inherent in the synaptic programming of our DNA, but it seems just as reasonable to suspect that others are invented.
The essence of
Homo sapiens is our astounding ability to transcend nature and reshape our environment to suit ourselves, along the way inventing the technologies ("tools") necessary to accomplish that goal. Language is a technology and there's no good reason to doubt that a great deal of it is man-made, just like our other technologies.
did not know many languages, so had to take his word for the truth of certain regularities that Chomsky (and that professor) claimed do exist in ALL languages, without exception (except in artificial languages like Esperanto).
I'd be surprised if it doesn't also apply to Esperanto, since it is slavishly (and often foolishly) so clearly Indo-European.
For example: "John cat bit dog” is not as there is no "structural role" for both John & cat.
This is a perfectly valid sentence in Chinese. It has no prepositions or conjunctions, so relationships are often implicit in its rigid word order. (Although they are also expressed with nouns and verbs.) If one noun precedes another and they don't form a compound with an established meaning, the assumed relationship is one of subordination. The first guess at the meaning of "John cat" is, in English word order, "cat of John," or "John's cat." Chinese has streamlined its grammar by discarding both prepositions (of) and inflections (-'s) and the price it pays is almost no leeway in how you can arrange the words in a sentence.
I rarely use Wiki but a quick scan seems to indicate that there are still two divisions: Chompski believers like that professor, and non-believers. But all would agree that there are "pre-Chompski" linguist not much concerned with these unconscious abilities all humans have. They are like Fraggle experts in languages -how they evolved, similarities in words, etc.
That's far more interesting to a bookkeeper.
I think Fraggle mentioned that “who” was quite old. In many languages a “W word” does help with this conversion. “Jack hit John.” becomes Who hit John?” Cat is home. Where is cat? Etc. Perhaps that helps explain why “who”(and probably some other W-words) have ancient roots.
What, when, where, why, who, which, whence, whither, whose... these are inflected forms of a proto-Indo-European word that I can't track down with the reference material I have handy. It is better represented by Latin
qua, que, etc. because in accordance with Grimm's Law, Indo-European Q/K becomes H in Germanic. (
Cor-/heart,
cap-/head,
can-/hound,
cent-/hundred, etc.) It also shows up clearly in the Slavic languages: Russian
kto, gde, kotoriy, etc. Turning
quid into
quo, quondam, qui, etc. is just the remnants of the Indo-European declension of the original word, "of what, " to what," "for what," etc.
In some sense, English is not a collection of words and school taught rules (they completely change over time) but a particular setting of the switches on Chompski's innate "Language box." There may be some setting of the "language box" in which "Down house fell." is not only an acceptable sentence but a very proper one. That is the sort of thing it takes a linguist like Fraggle to answer.
I find it interesting that the "switches" of English have been reset. The fundamental structure of English changed enormously after the Norman invasion. We began discarding inflections as a way of expressing relationships and other subtleties of meaning, doing away almost completely with the German paradigms of case, number and tense, and switching over to the Chinese system of using more words, and their sequence, to precisely express meaning. Middle French had already simplified the Latin inflection paradigms, so what we see is a French
superstratum on Middle English. In this case, the superstratum is not vocabulary (although there was a colossal amount of that too) but grammar. This leads to what linguists call a
Sprachbund, a German word meaning a group of languages that are unrelated by origin but nonetheless share properties, due to their influence on the way each other's speakers think. Of course French and English are related by origin, but it is a distant relationship going back to about 1500BCE when Latin and proto-Germanic separated from the rest of the Western Indo-European languages, whereas the
Sprachbund was initiated in 1066CE.
German has most of the switches set the same way as English but the word order switch is set for the simple sentenct is set for S,O,V not S,V,O where S= subject, O = object and V = verb.
This is very incorrect. German uses the SVO word order, as do all the Germanic languages including Swedish and Dutch. SOV is common in Latin, although because of its intricate inflections word order is not usually important to understanding and can be changed for emphasis or sheer whimsy.
I suspect what you're remembering it that in a compound verb, the participle or infinitive is shoved all the way to the end of the sentence; but still the auxiliary verb remains in the second position.
Du hast meinen Frühstück gegessen, "You have my breakfast eaten," or "Ich möcthe nach Deutschland reisen," "I would to Germany travel." In both cases the auxiliary verb preserves the SVO order and it's only the participle or infinitive that is buffeted around.
I don't recall but probably this causes some of the embedded clause bindings to be different etc. also.
German is notorious for its
Schachtelsätzen or "box clauses."
Ich habe ein altes Koffer, den ich nicht mehr brauchen kann, in der Zimmer verlassen, "I have an old suitcase, which I no more use can, in the room left."