German is like this I learned it in college German is like you're like uh I him blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah on Tuesday met and then you so you have to wait all the way to the end of the sentence a lot of the time to find out what the verb is and to see who is doing what's the

whom right exactly so exactly

like German what you find is if you have the two subjects and the objects right beside each other it would be very hard if you didn't mark with case to understand which was the subject and which was the object because they both precede the verb and so we just run as a natural functional tendency languages that have that kind of structure have case languages that don't have that kind of structure don't have to have case so these are functional developments that arise for our brain's ability to process information so again there are two very different arguments about how language occurs in the brain how we learned these rules but fundamentally it's from the way the brain is structured and how we're structured as humans to

process the world that's really fascinating because whether you're a chamsci ite or a functionalist about it and we could I don't think we need to dive deeper into the difference regardless of which one you are this is part of the structure of how humans work rather than something you need to learn in a style manual or you know that you need to be taught in school it's actually absent from the rules that you know you would learn in a setting like that because it's sort of built into us which is really it's really fascinating that like you know the the language pedants don't even bother to tell you about it but there's all these other rules that they feel that they often need to enforce never split and infinitive you know that kind of thing uh is is very fascinating to me that that we end up that that some folks feel a need to have that kind of rule I let's move on from the talk about prescriptivism though um one thing I'd love to ask you about I know you write about uh

uh you

write