Re: Settling an Argument - Assembly *IS* a Language, Right?

Helmut Richter wrote:

On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Neeraj Mathur wrote:

I said 'L1 transmitted'. Esperanto does not qualify: there are no
significant communities functioning wholly or mainly in Esperanto, and (most
importantly) the vast majority of those who know the language have not
learned it as their L1 or from an L1 community.

Whether a language is constructed or not, is not a clear dichotomy. Some
languages have some of their grammar or of pronunciation rules constructed
in the sense that the first users of these language features did not get
it by L1 transmission. The usage of the aspects of Classical Hebrew to
mean (more or less) tense in Modern Hebrew, or the general SVO structure
of most Modern Hebrew sentences was invented in the 19c by Eliezer ben
Yehuda and Achad Ha-Am, perhaps as a service to the IE "customership" of

No, they didn't "invent" ModH syntax; no one in those days paid any
attention to syntax (which includes the use of tenses etc.), so they
simply used the grammar of the language they'd grown up with (usually
Yiddish) with Hebrew morphology and lexicon. (Which is why Wexler can
claim ModH is "relexified Yiddish.")

the language to be revived. Today, these constructed features are L1
transmitted along with the "natural" parts of the language. A certain
amount of constructedness does thus not prevent L1 transmission.

That's why people keep
believing in the 16 rule garbage.

What's that?

Zamenhof, also knowing nothing about syntax, wrote "16 rules," which you
can doubtless find just about anywhere, claiming that Eo was thus
"simpler" than any other language. (If it were, of course, it couldn't
have had anything like even the limited success it has had.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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