Re: unnatural languages

Jens S. Larsen wrote:
António Marques:

Jens S. Larsen wrote:

So you think meeting people at conventions is linguistic immersion?
Why not?
There you go, replying apples to oranges, and when asked how are apples
oranges, answering 'why not'. The burden to prove apples are oranges is
on *you*.
Apples and oranges are both fruit. The burden to prove that the
difference matters is upon you.

Sorry, no one asked for 'fruit'. We're talking oranges. Come back when
you've got oranges to trade.

What's the difference between meeting people at conventions and
meeting them elsewhere?

The difference is between living among them and meeting them.

Well, at the bottom line we're probably discussing whether language
diversity is a natural phenomenon or an artefact.

Are we? 'We' who?

You and me. If I misunderstand what you're talking about, maybe it's
because I speak INE, whereas you speak SNE.

No, I'm talking about the difference between a language and its description, which is necessarily never complete. You are apparently talking about what defines a language.

I should have mentioned most 'conlangs' come with a small corpus.
Doesn't make much of a difference, anyway.

The difference is whether somebody want to contribute to the corpus.

Doesn't make much of a difference [because it's a small corpus, not necessarily coherent, and hardly representative of much more than is already described in the grammar], anyway.

If I were to 'contribute' to the english corpus with 'I already explained this all, don't see for what is that me am a-repeat', I'd be devirtuating the language. Whereas if one did the same for any insufficiently-specified 'conlang' - which is to say, almost all - it would be hard to dismiss it ouright.

There has always been Zamenhof's style to try and live up to.
But hasn't Eo grown (literally) as need arose?

Sure. The "Plena Ilustrita Vortaro" also counts Kazimierz Bein, Antoni
Grabowski, Kálmán Kalocsay and the translation of the Bible as
normative classics.

So, before them the language was less perfect.

There are grammatical elements of Esperanto that can be used
specifically to form idioms. "Sur la ŝipo", for instance, means "on
the ship", whereas "surŝipe" renders "on board".

Those look quite regular and transparent, though. How are they 'idioms'?

They aren't. They reduce the need for idioms, without eliminating them
completely.

But where are the Eo idioms that are not calques of something in their creator's linguistic background?

The
issue being discussed is whether or not any human language has an
immense amount of particular syntactical and morphological constructs
the nature of which can't be precisely or at all determined by their
parts. Some of those contructs are mor regular than others, some are
more frequent than others, some are well understood and some are more
fuzzy. Your only comments on this so far have been first to deny it,

I never denied it. I said it was in the foreground, whereas you
insisted on the background.

No, that was the part you went on a wild tangent on my perfectly clear and justified usage of 'background'. Which I thought we shouldn't need to revisit.

and then to say they're adequately covered by dictionaries.

Dictionaries never cover a language adequately for all intents and
purposes.

What, then, covers a language adequately for almost all purposes?

I repeat, can you state what the matter being discussed is?
What is language, and is Esperanto one. IIRC.

You don't rc. From what I've said so far, you may have gotten that 1) I
don't presume to define what is language, and 2) Esperanto or any
'conlang' as spoken in natural circumstances are necessarily languages,
whereas the descriptions of Esperanto or any 'conlang' by their creators
are not languages.

How are you going to explain what that means without a definition of
"natural circumstances"?

It's irrelevant, it's not being used as a defining factor, just as an expendable qualifier of 'spoken'. Besides, it's obvious it means 'the usual same way any language is spoken' - or are you now going to play LSD and complain that I didn't specify if the speakers are upright or standing on their heads?

And so you think you have full competence in Eo? Who has?
Define "full competence". It means something completely different in
SNC, SNE etc.
And there you go again. Answer the question, don't hide behind such
meagre stuff.
Well, if "full competence" means there is nothing more to learn, then
indeed it's a destiny worse than death itself. I wouldn't wish that
for my worst enemy.

But then of course it doesn't mean that (nor do I have to define what it
means).

Well, if I can define myself what full competence means, I can claim
to have full competence in Ubykh and Warramunga.

No, you can't define it yourself. You have to stick to what is the accepted meaning in current discourse.

Are easy things by definition distasteful?

And now you adduce the 'easy' thing?

No, morphological regularity per se does not make a language ugly,
though it may make it uninteresting. Here the grestest offense is Eo's
way of forming feminines.

What do you think of the way of forming feminines in Warramunga?

If it's the same as in Eo, it's a major no-no.

But where things seriously break is when you
pick roots with no consideration given to phonological balance.

Why not? That's common in natural language.

Give me examples.

Other
languages adapt the roots as needed to conform to their own historical
and synchronic structure. This process is necessarily so multivariate to
be considered ad-hoc.

How is that to be understood?

I'm sure you can look at root acquisition in the languages you know and see.

Do you deny the existence of sound laws?

Sound laws apply to phonological change within a language. The issue here is root acquisition.

A 'language' with a similar problem is taxonomic
latin, where the carefully defined rules for root adoption seldom result
in anything reasonable. And then so much of the roots you choose are
monosyllables, but your morphology doesn't allow them - and you get
things like 'ag^o'.

You can shorten that to aĝ', if need be (as to fit metre in poetry),
but I don't see what's so wrong about it in the first place. There are
no nouns or verbs in Greenlandic with only a short vowel, for
instance. ("Aak" means "blood"; "ak" is an interjection meaning "there
you are").

And what's that got to do with what I wrote?

And then the orthography.

That's not language, but description of language. Slap yourself on the
fingers with a ruler.

The orthography is part of the written language.

Most of the above are defects of implementation.

What other kind of defects are there?

Design. Btw, the comment above was supposed to be concilliatory - meaning that those defects were nothing that couldn't be corrected.

I always wondered why Esperanto is such a formidable succes among
conlangs, at the same time being such a failure as a universal means
of communication. I never succeeded in holding back my curiosity.

Maybe the reason is that the success of a language is directly related
to the success of its culture and its social value. Latin thrived among
scholars when it was considered the apt language for science and
philosophy and effectively offered access to most of what was done in
both fields. German enjoyed a similar success in the 19th century. So
did french for a while. Today english will get you any amount of science
and pop culture. Whereas Eo puts you in contact with a community
interested in all those ideals of the Eo community. That community,
taken worldwide, is large in absolute numbers, but small relatively
speaking.

No?
--
am

laurus : rhodophyta : brethoneg : smalltalk : stargate

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

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