Re: unnatural languages

On 27 helmi, 18:43, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <1172580136.088467.38...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:
Nathan Sanders wrote:

You sound as uninformed about modern linguistics as Al Gross. Don't
believe the hype: linguists are not all Chomksyan syntacticians
working on English!

So would you please specify, how and where exactly ordinary linguistic
study of Esperanto could be unreliable or misleading, in your opinion.

I already gave one important example: linguistic typology. Any good
theory of language deals with typology.

Do you suggest that Esperanto does not lend itself to typological
analysis?


That's not the original question as I understood it. The question was
whether linguists study artificial languages in the same way they
study "real" languages. They don't (and shouldn't) because the two
types of languages are different objects, which warrant different
methods of study.

Are you sure there is a stark contrast between artificial and real?
Where would you put Cornish?

Original or the revival? The original was clearly a natural language.
I don't know the details of the modern revival, but if there hasn't
yet been a multigenerational community of native speakers (as
Wikipedia seems to suggest),

The oldest neo-native speaker should be about thirty years old by now
(insider information).

then any data collected from speakers of
Revived Cornish would always be suspect to some degree or other. That
doesn't mean the speech patterns can't be described and categorized,
just that the data cannot be blindly incorporated into a larger theory
of language.

Where does that leave languages such as medieval Latin (or pre-
revival, learned Hebrew) or high-variety Arabic, which are studied,
acquired and used as second languages, but which are nobody's native
languages, and which certainly depend much more on normative grammars
than intergenerational transmission?


Indeed, the ideal native speakers for linguistic analysis are also
uneducated and monolingual, because they provide the analyst with the
"purest" data.

This view of language has always struck me as profoundly impractical
and irrelevant. It does make some sense if you are trying to codify a
standard language for vernacular elevation, but I wonder if such
purism can ever produce any insights that could hold water in Real
World (TM), where people are at least half-educated and usually even
plurilingual. To me, real world is bilingualism, diglossia, and code-
mixing, and I can only say that you and me, we seem to have entirely
irreconcilable views of language itself.

.

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