Re: unnatural languages

Nathan Sanders:

Joachim Pense <s...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Am Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:30:50 -0500 schrieb Nathan Sanders:
"Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Why aren't pidgins even more natural than creoles, then?
Why should they be?
Because they come first, and creoles develop from them?
Are Pidgins _constructed_? I don't think so. So they are natural. I
wouldn't say _more_ so than creoles, though.

Don't get all mike3 on me! "Natural language" is just a name for a
category. Trees can be validly described as "natural", but that
doesn't mean that a tree is more like French than Esperanto.

That's actually what it does mean, according to virtually all people
outside the community of linguists and probably to the majority
inside. When we speak of Pig Latin as not being a natural language,
it's because a tree can validly be described as being more like
English than like Pig Latin, even if the comparison is rather far-
fetched. Stretching it even further, we can compare Pig Latin with the
incision in a gum tree. Where to put Esperanto and knowledge of second
languages in general is a rather difficult question, though, and
probably not useful to pursue.

JSL.

.