Re: If you were to design a language, how many vowels and consonants would you use?

Stefano MAC:GREGOR:

Language, of itself, is a natural phenomenon. The natural
language can be cleaned up by grammarians, of course, to
create a literary language, such as classical Latin or High
German, and that literary language can be spoken.

What makes you think there are different languages?

A language can be created from scratch, like Lojban or
Thlingon-Hol, and the result can be used just as any
other language can.

Only if they comply with the structure of natural language -- which
means, you haven't established an antithesis. If Lojban falls outside
the category of human language, and Klingon (let's not try to name
that one in Itselfese!) falls inside it, then its just that: one
category, no theses around.

Halfway between the two extremes are languages like Interlingua,
Esperanto, and Bahasa Indonesia, based on existing languages and
developed from there.

Once developed, is there anything about them that is not real, as
languages go?

Is there anything real about distinguishing one human language from
another in terms of relative naturalness? I can see how it might make
common sense, but it doesn't make scientific sense.

Jens S. Larsen
.

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