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

In article
<40653b53-f7f6-435c-a514-e18ea117b307@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_larsen@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

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?

The same thing that makes us think there are different animals. Even
closely related breeds are still observably different, not just
superficially, but even down to their genetic code (dig deep enough,
to their molecules, neutrons, and even quarks, and yeah, they
eventually look the same, but then, so does all matter).

Upon what evidence do you think there is only one language? (Don't
cite Chomskyan deep structure as "evidence": (a) we don't even know
whether it or anything like it exists, and (b) even with the most
atomic abstract representations, languages often turn out to need
radically different kinds of deep structure from each other.)

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.

One could, for example, talk about markedness, though in general, it
would only be a useful measure for comparing some small bit of a
language to small bit of another language, not for comparing entire
languages to each other.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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