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

Nathan Sanders:

"Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
What makes you think there are different languages?
[...]
Upon what evidence do you think there is only one language?

I do it the other way round. There is no evidence of difference of
language being anything else than ultimately a difference of dialect,
and then we might as well use the term dialect for the differences and
language for the sameness.

(Don't cite Chomskyan deep structure as "evidence":

Chomskyans are trying to get rid of it anyway.

(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.)

It's not difficult to make up syntactic structures that no human
language can make any use of. That would indicate that those they do
use have something in common.


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.

On the face of it, suppletion would seem to be very marked and very
natural at the same time.

Jens S. Larsen
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: The whole dialect business
    ... >> competent language in its own right'? ... These characterise a DIALECT ... > Dialect speakers always understand the Standard form (colloqueal Scots ... English itself didn't develop a standard form until the ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: The whole dialect business
    ... >>> competent language in its own right'? ... These characterise a DIALECT ... >> Dialect speakers always understand the Standard form (colloqueal Scots ... >> and English both understand The Sun), but they do not always understand ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: The whole dialect business
    ... >> literal definition of the distinction between dialect and language. ... >> Zealand, RP English, etc.) which are called dialects of English despite ... that linguists routinely call these tongues "languages", specifically, ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • OT Southern Chinese dialects, was: Electric Kettle, was: Hello and Thank You
    ... Hokkien would be the Kejia language? ... word that English speakers in Singapore use to refer to Minnan dialect. ... You are correct that many languages are spoken in Hainan. ...
    (rec.food.drink.tea)
  • Re: nationalists, languages and dialects
    ... >> speak the language or dialect that you use in the home, ... happen with two mutually unintelligible "dialects" of German, ...
    (sci.lang)
Quantcast