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

Bart Mathias:

Jens S. Larsen wrote:
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.

We kind of do, but you would probably agree to partitioning
it into human language and computer language, at least.

Absolutely.

We could apply your simplification to a lot of fields, I bet.
We could have "biota" or "eukaryotes," and go from there to
family, such as Canidae and Fabaceae.

Do you equate "a language" with a specific organism or a whole species
in that analogy?

There's a difference in degree between the two cases, but it
does seem handy to have a way to classify Cockney and Bostonian
English together but separate from the "Mandarin dialect of
language."

Sure, but that's not interesting theoretically. All kinds of non-
linguistic issues go into distinguishing Mandarin from English.

Jens S. Larsen
.

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