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

Ross Clark:

"Jens S. Larsen":
When is a continuum the same language and when is it not?

This is a well known unanswerable.

The existence of real-life synchronic continua between, say,
Amsterdam and Vienna, or Paris and Rome, does not imply that
Dutch and German are the same language, or French and Italian.
The fact is that small differences can cumulate into differences
large enough that understanding is no longer possible.

Some people find the lack of a clear-cut criterion for "language/
dialect" disturbing. But to say "All languages are really the same
language" does not seem to me like a solution.

If we have no objective means of telling one language apart from
another, what other options are there? If Hindi and Urdu are separate
languages only because their speakers consider them to be, not because
they don't understand each other, then we might as well scrap the
whole concept of language and make do with dialect. In common parlance
a language is the spoken form of an orthography, but I've never met a
linguist that didn't emphasize the primacy of speech in that context.


[...]
In any case, your whole invention/natural dichotomy seems
misguided. In the earliest stages, humans evolve (naturally)
certain abilities which serve non-linguistic puroposes.
What kind of "stages" are you hinting at here? Do you happen
to be a Marxist?

No. At this point I'm talking about people who already have
a (pre-human) ability to use vocal sounds as signals. The
period during which that ability somehow progresses to something
that we'd recognize as a language, with a vocabulary, phonology,
grammar. A period about which we have nothing but (more or less
intelligent) speculation. It's not my field and I'm not planning
to launch my own theory, just to suggest
that invention and natural selection could interact.

The whole question of origin of language was a scientific taboo during
a century and a half. Nowadays there are biannual conferences on the
topic, a "Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit" at the
University of Edinburgh (headed by Simon Kirby), even articles by
linguists in Science. Do you have any idea how that happened?


Someone may then think of (invent) a way of using such
abilities which points in the direction of language.
Natural selection subsequently favours humans who can
make the most effective use of this new invention. In
the later stages, every particular language is the
result of thousands of accumulated inventions
by different speakers over the centuries.

Do you think this linguistic survival of the fittest is
still taking place?

Who knows?

*Sigh*. I'm close to giving up. Doesn't the term "uniformitarianism"
tell you anything?


What consequences does that have on your views on language
maintainment and revival?

Some people have suggested that the big languages that are
taking over the world are doing so on the basis of superior
intrinsic qualities, but I see very little evidence for this.

How do you prefer to look at it, then? If the differences between
different languages are not intrinsic qualities, why do we need to
posit more than one?

Jens S. Larsen
.

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