Re: If you were to design a language, how many vowels and consonants would you use?
- From: Nathan Sanders <nsanders@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:33:40 -0500
In article
<f82d2a4e-7871-498a-b8d3-b838051dd534@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_larsen@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ross Clark:
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,
Who says we don't have such means? Is someone is a different person
from me, this his language is a different language from mine. I
guarantee that some statistically significant difference can always be
found between any two persons' speech, whether it's in voice quality,
speech rate, distribution of syntactic constructions, lexical item
frequency, etc.
Now, whether his language is mutually intelligible with mine, or
provable related to mine, or considered the same language by our
government, those are totally orthogonal issues.
In common parlance
a language is the spoken form of an orthography,
Then common parlance is idiotic, since it means any language with no
written form isn't a language.
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?
Ross isn't questioning the existence of intrinsic qualities in
general. He's questioning whether *superior* intrinsic differences
are the cause of languages "taking over the world", and indeed,
whether intrinsic qualities can even be measured by their superiority
at all.
Nathan
--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.
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