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


"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:e23898ee-5316-4ff4-92d4-d3c57029b2e5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Dec 16, 12:14 pm, "Jens S. Larsen" <jens_s_lar...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels:

> Jens S. Larsen:
>> Well, if we go down to the level of the individual speaker,
>> then we agree. It's analogous to the difference between an
>> individual animal and the species it belongs to. The
>> disagreement is about what within
>> linguistics corresponds to a species in biology.

> (a) Why should there be such a correspondence?

The claim that there are different languages gives each language the
status of a species.

Why? On what grounds? What do _you_ mean by "species," given that
you're using all these other terms in idiosyncratic ways?

The claim that there are no different languages
gives that status to what was traditionally known as the LAD.

I have not seen anyone claiming that "there are no different
languages." I have seen Nathan claiming that every idiolect might as
well be called a separate language, which is in agreement with Robert
A. Hall, Jr..

> (b) The notion of "species" doesn't seem to be as useful as it was
> back in Darwin's, or Linnaeus's, or Aristotle's, day.

The concept of species is a descriptive tool that perhaps some day
will be discarded in favor of something more explanatory, but DNA
research isn't quite there yet.

What do _you_ think "species" describes? How is that description
applicable to language(s)?

To me, the analogy between "language" and "species" seems quite a useful one. A species is a population of organisms reproductively isolated from all other populations. A language is a conglomeration of speech varieties (ideolects) comunicatively isolated from other such systems. In neither case are these rigorous definitions -- it's easy enough to find circumstances where the model doesn't work, or even make sense -- but they work well enough, enough of the time, to be extremely useful idealisations, as much so today as in the past.

Of course they only work synchronically, and don't apply to variants through time. Paleospecies are a more iffy concept, at least till we learn to clone mammoths. Proto-languages are iffy too, except in as far as we can use written documentation to restore dead languages to life. The various isolating mechanisms, in both cases, obviously only apply synchronically.

This comment is not intended to necessarily have any relevance to what Jens is on about, whatever that might be.

John.

.

Relevant Pages

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