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

Brian M. Scott:

Jens S. Larsen:
I'm not quite sure what I mean.
I don't subscribe to that claim anyway.

Which is clear evidence that either you have a private
definition of 'language',

I'm attracted to Chomsky's ideas on the subject. If you think I've
misunderstood the direction he's heading in, please point it out.

or you have the observational
powers of a carrot.

I guess that explains my effect on observational donkeys.


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."
You've seen me.

Unfortunately. Such blatant idiocy is depressing.

Apparently both you and Peter have difficulties finding out when I'm
speaking for myself and when I'm trying to follow the reasoning within
the seven linguistic paradigms I disagree with. Why don't you just use
the key I gave you back in April?


What do _you_ think "species" describes?
A community of biological reproduction.

It's rather more complicated than that even if you restrict
your attention to the biological sense(s).

That's in the nature of definitions.

[...]

On the other hand, if you very much want language to be
both biological and societal, the most sensible thing to
do is trying to prove that each language or language
family is one biological species.

How moronic can you get?

I don't want language to be societal, so we very much agree that the
passage you're responding to here is quite moronic. Whenever you apply
my Metalinguistic One-Armed Bandit(TM), you're guaranteed to be
moronic at least half the time. If you use all its potiential, you can
be moronic seven times out of eight, but in this thread I've settled
for two out of three.

Languages and language families aren't biological entities of any kind.

That depends on whether a herd qualifies as a biological entity and
whether a speech community can be considered a human herd.

Jens S. Larsen
.

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