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

<jimbo.tyson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Dec 18, 11:42 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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 (idiolects) communicatively isolated from other such systems.

Except not. Speakers of different languages (or speech varieties, or
idiolects) *aren't* communicatively isolated from each other and,
therefore

(therefore??)

neither are the speech varieties (languages, idiolects)
themselves

Obviously, idiolects aren't -- people do speak to each other. Nor are the kind of speech variety usually called "dialects" (they're analogous to biological populations that interbreed readily when they happen to come into contact). The speakers of two different _languages_, however, to the extent that they're not mutually intelligible (a concept nearly as difficult to quantify in many cases as is reproductive isolation in the wild, of course), have sufficient difficulty communicating using them for us to speak of them (the languages, not the speakers) being "communicatively isolated", to at least the same extent as wolves and coyotes are reproductively isolated.

Conversely, a fair degree of isolation, geographical or behavoural, is necessary for one species/language to split into two.

(in so far as a language being communicatively isolated
makes sense at all). I live in a very normal multilingual environment
where some of the languages I use bleed into each other constantly.
So unisolated are the varieties I use that occasionally I have to
introspect to check which one I'm using (happened the other day - I
thought I was having a conversation in Catalan and my interlocutor
thought we were speaking Rossellones). In what world is this not so?

In the same ideal world where members of different biological species never interbreed, of course! If you'd had as much experience in field biology as you have with languages, you'd know that your argument, mutatis mutandis, is identical to the one everyone uses to show how leaky the species concept is (more a problem in practise for flowering plants than for mammals and birds, true, because of the promiscuous way they reproduce).

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.

I'm surprised: I can make no more sense of your characterisation of
language as species than I can of Jens's. Idealisation is a very good
thing but not surely when it renders the object unrecognisable at all?

In that case, species are unrecognisable to you too, I presume? Fair enough, that's another analogy between "species" and "language".

John.

.

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