Re: the Maligned Art

Simon Kissane wrote:
> Are natlangs and conlangs really fundamentally different? I don't
> think so. Conlangs can be as complicated in grammar as natlangs.
> Conlangs
> could easily have as large a vocabulary as natlangs, if their designers
> wanted to extert the effort. Conlangs could easily be just like natlangs
> if enough work was put into them.
There is a fundamental difference - I don't believe that anyone has the
skill to produce a conlang that could not be distinguished from a
natlang.  There are millenia of analogy, borrowings, back-formations,
derivations, slurrings, etc. at work which cannot be distinguished.
*Maybe* it's possible, but even so, there's still a valid distinction
(IMO) between natural and artificial.  How can you argue that there
isn't.  Yes, conlangs and natlangs are fundamentally the same (I
shouldn't have said that they were *fundamentally* different, I
apologize), but there is a great difference between them.  However, this
looks like a case where we're approaching this with totally different
perspectives to start with, different value systems, so that we'll never
get anywhere.  Shall we agree to disagree?

> It doesn't, because in the physical (as opposed to "cyberspace") realm
> the male/female distinction does make sense. And due to differences in
> psychology, its role in personal identity, etc. it is useful. But if
> these factors were not so, it would be irrelevant.
Irrelavent may have been a poor choice of words, since it doesn't
*really* make much difference whether the person I'm speaking on-line is
male or female (altho the distinction isn't non-existent), but it's
certainly still a real and valid distinction.  Same with conlangs.  Even
if I had the skill to create a conlang of such naturalness as to be
indistinguishable from a natlang, I still would call it a conlang.  On
the other hand, as I said before, if conlangs were to be adopted by
communities of speakers, they would gradually become natlangs, and
there'd be no point (other than, perhaps, the point at which you have
native speakers) at which you could definitely delimit the two, but the
existence of grey areas doesn't make the prototypes invalid.  For
example, you cannot find a point at which a child becomes an adult,
except for an arbitrary, legally selected, point.  Is someone who's 17
years, 364 days old really that different from someone who's 18 years
old?  No, but does that mean that child and adult are not valid
distinctions?  No, it just means that there's a grey area.
--
"It has occured to me more than once that holy boredom is good and
sufficient reason for the invention of free will." - "Lord Leto II"
(Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert)
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/
ICQ #: 18656696
AOL screen-name: NikTailor