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Re: the Maligned Art

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Tuesday, November 10, 1998, 7:30
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