Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

Benct Philip Jonsson said:
> At 21:46 8.5.2004, Ray Brown wrote:
>
>>On Friday, May 7, 2004, at 10:26 PM, Mark P. Line wrote:
>>[snip]
>>
>>B. Philip Jonsson:
>>An unambiguous language would not be amenable to change, and since human
>>culture changes it would eventually be discarded.
>>
>>
>>What makes you say that an unambiguous language would not be amenable to
>>change?
>
> Because ambiguity is what drives change in natural languages.
I'm not trying to be dense, but where did you come up with *that* idea?

I don't believe anything "drives" change in natural languages overall.
Variation exists in all speaker populations, and languages can drift
because of that even when the population is pretty homogeneous. When the
population becomes bifurcated (e.g. migration across or around natural
barriers), they drift in their own separate directions. Change happens all
the time, automatically -- it takes special mechanisms to drive the
conservation of linguistic features, not to drive change.

If it were true that ambiguity is the one thing that drives change, then I
would expect all natlangs to be perfectly unambiguous by now.


>>Yes, indeed. Even to remain unambiguous it will need to change as human
>>knowledge & understanding develop. But once humans start using any such
>>language, it's bound surely to change - 'tis the nature of humans. A
>>language which didn't change would be well & truly dead IMHO.
>
> Would there be any need to change or refine what is already unambiguous?
See above. Language doesn't change because people need it to change
(except for prescriptively driven change, which is not what I thought any
of this was about). It evolves because of the inherent variation in any
population of speakers.


-- Mark