Re: Open Source / community based Language

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe" <joe@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: Open Source / community based Language


> I'd expect that's how Language developed.
>
> Someone pointed at a rock and said 'kwe', or something, and someone
pointed
> at a tree and said 'ra', then everyone gets in on this naming thing, and
> eventually, they ascribe words to actions, thus inventing verbs.  Then
people
> have the bright idea of mixing the two, creating the first languages.
Then
> some bright spark fleshes it out a bit more, inventing adjectives.  And,
> eventually, after a while, cases, number, and gender get absorbed,
creating
> inflections, and so on.
>
> That's my theory of language development...
And if it happened like that, it might not all have been in accordance with
the inventors' whims.  As an example, in my grandpa's hometown, all the guys
had nicknames.  But they didn't pick them, it was what they got called.  The
more they complained, the more it stuck.  So some of them get really dumb
nicknames, just because that's what they complained about.  Imagine that
person A, who nobody likes very much, proposes the term "thorta" to mean
rock.  They then begin calling him "thorta", and the madder he gets, the
more they call him that.  If another ungainly fool like him comes along,
they might call him "thorta" as well.  And so the word passes into their
vocabulary as "idiot", save for the one splinter tribe where it means "great
leader", when the two thortas got fed up and went off on their own.

Just an idea.

Joe Fatula