Re: Conlanging and Natlangs

AcadonBot wrote:
 >Yet IMO conlanging is going on at all times in the world>of natural language.
People coin new slang terms
constantly,>and new inventions like "radar" and "modems" produce new>words than may become
quite common. All this may
not>be serious stuff. Some is clearly for fun -- take "Jabberwocky">-- not without
its influence on the English
language.>>Natural languages are "under construction" constantly.>Moreover, the leading
"natlangs" are all to some
extent the>result of conscious efforts to define norms and establish>a common vocabulary.

There are a couple confusions here:

(1) "Languages", as such, do not exist. When we say we are speaking
English, what we are really saying is that the kinds of speech we are using
are similar enough to allow mutual intelligibility.  In fact, we all speak
slightly differently, with our own forms of language that themselves are
different from one point in time to another.

(2) "Construction" as applied to natural language is purely a metaphorical
manner of speaking.  The notion of "construction" implies conscious
effort by people.  The problem is that most of language is entirely
unconscious.  No one can honestly claim that phonological sound
changes are planned or premeditated, as if by government diktat,
or that the complicated processes associated with, say, grammaticalization,
come about because people want them to.  The people experiencing them
are not even aware that a change is taking place, much less are able to
explain why they are happening.  The fact is, extremely complicated
systems like language can arise out of elements which in and of themselves
or taking all separately do not have its properties.  This is known as "emergent
properties", and is one of the central tenets of modern biology.  The result of
this is to say there is no inherent need to call "creation" what is in fact merely
spontaneous organization.  This is not, as you claimed some think, because
languages "just grow", nor is there any qualified linguist I know of who would
say that. There are principles that underly that growth, based on the
way in which humans communicate on the microlinguistic level, but, and
this is the critical point, the patterns that the growth takes on at the macro-
linguistic level is entirely beyond the power of individuals to shape in and of
themselves.

>An Emperor of Korea invented Hangul;
You are speaking of writing systems, not abstract language systems.  Writing
systems are, at best, metalinguistic phenomena, not linguistic ones.

>Hebrew came back from the dead -- reorganized by
>planners.
[...]
> Kemel Ataturk
>reorganized Turkish, replacing much grammar and
>vocabulary and putting it all into a new alphabet.
Again, there is this confusion about the meaning of "construction".  Nobody
planned modern Hebrew, in the sense that what you hear today in the streets
of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv was consciously set down in law for all.   Israel may
have an official academy, but that does not mean everyone or anyone actually
speaks "Hebrew", for the reason stated above: that it does not exist.  The rules
that official academies and longstanding cultural traditions standardized as the
"languages" we are taught in school are not used by anyone, even their creators,
since there are so many more things about speaking a human "language" than
could ever be written down.  This is, as Kurt Gödel showed, because for any
formal system there must be an infinite number of axioms to describe all the
relationships within that system.  He was talking about mathematics, but the same
rule applies to human languages.

As for Kemal Atatürk, what he did could not be termed "constructed" either,
despite the fact that some of his plans did actually come into use.  This is because
he influenced their conscious use of speech, but he did not have control over
any part of the language which is used unconsciously, which is most of it.

(The change of the writing system, as I've noted, was not a linguistic change.)

>To imply that languages "just grow" is IMO very
>nearsighted. Even the major "school grammars"
>show the impact of the conscious efforts of
>individuals on the direction of language.
(See above)

>Natural languages and subsidiary language forms are,
>in fact, often the result of conscious efforts to fill a need.
>And fun can be a need as well.
But, as I've tried to show, this is precisely what they are *not*.  "Construction"
implies conscious ability to shape the entire language in the way in which we
conlangers try to shape our languages.  But, obviously, we cannot shape the
entirety of the language, and so to that extent, there is nothing "constructed"
about human languages.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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