has anyone made a real language
From: | Markus Miekk-oja <fam.miekk-oja@...> |
Date: | Sunday, April 27, 2003, 14:01 |
>Phonemic diversity is a desirable feature of a language
>because it helps distinguish the words. Other forms of
>linguistic diversity (irregularities) may not be desirable,
>because they make the language difficult to learn.
When has the most beautiful human languages been regular? Tell me, is French
regular? Is Hebrew regular? Old Greek?
I see from your post that the answer is "no, I don't enjoy irregularities
and quirks." From this, we perhaps should derive the conclusion that any
language with ergative systems, or the Bantu verb-markings is diverse enough
and in fact a "quirk" that they should be disregarded.
If the only thing about a language that is worth anything is its easiness to
learn, then you are clearly in the wrong group.
And I wrote strictly about _irregularities_, not diversity, large
differences there (you are confusing two concepts) - I talked about rubbato
lines in music, I talked about
weird tonal catastrophies that somehow get salvaged because of a genious
guitarist, I talked about sudden and unexpected changes of tempo, style,
timbre. Not about diversity. Listen to some music where the logics of
music suddenly are suspended - go buy an experimental record. I see you
cared not to bother about the fact that the greats were greats since they
knew how to break the rules in the right way, and why a computer won't be
able to do that - without first analyzing all of the human brain and genome
and whatnot.
And yet another point, "irregularities", what about very foreign yet regular
grammars? What about the Australian languages with totally free word order?
Would a fully regular version of them still be non-functional since they are
unknown to most people?
With all due respect,
Markus Miekk-oja