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Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 1, 2009, 15:26
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> Den 31. mar. 2009 kl. 22.32 skreiv Mark J. Reed: > >> Why must there be a "point" to the variety of languages?  Can't things >> just be, without all having to fit into some master plan? The variety >> is interesting of itself. > > Variety is charming. It makes linguists busy. Maybe that's enough of a point > after all. But from a practical point of view it really would have been much > better if we all used the same language - unless the different > manifestations of language do have the ability to enrich our communication > and understanding in practical ways.
And I think it does. It's probably true that there's nothing you can express in one general-purpose language that you can't express in any other; but different languages seem to be optimized for talking about different things in different ways. What's easy to express in one language is harder to express in some others, etc. The strict Whorfian idea that some ideas can only be expressed in certain languages is almost certainly false; but variety is still useful if it only makes certain things easier to express in some languages than in others. (On the other hand, if certain ideas can only be expressed in a certain language by coining a lot of new vocabulary, then is the resulting expanded language still the same language? If not, then the old, smaller-vocabulary version of the language was in fact incapable of expressing those ideas. But I would generally incline to think that two versions of a language differing only in the amount of vocabulary are essentially the same language -- that it takes a deeper change in grammar or the fundamental semantics of basic vocabulary to form an essentially different language.) -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

Replies

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Paul Kershaw <ptkershaw@...>
G. van der Vegt <gijsstrider@...>