Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?
| From: | Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 1, 2009, 15:26 |
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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/
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