Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

Sigh.  You can say--all ice cream is ice cream.  Or you can appreciate
flavors.  Personally, I default to chocolate (my native tongue?) but can be
talked into tasting strawberry banana onion milkshake.  Conlanging seems to
me to be about discovering new flavors as much as anything else.

RR

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:51 PM, G. van der Vegt <gijsstrider@...>wrote:

> 2009/4/1 Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>:
> > 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.
>
> Turing completeness, eh?
>

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