Re: A Conlang, created by the group?

Pablo Flores wrote:

> I don't know if an analytic language is "un-alien". Probably an alien would
> understand Chinese or English before French or German. It's all on the
> alien's mind.
How so? Noam Chomsky once made a good analogy about human languages:
he said that if frogs were to look at each and other judge each other, they would
pay incredible detail to all the little possibilities that might separate them from one
another: this skin tone there, that wart there, that kind of stuff.  But if you ask a
human to look at them, they would only respond with the overwhelming ways in
which they are the same.  The same goes for human languages:  human languages
have fundamental similarities which, though we might concentrate on the differences
which Chomsky terms "trivial", to an outsider would only seem like variations on
a theme, a veritable _Die Kunst der Fuge_ of speech. So, when you think about
it, the aliens who might examine human speech would only see those things which
unite us.  They have no stake in playing on differences, while humans do, or rather,
think they do. :)


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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Why should men quarrel here, where all possess /
as much as they can hope for by success?"
 - Quivera, _The Indian Queen_ by Henry Purcell
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