Re: ergative? I don't know...

>
>Could you please comment the attempts of certain conlangs like All-Nouns
>to create an agentive from instruments ?
I think such projects are fascinating, in part because they don't seem to
follow the patterns of naturally evolved human lanaguages. As time goes by,
I find myself more inclined to believe that people may be capable of
learning languages different in kind from any that we know: I suspect our
language universals may reflect historical trends in language evolution --
had the indonesian-style trigger languages become extinct, no one would
find that system "natural" or even plausible for humans to speak. But
because we have the example, we know that it's not unnaural.

I don't believe that we could learn _any_ rule-based communication system,
as our computational hardware clearly has significant limitations.

My exposition was directed at "naturalistic" conlangers, who want
"plausibly human, yet unique" language structures. I tend to mostly invent
such languages for conlanging, since I get enough "unnatural" linguistic
input in my capacity as a computer scientist. In other words, I was just
regurgitating my partially digested take on typical argument marking
systems as absorbed from a number of books on typological linguistics.

I tend to think that going from nouns to verbs is semantically a bit
harder, but I'm not very attached to that opinion. In general, I don't
think we have the evidence to answer any of those kinds of questions. In
fact, since there are so many different logical systems that one might
construct as underpinnings for the experiments, I'm not sure that we can
even frame the questions in a meaningful way.

   -- David

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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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