Re: Constructive linguistics

Jim wrote:

<<
What is missing, I suppose, from the theoretical program is a good
survey of
non-natural features found in invented languages.  I don't know that the
survey would be crucial, but wouldn't it be helpful in eliminating any
confusion between possible natural languages and possible languages?
 >>

This is a really interesting question.  I'm pretty sure that the answer
a linguist
would give is "no": such a survey wouldn't be interesting.  But it
would be
better to have a concrete reason for saying "no, that's not possible in
a natural
language", or "yes, that's possible in a natural language".  I think
currently it's
just whatever's been seen is possible, and whatever hasn't been seen
isn't
possible, until something like Piraha comes around and changes what's
been
seen.  Doesn't seem very scientific.  But, then again, I've never read
much on
universal grammar/constraints, etc.  Perhaps there are criteria.

Jim wrote:

<<
Practically, what with the disappearence of so many languages, and the
fact
that so many varieties of language have yet to be studied, and the fact
that
more missionaries than academic linguists learn newly documented
languages,
 >>

And let me just add that that's rather annoying.  We're working with a
language about which only one thing has ever been written, and it was a
grammar by a missionary.  To give you an example, for the section on
prepositions, he wrote, "A preposition may appear before or after the
noun it modifies, and it also may appear as either a prefix or a
suffix."
Very helpful.

Jim wrote:

<<
We do read
each other's works, but we read them more like cookbooks than assembly
instructions, checking around for features we find interesting and
inspiring.
 >>

I agree with this.  But, to echo what Sally mentioned, it's hard to
actually
learn a language.  It's not like reading a story or a book.  Even
reading
Finnegans Wake is easier than actually learning another language.  If we
lived in the dream world of the matrix where you can essentially
download
knowledge into your head in a matter of seconds, perhaps language
creation itself would take on a different form.  Man, I wish we had
downloadable knowledge...  Well, but then, of course, there's the
conflict
as presented in the episode of The Prisoner entitled "The General".  Oh
well.  It's still fantasy.

Jim wrote:

<<
Low and behold, I created mandatory deletion of any NP within a
compound or
complex sentence that was identical to the subject of the first and/or
matrix clause.  Well, I put that device aside when I found out that Matt
Pearson's Tokana contained a very similar device called "topic
deletion."
AFAIK, no conlanger claims a copyright on an isolated feature, but I
still
let the idea go because I wanted
to do something different.
 >>

If I'm understanding you correctly, this would mandate the following:

(1) The man(i) told his sister that he(i) wouldn't be caught dead
talking to his(i) cousin.

In the above sentence, everything marked with (i) would be deleted
except
for "the man"?  Could you site a Tokana example similar to this?

Anyway, under your new system, which I'll quote here:

<<
a)  one third person subject pronoun with one invariant form, whose use
is
mandatory where "topic deletion" used to be, and....

b)  a whole bunch of third person non-subject pronouns, each having a
different implicit number and semantic class.
 >>

How would the sentence in (1) work?  Or am I misunderstanding your
example?  Anyway, sounds interesting!

I'm going to switch topic's and reply to Sally's e-mail now.

Sally wrote:

<<
I'm wondering if your sense of linguistics as a field, David, conflicts
with
my sense of linguistics as a field--which to me has many branches that
share
roots with anthropology, pragmatics, philosophy, and history.
 >>

I wouldn't doubt it.  I haven't seen much, though, and I've understood
even less.  Regarding Anthropology, though, wasn't it Kroeber who
closed the first linguistics department at Berkeley because he thought
it
wasn't essential, and that everything important that such a department
could do could be done in anthropology?  I know something like that
happened, and then Prof. Eminau revived it in the 50's.

Sally wrote:

<<
Actually, I think that divide is very strong in modern and contemporary
literature.  Look at James Joyce.  Could he have done what he did in
Finnegans Wake in the 1600s?
 >>

You know, I thought of that very same book, because I believe it *was*
Joyce's intention that Finnegans Wake be read.  As I recall, he wanted
it to be a "sleep book", that people would read for the thirty or forty
minutes just before their bedtime--for the rest of their natural lives.
That's why it ends and begins in the middle of a sentence.  (Or one
reason.)

Sally wrote:

<<
I rub shoulders constantly with writers in my
department who look down on "genre" writing, considered easy to grasp,
dull,
bad, and caters to the masses and who elevate "literary writing"
because it
is complex, difficult, obscure, caters to the intellectual few, and
takes
narrative and rhetorical risks (which genre writing is assumed not to
do,
being convention bound and "intelligible.").
 >>

You know, writers who have that view have caused "literary writing" to
become a genre itself, and it has suffered.  Now the only things that
come
out are thick and impenetrable, and really not worth the effort.
Virginia
Woolf is just as literary, but is hardly impenetrable.  And the further
back
you go, the more entrenched in convention literature is, and it doesn't
suffer for it.  But this is the CONLANG list...

Sally wrote:

<<
Indeed!  And is that a linguistic point or a philosophical one?
 >>

This is regarding a language encoding the color of a speaker's shirt on
a
verb.  It's possible, but certainly would never be done in a natural
language.  Unless, say, a society was so regimented that a person of a
particular class wore a particular color shirt, and there was no upward
mobility.  If this language had an honorific system, it might as well be
encoded by shirt color.  Hmm...  Anyway, that I suppose is a
philosophical
issue.  Linguistically, it'd be interesting to see how color terms would
interact with the verb.  And in this bizarre society, would certain
colors
then be stigmatized?  Would their be taboo replacement, so that the
upper class no longer say "yellow", they say "ochre" or "bronze"?
And if a lower class person says "bronze", I suppose they'd be putting
on airs...?  Weird stuff.

Sally wrote:

<<
We've talked before about the ludicrous fantasy of the "exact" map: one
that
is the size of the land it maps.  Wasn't that Borges who came up with
that?
 >>

Indeed it was.  That was in _The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq_, if I
remember
rightly.  Lots of good stuff in that one.  The conlang that's an exact
replica
of Latin, down to the letter, would fit right in with that collection.

And later Jim wrote:

<<
Current Post:   I think that would be a great idea.  I'm new to this
list
about every few years or so, and I'm sure I missed the survey.  So I
ask, in
all seriousness, that you trot it out again.  Anyone second that motion?
 >>

I second!

-David

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