Re: Impossible Gibberish (was Re: On the design of an ideal language)

>From me, send accidentally to Paul instead of the list, because of undesirable Reply-To mungeing.
> Paul Bennett, On 01/05/2006 20:27:
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: And Rosta <and.rosta@...> 7. Principle of Semantic
>>> Conservation "There should be no such thing as a "nonsense" or
>>> "incorrect" phrase."
>>
>> I rather suspect every language has its own colorless green ideas,
>> and I rather suspect that at least some utterances will either be
>> grammatically incorrect or lexically nonsense.
>>
>> One could argue that the former are by definition outside the
>> language, but if they're made by combining valid, defined morphemes
>> in a locally-legal way (even if as a whole that results in syntactic
>> garbage), I'd say they are still utterances in that language.
>>
>> If one manages to define rules that force every legal string of
>> morphemes to be interpretable as a valid utterance (quite a trick in
>> a nontrivial language, I imagine), simply selecting weird lexeme
>> combinations could easily form a nonsensical phrase.
>
> The Principle, in its extreme form, is that every well-formed
> phonological string corresponds to  all or part of a well-formed
> sentence. Weird lexeme combinations produce weird meanings, but remain
> meaningful and well-formed. The Principle is not about colourless green
> ideas, but about "the and but not though".
>
> --And.
>