Impossible Gibberish (was Re: On the design of an ideal language)
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, May 1, 2006, 19:27 |
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-----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.
Paul
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