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

From:Hanuman Zhang <zhang@...>
Date:Monday, May 1, 2006, 21:01
Methinx that "non-sense" and/or "incorrect" are quite
socio-culturally-dependent and subjective.

Ferinstanz, to average monolinigual American with the bare minimum of 4 yrs
of college or less, James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_ is impossiblly hermetic
"non-sense"... and auxlangs like Interlingua or Novial "incorrect," vaguely
Eurolang gibberish.


on 5/1/06 12:27 PM, Paul Bennett at paul-bennett@EARTHLINK.NET wrote:

> -----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.
-- Hanuman Zhang "One thing foreigners, computers, and poets have in common is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt
> >[...] francophones, hispanophones & speakers > of other Romance languages are animists who see sex in in everything! > > :-D

Replies

Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>
Joe <joe@...>