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

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

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