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Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

From:Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>
Date:Sunday, April 27, 2003, 14:21
> > OK. I was wrong. Latin does change a little, but there may be > > human languages which are frozen in time for religious reasons. > > Some social animals may also use languages which do not change. > >Note that I didn't say 'do change' but 'can change'. Any communication >system that is, in theory, expandable sufficiently to express any >concept >should be considered a language. This includes expressing new concepts >with existing lexemes, or adding new lexemes entirely.
You have your finger on part of the issue/problem: Andrew and some others do not seem to recognise immediately the difference between absolutes & potential: "Y does X" or "Y = X" as opposed to "Y might do X", "Y sometimes = X". It's part of the whole "computers can create" issue here. Might they one day create something for which they have not been preprogrammed? Sure, it's possible, as humans come closer and closer to understanding what "creativity" is and find ways of coding that as an open-ended learning program. Is there concrete genericly convincing proof right now that they one day will definitely? No, there really isn't (and I'm one of those who truly wishes there were, as I studied AI as minor in a university), so it remains an interesting hypothesis and speculation, just as is the hypothesis that a deaf sentient species might develop a language which reverses a ideograph/word to negate it (e.g. 'dam' = 'display an emotion', 'mad' = 'hide an emotion'). _______________________________________________ Alterum animi mei quaerens natus anctus harpyiae et stoici Elysiis triste praepalor. _________________________________________________________________ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus