Re: My Three Assertions

Quoting Trent Pehrson <pehr099@...>:

> This still supports my assertion that any speech declared as
> language 'a' is arbitrarily designated as such.
I agree to an extent.  Designation of utterances as belonging to
a specific named language is fuzzy, especially when a fellow deals
with mutually intelligible dialects.

> You are arbitrarily defining 'real-time'.
Cultural norms for oral communication define real time.

> In doing so, you are making a subtle but arbitrary decision that
> humans always have had and always will have the same capacity for
> language learning diachronically and that all humans synchronically
> have the same capacity for language learning.
Easy way to handle "all humans synchronically" is to exclude those
humans more than 2 standard deviations below mean intelligence.
On the other hand, "diachronically" on the timescales where it would
matter is an argument between evolutionists and creationists, and
I don't like to get into arguments about natculture religion.


Mike Ellis wrote:

> And yet, somehow, we're able to tell that German is a tinkered
> natlang and Wenedyk is a conlang. Go figure.
Possible solutions:
* A conlang taught as L1 or L2 by a legitimate government becomes
  a natlang, creating a bit of a double entendre between "natural"
  and "national" as expansions of |nat-|.
* A tinkered natlang is mutually intelligible with an existing
  natlang, assuming for the moment that recognized natlangs have
  been grandfathered into the discussion.

I agree with your core argument that distinctions in the real world
of linguistics are fuzzy and that sometimes a fuzzy distinction
works better in practice.  Anyone who cannot accept this is talking
out of his posteriori (sorry, couldn't resist).


--
Damian