Re: My Three Assertions

Trent Pehrson wrote:

>Kind and gentle list members,
Oops, this might not be meant for me...

>Recently and in the past, some have asserted an inherent distinction
>between natural languages and constructed languages.  Additionally, there
>have been threads wherein some have proposed that the two are entirely
>different phenomena and even that only natural languages are of value to
>linguistics as an academic discipline.
Yeah, aren't they just tedious?

>I would like to make my own assertions and see if any in this list have
>similar ideas and opinions.
>
>Assertion 1: There is no non-arbitrary way of designating some languages
>as natural and some languages as constructed i.e. there are no universally
>unique characteristics across all languages designated as conlangs which
>separate them from all languages designated as natlangs.
"constructed" ... "having been constructed" = "having been deliberately put
together / shaped / engineered with the goal of making a language"; whether
it's from scratch or from existing language(s) doesn't matter here.
No, there aren't characteristics inherent to conlangs AFTER their
construction that seperate them from natlangs. Theoretically it should be
possible to make an *a-posteriori* conlang that passes for a natlang. But
I'd say there are plenty of a-priori and semi-a-priori langs that wear their
constructedness visibly.
However, having been deliberately constructed (usually by one person) is
itself a very different way for a language to come about than having
developed over generations of speech without deliberate creation. THAT is
the unique characteristic.

>Assertion 2:  Designating any speech as a language ‘a’, whether relative
>to an individual speaker ‘x’ or to a population ‘x...n’, is always an
>arbitrary designation both synchronically and diachronically because
>speech varies across synchronic individual sets and speech changes for
>individuals and individual sets over time ( e.g. Declaring that the speech
>of individuals ‘x...n’ is of language ‘a’ at a point in or period of time
>is based on an arbitrary decision that the speech differences between
>individuals in set ‘x...n’ are insignificant. Also, declaring that
>individual ‘x’ speaks language ‘a’ for any period of time ‘t’ is based on
>an arbitrary decision that the differences between ‘a/t1’ and ‘a/t2’ for
>individual ‘x’ are insignificant.).
Right. Dialects don't have definite boundaries between them, nor do past and
modern forms of languages/dialects have sudden boundaries. But that's a
different question from natural v. constructed languages.

>Assertion 3: All human language is human language.  Hence, if the study of
>an arbitrarily designated ‘natural language’ can yield information about
>human lingual phenomena, so can the study of an arbitrarily
>designated ‘constructed language’.  The contrived compartmentalization of
>the two is irrelevant to their existence as human lingual behavior.
Natural languages are shaped by certain tendencies that can show us how the
human mind works. When you create a language you can deliberately go against
these, either subtly or by creating something that's impossible for a human
to process without working it out on paper first. The whole stack-syntax
thing, for example, could result in sentences that require a speaker to
remember the precise order of a larger 'stack' of words than most people can
hold in their memory at one time. Studying such a language wouldn't give any
insight into the human mind the way studying a natural (non-deliberately
developed) language would.

M

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