Re: Linguistic knowledge and conlanging (was Explaining linguistic...)

Gary Shannon said:
> --- "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:
>> Gary Shannon said:
>> >
>> > Here's the process I'm using for my present
>> > experiment.  I choose a piece of text and just
>> write
>> > the translation.  Since this is the first piece of
>> > text nothing is known about the language yet, so
>> the
>> > translation can look like anything; just a string
>> of
>> > made-up words.
>> > [snip]
>> > I am also free to refer to the existing corpus
>> > for examples of sentence structure,
>>
>>
>> How do you know what the sentence structures are?
>
> The same way a four-year-old knows the sentence
> structure of his native language;

From what I know about L1 acquisition, whatever a four-year-old knows
about his native language has been arrived at through stages of one-word
utterances, then certain types of two-word utterances, then on from there
to longer and richer utterances.

That doesn't sound very similar to the experiment you've described.

On the other hand, I don't want to encourage you to inject linguistic
knowledge about L1 acquisition into your experiment, since you've already
said that's something you want to avoid. So we can leave this alone until
after you've gotten some stable results from your experiment.


-- Mark