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

Jörg Rhiemeier said:
>
> On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 15:27:02 -0500,
> "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:
>
>> Personal note: My beef has usually been with conlangers who insist that
>> they are operating well inside of natlang evolutionary space,
>> notwithstanding any amount of evidence to the contrary (e.g. deep center
>> embedding, phonological conditioning of open-class suppletive
>> allomorphy,
>> pure ergativity, etc.). I'm becoming more mellow with age, however, and
>> now almost always leave everybody alone. :)
>
> What exactly do you mean?  Fictional human languages that are not
> plausible human languages?
Yes, or ones that do not imitate human language to the degree that the
designer intends.


>> I couldn't agree more. Most linguistic education sucks, as nearly as I
>> can
>> tell.
>
> I haven't undergone formal training in linguistics, but I have worked
> through several textbooks, and picked what I found useful in conlanging.
> What I have noticed (but what didn't surprise me) was that linguistics
> is far less of a rigorous, exact science than, say, physics, and much
> bad theory is in circulation.
Absolutely. To paraphrase Murray Gell-Mann, linguistics is the way physics
would be if particles could talk.

Of course, none of the sciences are as rigorous nor as exact as many
people believe.


> I whole-heartedly agree.  I think the only meaningful gauge for
> a conlang are its own design goals.  For example, if one was to
> present a philosophical language with self-segregating morphology
> and a typologically unlikely phoneme inventory as a near-extinct,
> pre-Indo-European minority language of the southeastern Alps,
> I'd say that he has done a pathetic job of it.  But that doesn't
> mean that the language is not excellent from some other point of view.
Right. Clearly, Classical Yiklamu is the perfect conlang and cannot be
surpassed (given a suitably narrow standard of evaluation)...


> Or Old Albic would probably not be a good machine translation
> interlingua, for example.
No, you have to use Aymara for that.


-- Mark

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