Re: Fictional auxlangs as artlangs (was Re: Poll)

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> Hm.  Wouldn't you have to raise a child as a monolingual Loglan (vel
> sim) speaker in order to have a valid test of Sapir-Whorf?
I'm not entirely certain, myself. I would think that Sapir-Whorf might predict
that a fully fluent multilingual would have different concept structures in
each of their languages. I've heard many cases of someone who is fluent in two
languages saying, "I don't know how to say it in English" not because they
didn't have the vocabulary but because the vocabulary didn't accurately reflect
the concept structure. After all, that's how some loan words drift over:
Schadenfreude being an obvious example. Certainly English has the concepts of
joy and misery, but it's characteristically German to combine those feelings.

In such a case, Sapir-Whorf would be supported (albeit not definitively) by
someone fluent in Loglan and some other language who, unrestricticted by
vocabulary limitations, finds it nearly impossible to describe a concept in
Loglan but not in their native tongue (or vice versa).

-- Paul

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