Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Bryan Maloney wrote:

> Another way of looking at this question is to look for "non-laws"--that
> is, things we may presume without adequate evidence to be true but which
> can then be found to be contradicted in a natural or constructed
> language--defining a shape by the negative space, so to speak.
YES!  In fact, I got interested in this subject by reading a doctoral thesis
on one natural language that superficially seemed to have nothing in common
with modern languages.  That language was spoken by a "Stone Age" people --
the Puget Sound Indians -- who also spoke an inter-tribal "trade language"
that we call the Chinook Jargon.

The Chinook Jargon was shared by more than a dozen tribes in western British
Columbia, northern Oregon, northern Idaho, western Montana and all of
Washington State, and had been spoken by them for about 300 years before
French and English traders arrived and added some European words to it.  So
the Chinook Jargon's grammar cannot be due to European influence.  Yet its
grammar is very much like that of all other "pidgins" -- and very unlike the
grammar of the language of any tribe that shared that trade language!

I could see how the Chinook Jargon (or any pidgin -- any trade language)
could develop into a "modern" language (with the sorts of complex grammars
that modern languages have), but I couldn't see how a tribal language like
that of the Puget Sound Indians could do so.  So I began to wonder whether
all the modern languages might be descended from trade languages, instead of
from the languages of "Stone Age" tribes.

Few Stone Age tribes survived into modern times so that our linguists could
analyze their languages, but the few such languages that I know of do indeed
resemble that of the Puget Sound Indians.  I call them "fill-in-the-blank"
languages, and they are very much like computer programming languages.  In
such a language, the foundation of each sort of expression is a unique
string of syllables, and the expression is completed by inserting words
before and/or after each of those syllables.

As a result, each word can have several different (and unrelated) meanings,
and which meaning a word has depends on which syllable it is inserted before
or after within any particular such string of syllables.  And the individual
syllables of such a string have no independent meaning: They just jointly
form the foundation of the expression.

Such a language is incredibly unambiguous and concise, and you can start
speaking it as soon as you learn any one of its unique strings of syllables
-- but you're limited in what you can express in it until you've learned a
great many of its unique strings of syllables!

A trade language abandons that approach, and lets its speakers express all
sorts of ideas very sloppily.  And the modern languages -- which IMO are
descended from trade languages -- have reduced that grammatical sloppiness
by adding layer upon layer of complexities (genders, cases, declensions,
etc.) that the Stone Age languages lacked.

-- Tommie