Re: building from primitives (was Re: Langauge Constets)

Hallo!

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:12:28 -0000, Michael Poxon wrote:

> Bravo!
> Someone (I forget who) once said that "the danger is not that computers will
> think like people, but people will think like computers".
AMEN.  People "thinking" like computers are indeed a great danger
- because they no longer really think but merely obey orders.
It happened here in Germany (as well as in other places, but the
German case was the worst of all) - the gory results are well-known.

If you read web sites of transhumanists, you find this kind of
computerish hyperrational thinking all the time.  I find that
very unsettling.  Those people appear to be bored nerds who wish
to play Hitler once they get the money to do that :(

One of the strengths of human beings over computers is that they
can question what others tell them - if they fail to do so, great
evil usually is the result.

>       There are so many
> wonderful differences between computer "languages" and human ones.
> Human languages (or a decent conlang) have cultures and histories behind
> them to which they refer and are inextricably part of, for one thing.
Yep.  I feel that all that "philosophical"/"semantic primitive based"/
oligosynthetic engelanging is thoroughly misguided.  Those languages are
cumbersome, lifeless and ugly.  I have experimented with such beasties
in the past, and was utterly unsatisfied with the meager results.
I found it doesn't really work: reality is far too complex to pigeonhole
it into a set of "semantic primitives".  I found my naturalistic conlang
projects, all of which have a history behind them, to work out much better.

Loglangs and their ilk are not even useful as auxlangs - they are way
too difficult to learn because they are so unlike human languages.
You have to be familiar with first order predicate calculus in order
to understand the grammar of Lojban (let alone learn the language)
- can we really treat tourists and businesspeople to undergo that
effort?  Even I, who has a university degree in computer science and
certainly an above-average predilection for languages, found the grammar
of Lojban to be a book of seven seals.

All that "testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", "eradicating semantic
sloppiness", "speeding up thought" and whatever things some people
want to achieve with engineered languages appears to be completely
misguided to me.

... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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