Re: The philosophical language fallacy (was ...)

Hallo!

Here's a mail I sent to And Rosta in reply to an offlist reply
on my post.  He suggested to me that it would be of interest
for the list, and like him, I feel this is worth discussion,
so I'll post it here.

----------  Forwarded message ----------

Subject: OFFLIST: Re: [CONLANG] The philosophical language fallacy (was Re:
Evanescence of information (was Re: Going NOMAIL: Honeymoon))
Date: Freitag, 4. Juli 2008 15:47
From: Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
To: And Rosta <and.rosta@...>

Hallo And!

On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 00:59, you wrote:
> Thanks for the explanation. I assume that you mean that a taxonomic
> vocabulary is not philosophically superior; for one can think of linguistic
> arguments in its favour, such asease of learning, or encoding a coherent
> worldview...
I mean that there is not much to be won with a taxonomic
vocabulary, as the taxonomy in itself is arbitrary to a
large degree.

Also, a major disadvantage is that taxonomic vocabularies tend
to have awfully low redundancy, with words denoting closely
related concepts being uncomfortably similar to each other.
If 'apple' is _mala_ and 'pear' is _male_, a misspelling of
the last vowel is hard to spot because each of the words fits
into most contexts where the other could also occur.  In a
language with an arbitrary vocabulary, a misspelling gives
either a non-existing word or, much less often, a word with
an unrelated meaning that doesn't fit the context.  Hence,
the listener/reader can esily spot that there is something
wrong, and in many cases even reconstruct the correct form.

Another problem is scientific and cultural terminology,
which is the same as with closed-vocabulary schemes.  How
do you express concepts such as 'ravioli', 'kimono' or
'morphosyntactic alignment' in a taxonomic language?
You have to resort to clumsy and verbose circumlocutions;
any practical language ought to be open to borrowing words
from existing languages, which of course is impossible in
a taxonomic language.

I also have my doubt that taxonomic vocabularies make
learning the language much easier.  When you learn a
language, you must also learn to keep the words apart,
which does not exactly become easier if they resemble
each other so closely.  Anyway, the complexity of the
words and rules is one matter in language learning;
the main difficulty is getting familiar enough with
them to use them fluently.  Compare that to musical
instruments.  A piano is a pretty easy instrument,
one may think.  There is a key for each note, you
press it and the note sounds.  Easy.  Also, the keys
are arranged in a very logical pattern.  Just about
everybody in the western world understands that.
Yet, it takes years of practice to become a good
piano player.

Sure, a taxonomic vocabulary encodes a particular
worldview, be it coherent or not.  However, if the
worldview is not all that coherent, or if it is
idiosyncratic, learners will find it difficult to
understand your taxonomy.  And then, a worldview,
however well-founded and coherent in the days of
the designer of the language, may become outdated.
The 17th-century taxonomic languages are full of
quaint and outdated classifications.  In one of them,
'comet' is derived from 'fire' - we now know that
comets consist mainly of *ice*.  There are many,
many different worldviews, and hard-coding one into
the vocabulary of a language, especially an IAL, does
not look like a good idea to me.  It is like Orwellian
Newspeak, and probably doesn't work anyway (I am quite
sceptical of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

Hence, designing a taxonomic vocabulary may be an
entertaining mindgame, but it does not strike me as
especially useful.

Greetings,
Jörg.

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