Re: THEORY: Aymara

Ed Heil wrote:
> (For example, people sitting down and inventing from
> scratch a system of government in all its details, and writing it down
> in a Constitution...)
Well, to be fair, the Constitution was based on the already-existing
governmental system, with safeguards added to prevent corruption.

Of course, assuming that Aymara *was* a conlang, it, too, would probably
have been based on previously existing languages.  Perhaps that explains
the similarities with Quechua?  They got their ideas from Quechua?  :-)

>
> I still haven't managed to confirm the UFOs bit though. ;)
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>                        edheil@postmark.net
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > > Date:         Sun, 21 Nov 1999 14:29:48 -0700
> > > From: Ed Heil <edheil@...>
> > >
> > > Has anyone here ever heard of a crackpot theory that the Andean
> > > language Aymara has mysterious syntactical structures that somehow
> > > violate normal ideas of the way languages work and suggest that it
> > > might be a conlang (a conlang probably constructed by UFOs no less!)?
> >
> > I've heard (read, rather) that some people think it might be, or have
> > started out as, a conlang. I've also read that some people think it
> > would make a good interlanguage for computer translation.
> >
> > However, the reason given for both beliefs was that it is very simple
> > in syntax, regular in morphology, and 'orthogonal' in the programming
> > language sense that any feature that can be marked on words of a
> > certain class, can be marked on all of them. (Pronouns are just like
> > other nouns, and so on).
> >
> > So it's the absence of the 'normal' amount of odd structures (for a
> > natlang) that makes it stand out. (Well, some more than others. In
> > Hittite, for instance, even 'to be' is regular).
> >
> > Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT
> marked)
--
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