Re: THEORY: Re : Universal Translation Language

At 2:58 pm -0700 28/5/99, Charles wrote:
>Tunu fella wrote:
>
>> Come on, nobody exacts revenge here on
>> anything. You know that most artlangers would be delighted to hail the first
>> perfect IAL, and some of us (like you) are also log- and auxlangers.
>
>I was just thinking of how the AUXLANG bunch were kicked out of CONLANG
>because of their over-heated arguments;
And quite right too IMO.  The arguments are not only overheated, they are
so often repetitious (those who care, e.g. know the pros & cons of
Esperanto, Ido & the other "classical" IALs), exceedingly tedious and far
too often in my experience degenerate into partisan name-calling.  Like
others I know, I am ashamed to have got caught up in the petty quarelling
of that list and have never once regretted leaving it or felt any desire to
return.

>it would ironic if log/auxlangs
>got blasted here in return.
And IMO very unlikely.  Loglans get an airing every so often.  I don't ever
recall anyone blasting them.  Why should they?

It's true conIALs don't figure here quite so much; but they have been
discussed from time to time.  Personally, I can recall a conIAL being being
blasted per se, though the antics of some conIALists may have got blasted
if one looks in the archives.

.......
>
>I don't feel comfortable without some kind of adjectives, though.
But a lot of natlangs feel quite comfortable :)

>Ido's part-of-speech marking really simplifies the grammar;
It also IMO fossilizes a pattern of language analysis derived from
traditional grammars of Latin & Greek which are alien to many natlangs.

>prepositions are more plainly seen as "transitive adverbs",
>which is unclear in English even though we use them that way:
>"go up" versus "go up the stairs", rather than "ascend the stairs".
Indeed - which calls into question, surely, the traditional analysis into
'adverbs' and 'prepositions'.

[snip]
>
>I would not want to over-grammaticalize, encoding too much
>into opaque codes. It seems there is a primitive, naive physics
>that underlies language, a kind of baby-talk syntax that
>really generates all the rest. Bierzwicka (sp??) analyzes
>words down to this primitive level. Why not leave it visible
>on the surface level, easier to learn and understand?
Very theoretical and the stuff of linguistic debate - but, OK, experiment
along these lines and see what happens.

>Might turn out a bit Ent-ish but that's OK ...
Umm - that might be a good thing for an IAL!  If it takes all afternoon to
utter one sentence & the rest of the evening to get the reply, it might
give the two speakers time to cool down and think - and we might get less
conflict & more harmony.  But somehow, I find it this somewhat unlikely.
As any Ent would point out, if you are patient enough to listen, humans are
"very hasty" creatures  :)

Ray.