Re: Language comparison

On Wednesday, January 5, 2005, at 12:10 , Sai Emrys wrote:
[snip]
> *nod* Agreed. IMHO, it ought to be an issue for *all* linguists, but
> admitting that there are *any* qualitative, value-judgable differences
> between languages would be arguing against what the trend (as I've
> seen it) has been - to defend quote-unquote "simple" or "primitive"
> languages as being fully valid and equal in status to any other,
> because they too have fully functional grammars, complex syntax, etc.
The only problem is that any simple or primitive hominid languages became
extinct many, many, many millennia ago, way before any method of recording
them. Without time-travel we shall never know them.

Our earliest written records only go back some five millennia.
Reconstruction can perhaps push our knowledge back six millennia. By that
time all human languages, as far as we can tell, are _advanced_ with fully
functional grammars, complex syntax, etc.

The "trend" , as Sai terms it, was - I can as an oldie assure you - there
long before the concept of "political correctness". It has nothing to do
with PC, but a lot to do with linguistics.

The notion of "primitive society = primitive language" was shown to be
false at least by the early 20th century. If it were required, any
existing human language can develop itself (principally by expanding
vocabulary, as English has had to) in order to express the profoundest of
thoughts and certainly all the advances of modern science and technology.
The fact that some do not is to do with political and economic factors (i.
e. more people will read my work if I publish it in English, rather than
Basque or Xhosa) - nothing to do with linguistics.

Yes, natural languages do things differently - that is what makes
comparative linguistics so interesting & why I still (now nearly 65) get
excited, like a little kid, when I come across a new language. But that
does not per_se make one 'better' than another.

> However, this feels like an argument of *sufficiency* rather than
> *equivalency*. I would certainly agree that all natural languages are
> *sufficient* for their users' purposes and are (with enough use)
> grammatically etc. complete. But this does not answer my question of
> whether some might be better than others.
Better at what? As Chris Bates so rightly observes: "Without criteria the
entire question means nothing whatsoever."

'Better' is a relative term anyway. When my wife communicates with me, she
finds that English is better than French (or any other language); when she
communicates with my daughter-in-law she finds French is better than
English ((or any other language). So what?

> Specifically for conlangers, the importance of this is that it would
> imply a list of features - as you have in computer language design -
> with various well-known tradeoffs or wins for each feature. E.g.,
{Groan} - this is *not* comparing like with like - and I speak as one who
has had a lifelong interest in linguistics and has recently retired from
teaching computer science to college students.

Natural languages have developed over millennia upon millennia to
facilitate communication between human & human. Computer languages were
developed to make it easier (and less error prone) for human-machine
communication - using binary all the time is a wee bit tedious, seriously
time-consuming and certainly prone to error, at least by the human.

As for conlanging - there are several different types, with *quite
different* aims. To treat them all the same is very misleading. We have:
- artlangs, whose aims necessarily have a subjective element (what one
person finds aesthetically pleasing, another does not), and some of these
aim to be naturalist (like Quenya & Sindarin), and some to be unnatural
("pure art"?).
- engelans, where the author(s) consciously engineer the language to meet
certain objective criteria; not all engelangs have the same aims (I count
loglangs as a sub-category of engelangs).
- auxlangs, which in turn can be divided into the a_posteriori types,
a_priori types and mixed types.

Also, as many have observed, some conlangs do not fit neatly into just one
category.

We on this list like to help one another with ideas, whatever the type of
conlang, and we respect our very different aims; we do not try to judge
which conlang (or natlang) is 'better' than another. (Because in practice
auxlangers do like to compare one language with another for superiority,
they have their own list)

> something akin to "implement pointer arithmetic, and you introduce a
> strong low-level control at the cost of bugs". I feel like the way it
> is done now is more or less arbitrary; you know that you can do things
> in a variety of ways, but the choice between them is arbitrary or
> aesthetic.
You may feel that, but IMO it is utter rot. You seem to know very little
about what conlangers have actually been doing over the years I have been
on this list. Yes, aesthetics may play a large role in artlangs, but even
then there is generally more than just arbitariness about choices. As for
engelangs, the choice is anything but arbitrary!!!

> Of course, this is only relevant for those like me who want a sort of
> hacker's conlang. ;-)
For what purpose? That is a serious question. Until you know what the
objectives of your conlang are, you will not know what features of
natlangs are relevant in any case.

Ray
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ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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