Re: Language comparison

On 5 Jan 2005, at 8.56 pm, Sai Emrys wrote:

> This was inspired by this essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
> .
>
> My hypothesis: some human languages are better than others.
I did once read an essay expressing a similar view, somewhere on the
Internet. Can't remember where though.

Nevertheless, you've totally skipped the guts of your posts---we all
know that all languages can express the same concepts (I'm not sure
that Turing completion is a relevant concept to human languages,
excepting ones like Lojban). *Why* are some languages better than
others? *What* makes some languages better than others? *How* did this
come about? *How* much variability is there in natural languages'
goodness? Otherwise all you've done is posted an ill-thought-out flame.
(If you planned to use this as an opening to promote some
auxlang---don't. We don't care.)

(BTW: I would be wary about describing this as a hypothesis. To my
knowledge, hypotheses should be testable and falsifiable, but you've
made a relative assertion. What you have here is an opinion/idea, which
may be crafted into a series of hypotheses, which would then be tested
and bring us to some conclusion about the validity of your opinion.)

> This, BTW, is pretty much flatly rejected by modern linguistics as I
> understand it. I think it's critical to a conlanger, however - just as
> it is to a programmer or language-designer in the link above - and it
> is an underlying axiom of my ODIL essay.
I think we all agree that not all conlangs are equal. Even assuming all
words in Old Føtisk were created, you'd be hard pressed expressing
yourself in much more complex sentences then "The dog ate the man's
cat". And even leaving that aside, if modern linguists flatly reject
the concept (because it's false), I don't see how it's critical to a
conlanger. If there is some alternate universe in which all bridges are
equal, why should bridge-builders and engineers bother themselves with
questions like: 'But what happens if a bridge made out of mobile phones
is better than one made out of steel?!'. If, OTOH, modern linguists
flatly reject the concept because political correctness prohibits them
from discussing the issue, but, as a matter of fact, some languages are
not on-par with Classical Latin, then it is an issue for *all*
linguists amateur or professional, and not just those who are
interested in constructing them.

> Opinions?
Yes please.

Also, please leave HTML where it belongs: In (parts of) files bearing
the MIME-type text/html.

--
Tristan.

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