Re Barry Garcia

From: "lu su" <intelligent888@...>
> answer: I have no religions, I don't believe a
> language is a religion. I think it's a science and
> since it's a science, it arguable, unless one day you
> tell me the English language is not a science.
I don't see how the English language is a science any more than Paris, a pocket
calculator or a potato are sciences.

> answer: My answer would be different, for then base
> number is 10 you are right, but if the base number
> greater than 35, your are wrong, as the value of log35
> is less than one. One thing I agree with you is that
> English and Math are different, they can't be in
> harmonious that's why I believe that in the Future,
> information age, when people depend more math on
> everyday life, the English will fall down.
That's religious enough ;)  I'm thankful enough that the information age has
almost completely annulled my need for mathematics in everyday life.

> answer: This is just another question, I want aske,
> normally, in a sentence like: "Two years ago, Tom left
> me. " the adverbial already told you 'two years ago'
> why use a past tense?  If I say :"Two years ago, Tom
> leave me." you know what I mean, and you know it not
> fellow the English rule,
Now I get this picture...

[SCENE: A factory floor.  Two workers, BOB and JIM, are CHATTING about broken
BONES while they carry out MANUAL LABOR.  They do not feel the NEED to use
AGREEMENT in TENSE or NUMBER.]

JIM [yelling over the NOISE]: "So I was tell him!
                'All your base!' and he knock me down
                the whole flight of stair!
                How did you break yours!?"

BOB [yelling]:  "Two year ago! A toolbox fall!"

JIM [yelling]:  "That must have hu--!"

[A large TOOLBOX falls on Jim's head.]


Anyway, they're both in the past tense because they both refer to the past.
(The *same* past, mind you--if you were talking about further in the past, you'd
use a compound tense: "two years ago, Tom had left me...")

> answer: it depend mostly on position, for instance red
> apple is a fruit, and apple red is a colour. the
> position expressed. And another question for English,
> is plenty times when position tell you what the word
> means in grammar, why need change the form of words?
> For instance:"I love her." the position already told
> you who is the suject why change the form? Is there
> any chance you want write as: I her love, her I love,
> her love I,love I her or love her I? If the following
> sentence never happened, why change I to me, she to
> her?
These are famous proverbs.

    "some languages use word order constructions"
and
    "some languages use inflected constructions"
and
    "neither is fundamentally more
     difficult/wrong/unnatural than the other"
and
    "you will think all languages that work the other
     way from yours are strange; this is what 'strange'
     means."

On to:
    "Every language has a grammar."
    "This grammar is either going to be made of rules."
    "You will consider some of these rules
     too difficult to understand."
    "You will consider some of these rules
     too simple to have been worth codifying."
    "Your evaluations of what rules are simple and
     difficult will not be equivalent to every or
     even most people's."

This is one reason why making an effective auxlang is not a simple task and can
easily be underestimated.  Especially in forums like these, the chicken that
believes it can fly like an eagle will soon be escorted to the dinner table.

(I won't say anything more about auxlangs qua auxlangs here.)

Now, if you can, you can join the CONLANG list at this page:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=conlang&A=1

and show us your language and its features *as they are, by themselves*, but
(and this is the important part) CONLANG [1] is not a place to sell, persuade,
convince, argue, or even, really, laud the merits of any language over any other
language.


      *Muke!
[1] And even less so random subsets of its participants...