Re: "Theory informs practice" - OK?

Den 11. nov. 2008 kl. 23.19 skrev David J. Peterson:

> After all, must natural languages are
> the way they are because they're good enough.  As long as
> folks can do what they need to do and say what they need to
> say, innovation stops.  Plus, by and large, the reason languages
> are the way they are today is chance.  Take the dual.  Why do
> some languages have a dual while others don't?  Language
> works with or without a dual; it just happens sometimes.
> What if at the early, formative moment, those present decided
> more than one was good enough, while another group decided
> there was a good reason to separate out pairs of things?
Linguistic innovation is pretty arbitrary. It just chances to happen
that some people, either individuals or groups, come up with an idea
of some new category. They were able to communicate before the
innovation as well. And groups who don't have the innovation are able
to communicate. But often there is some fancy of utility behind those
innovations. For example, in Breton the dual category is lost as a
morphological number, but the speakers missed it, and invented the
tool of prefixing a noun with daou-. After all it's useful sometimes
for treating those important groups of two we often encounter
specially, like eyes, ears, lovers, etc. As another example, in
English and Norwegian we have verbal nouns that come in abstract and
concrete pairs, for exampel translating/translation, oversetting/
oversettelse. In Norwegian this is spreading to new pairs today,
especially among technical writers or translatiors, who often find it
useful to make such a distinction.

Part of my motivation for taking up conlanging was trying to see what
I could produce of such refinements, and what they could contribute
to the communication of ideas and feelings. But it seems I haven't
quite gotten to that stage yet. I'm still struggling to make them
work at all. Anyway I think that although any idea or emotion could
be expressed in any language, some languages are able to express some
of them better than others. In my work as a translator I often come
across things in English or French that I struggle to express in
Norwegian. Occasionally I find things that I know better how to
express in Norwegian as well, though it could be it's because I know
that language better. Looking at ancient languages I occasionally
find them shockingly sluggish at some themes that modern languages
treat with ease. So it may be that there is progress in language, if
nowhere else.

> One of the best examples I've seen of this type
> of language is Fith: a language built use LIFO grammar,
> which, in real time, I think is impossible for a human to use.
I don't see why it's so unusable. Wouldn't most statements be like a
usual SOV language? There's just some curious argument stacking in
some of the more involved cases, but nothing much more unmanageable
than the verbal stacking that you find in German sometimes, I think.

Actually I was thinking of inventing a stacked language when we
discussed those sign language observations lately. But I see it has
already been invented, like most things...

LEF