Re: What criteria do you have for your own or others' languages?

Den 6. des. 2006 kl. 21.57 skrev Gary Shannon:
>
> I have no formal lingusitics training, and half a century of
> exprerience with
> computers, so I tend to think of languages as an exercise in
> information
> engineering. My conlangs are sometimes modelled after such
> programming ideas as
> Reverse Polish Notation, Functional Notation, and Object Oriented
> Programming.
> I tend to think of language as a method of passing instructions
> from one world
> simulation to another. I imagine (i.e. simulate) some event in my
> head and use
> words to pass instructions to you that enable you to duplicate that
> simulation
> (i.e. to imagine in your own head what I am imagining). Thus "John
> gave the
> book to Mary" really says: "1. Imagine a person named John (i.e.
> create an
> instance of the class Person and set the name attribute to "John").
> 2. Imagine
> a person named Mary. 3. Imagine a book. 4. Imagine possession of
> that book
> transfered from John to Mary. 5. Imagine that John caused this
> transfer. 6. End
> of simulation."  If I can translate a sentence to a sequence of
> simulation
> steps then I "understand" the sentence.
Very intriguing. But what your simulation is saying is: "John give
book to Mary". How would you simulate the content of the definite
form (an object referred to in a previous sentence/simulation), and
of the past tense (the sentence being part of a narration of a series
of past events)?

LEF