Re: Defining "Language"

On 7/20/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
> In the last episode, (On Friday 20 July 2007 03:49:51), Jim Henry wrote:
> > (Even if two of the most fluent
> > "speakers" had different pronunciations in mind for the name of the
> > language, as we found out at LCC2 (David Peterson after my talk:
> > I was surprised to hear you pronounce /ka.'lu.sa/ as /'ka.lu.sa/.))
>
> Are you referring specifically to the fact that a /large percentage/ of what
> would surely be a /small number/ of speakers couldn't agree? Because, for
> example, whilst I would be happy to say that the "official" or most
> widespread pronunciation of "English" is /INglIS/, I myself regularly
> say /INlish/.
Not specially referring to disagreement about the name of the language, but
more generally referring to the fact that Kalusa never had an agreed-upon
phonology, only an orthography, due to the ad-hoc collaboration
method used.  Some who define language in terms of speech and say
that writing is secondary would say this means Kalusa wasn't a real
language; but whatever it was, I found myself, near the end of the project,
thinking in Kalusa to some extent, able to contribute new sentences
to the corpus without looking up words or carefully planning the syntax.
Several others reported the same.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry