Re: OT: Non-human languages (was OT: Dolphin intelligence (...))

Sylvia Sotomayor <kelen@...> writes:

> On Wednesday 02 July 2003 07:12 am, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> writes:
> > >       and 2) no matter how alien I tried to make the
> > > extraterrestrials, they still seemed way to human.
> >
> > It is really hard, if not outright impossible, to invent an alien race
> > that is not a kind of human stereotype in disguise.  Most sci-fi
> > authors
> > "alienize" their aliens by giving them a non-human anatomy
> > (and be it a few amendments on the human body plan) and some
> > salient personality trait.  The problem with this is that the aliens
> > are defined by which way they differ from humans, and the humans
> > thus represent a "normal type".  That is of course complete bull.
>
> Well, yes. This is also due to the limits of human imagination. It's
> difficult to imagine something thinking differently from ourselves when
> we are the only data point we have (or recognize).
Very true!  The only type of intelligence we know is ours, so we have
no data on how diverse intelligences could be.

> > > [dolphins easier to communicate with than aliens?]
> >
> > Possible.  But as you say, the difference between human and dolphin
> > minds will most likely be small compared to the difference between
> > human and ET minds.  And yet human-dolphin communication
> > will be difficult.
>
> Well, considering that Evolution is probably universal, then some things
> we'd share with an alien species might include: survival, reproduction,
> kinship, cooperation, illness, death, parasites, food, waste, etc.
> These are things that are relevant to any organism, sapient or
> otherwise.
Certainly.  But anything beyond that is utterly unknown; we can only
speculate about it.

> > > I've never tried to make any of my conlangs 'truly non-human', not
> > > even
> > > Yargish, which is supposedly spoken by non-humans, because I do not
> > > believe I
> > > could possibly succeed. Anything I create will be either a human
> > > language, or
> > > not a language at all.
>
> Since Kélen is purportedly a non-human language, I guess I should say
> something. I figured I'd violate a very basic universal, all languages
> have nouns & verbs, by not having verbs.
There seem to be human languages that at least get close to that.
I have read of Welsh (in Lockwood, _Languages of the British Isles
Past and Present_) that in the modern spoken language, most
sentences are formed with 'to be' and a verbal noun.  So Welsh
seems to be on the way to becoming a language similar to Kélen
(that is, when it doesn't go exctinct before reaching that point,
but that's another matter).

>      But, being human myself, I
> still wanted to deal with relating the arguments of the sentence, etc.
> So, I have four verb-like particles instead. Now, since in every human
> language we've studied, verbs are an open class, and in Kélen, they
> (whatever you want to call them) are a closed class, I've still made
> something different.
You did, or at least Kélen is of a highly marked, unusual type as far as
human languages go.  But this is probably about the maximum we can
achieve in linguistic alienness.  As I said earlier, even languages such
as Fith or Ilish (another alien language of the same author, available
under http://www.langmaker.com/ilish.htm) are probably more
anthropomorphic than real-world alien languages.  The latter are
possibly so bizarre (from our viewpoint) that we can hardly
comprehend them (well, Fith is bizarre enough to preclude
real-time processing by human brains when a speaker makes
intensive use of its LIFO stack and stack-manipulating devices).

> So, I recently read a book called "Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, And
> Adjectives" by Mark C Baker, wherein he attempts to come up with
> definitions for various parts of speech. Most of the books is
> theoretical & over my head, but parts of it were very interesting. In
> his section on verbs, he talks about verbless human languages. After
> demolishing the claims of Mohawk, Choctaw, Salish, and other languages
> that have been claimed to make no distinction between nouns & verbs, he
> says that it is possible for a verbless human language to exist:
>
> "It is not inconceivable that a human language could exist without a
> lexical category of verb, however. One probably could not have a
> natural human language without agents, themes, and predications. The
> creation of these is not, however, the exclusive privilege of verbs in
> my theory..."
This is probably true.  One always needs a means to express predications,
this is something not even aliens can get past, I think.  One does not need,
however, an open class of verbs separate from nouns.  From the viewpoint
of mathematical logic, verbs, nouns and adjectives are all the same thing,
namely, predicate symbols.  (A noun such as "bear" is a unary predicate
symbol meaning "X is a bear".)  And "logical languages" such as Lojban thus
do not distinguish between nouns, verbs and adjectives; in Lojban,
these are all _brivla_ (predicate words) and treated the same
(or at least I understand Lojban that way - correct me, John, if I am wrong).

> He then goes on to describe a theoretical language that would have a
> small number of functional words that govern the varoius nouns and
> adjectives. (Sounds a lot like Kélen!) He then goes on to show that
> these sorts of things already do exist, normally in languages that also
> have verbs. They usually get translated as 'be' or 'make'.
Yes.  And in theory, you can get along with the single verb 'to be',
as spoken Welsh apparently does to a large part.

> He also makes a statement that I think is thoroughly apropos to Kélen
> and to the conlanging of non-human languages in general:
>
> "I will fail in these goals, of course, to varying degrees. But that is
> no excuse for not having the right goals."
Yes.  When desigining a non-human conlang, one should at least try
to do something that is different from human languages in some
fundamental way - and anticipate one's ultimate failure to come up
with something truly alien.

Jörg.

____________________________________________________________________________
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail anmelden = 1qm Regenwald schuetzen! Helfen
Sie mit! Nutzen Sie den Serien-Testsieger. http://user.web.de/Regenwald