Re: The Naturalist Manifesto revisited

Herman:
> I don't know if this would apply to Vulcans, but Sangari learn the
> principles of logic after they've acquired a language. Their native
> languages are colored to some degree by their philosophical traditions,
> but they're not necessarily "logical" in the sense of languages like
> Lojban or Loglan. Logical thinking is an acquired skill. Certainly the
> idea of a philosophical or logical language as a language of a culture
> like the Vulcans of the Star Trek era or the typical Sangari is an
> appealing one. But I think it would be more of an acquired language,
> like Latin in the Catholic church, or Mandarin in non-Mandarin-speaking
> areas of China. Of course, conscious redesign of language isn't entirely
> unknown in fiction (consider George Orwell's Newspeak), and I can see
> that the idea would be appealing to some groups of Vulcans or Sangari.
> But whether an actual philosophical or logical language could be
> acquired as a first language is questionable.
IMO, logic underpins natlangs too: what stops natlangs from being
loglangs is natlangs' tolerance of ambiguity, relying on pragmatics
to resolve ambiguity. So I see no problem to an unambiguous logical
lg being acquired natively. That's not to say that Lojban or
(Standard) Livagian could be acquired natively, though, but that's
because of other unnatural aspects of the languages, rather than
their logicality.

--And.