Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

vardi wrote:
> To me, even saying "he's a superior tennis player" sounds kind of
> icky.
Really?  That seems pretty objective.  "He's a superior tennis player" =
"He's better at tennis than most people", "he wins most of the games he
plays."  You're not saying "He's a superior person".  Oh, well.

> I must honestly admit that in 30 years of learning
> foreign languages and 22 years of conlanging, it had never occurred to
> me to class languages as inferior/superior until this debate began.
Well, I don't think natlangs can be classed as superior or inferior,
without specifying a qualifier (e.g., "superior for discussing
technological concepts"), for example "primitive" languages - by which I
mean languages spoken by people with primitive technology, are inferior
at discussing computers than English.  For that matter, the written
language is superior at describing technology than the spoken language.

But, let me put this out to the list: If God has a language, would not
that language be superior to all human languages?  Probably impossible
for a human to learn, but still it would be superior.  That's what I was
getting at earlier, the concept of a language being superior is valid,
IMVHO.  However, natlangs are all roughly equal, and I doubt if any
human being has the capacity to exceed natlangs, so the whole discussion
is kinda moot.

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