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Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

From:charles <catty@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 14, 1998, 17:45
On Wed, 14 Oct 1998, Tom Wier wrote:

> Nik Taylor wrote: > > > Charles wrote:
> The way I read it, the writer of the second line here was saying > rather that there is nothing silly about the issue, and that it is on > the contrary something that should be taken with some degree > of seriousness. The point was NOT that races aren't equal, > they are; the point was that it was not a silly thing to talk about > them being so, likewise with languages.
Yes, it was an argument by analogy. I simply reject that analogy. A better one is "all cars are equally good".
> Any attempt to use terms of value judgment areat base flawed, and are outside the > scientific realm of doing things.
You can't say that without self-contradiction, because it is a value judgement to do so: "Value judgements are bad!"
> I would even deny the ability to build -- there is *no* basis on > which one can make such a language any more than another > on the macrolinguistic scale. It's critical to understand that > dichotomy (the one between microlinguistic and macrolinguistic > issues), because it's the difference between life and death > of his position.
Any tool can be made better or worse. Aren't we all engineers here?