Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Leo J. Moser wrote:

> Yet I find it hard to believe in theory. Let's imagine that some dialect
> area of Japan had had a different political history (we could take Okinawa
> or an imaginary "independent state of Nagano") and had opted to go with
> romanization. Wouldn't the resultant language be "of less complexity"
> than that of the rest of Japan?
The written language, yes.  BUT, the written language is not language.
There's a mutual influence, yes, but remember, many of the world's
languages, even now, are not even written!  The spoken languages are,
overall, of roughly equal complexity.  Where one language is more
complicated in morphology, it has less syntactic complexity, for
example.  And generally, tone languages have fewer phonemes, I think.

> >  However, each language tends to do some things better than others. In other
> >  words, anything you can say in one language, you can say in any other.
>
> Only in a most general sense. I'm not sure everything is really
> translatable.
Quite true.  Try translating "wishful thinking" into another language,
for example.  I read of a contest once to find an adequete translation
of that into Italian.  There was no adequate translation.  Sometimes
words can be translated roughly, like schadenfreude (sp?) = "malicious
pleasure", but it's not quite that.

> >  The question is meaningless,
> >  you'd have to define "better" first (and if you think that's easy, just try
> >  it).
>
> Fully agree.
And what I may think is "better", you may think is "worse".

> I've said much the same in the past, but now have doubts. Do we
> say this on the basis of empirical data, or on the basis of
> logical theory?
Well, only that there is no objective basis to judge language as more
complex or less complex; or better or worse.  Also, if there were a
language that were much better or much worse, it would stand out as
such.

> Let's split English into two imaginary (theoretical) languages.
> They are different only in one spells a word "through," the other
> spells it "thru."  Is not the latter going to be slightly "better" i.e.,
> more efficient and more logical?
Only in writing.

> Or say there are two imaginary versions of English, one has
> the word "tomato" the other calls the same fruit "poison-apple."
> Would not the latter be an "inferior language," because it would
> foster a tendency not to use a valuable dietary product?
>
> Or imagine versions of English where:
> 1.  The word "awful" did not have contradictory meanings --
> 2.  "Tag questions" were no more complex than in French
> 3. The past and present of "to read" were not spelled the same.
> 4. Plurals were as regular as in Spanish.
>   ... etc.
>
> If small matters CAN lead to differences in language ease and
> efficiency,  it seems likely that we are being inaccurate to say
> all languages are the same in their usability in effective communication
>
> Best regards,                          Leo Moser
Okay, it's not true that all languages are identical, BUT, since there
are no languages or dialects that are differ in only a few things, you
can't say that one language is superior or inferior, because there's no
objective basis.  Let's say that all languages are in the same range of
complexity/usefullness.  How's that?

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