Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

At 10:35 am -0700 13/10/98, charles wrote:
>On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Gerald Koenig wrote:
>
>> >
>> >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
>> >
>> I hope your are correct, otherwise I am a damned fool for trying to make
>> NGL a better language than English.
And I sincerely hope (and believe) that he is wrong.

A better language than English for what?  By what criteria does one one
judge one language better than another?

.......
>> effectiveness. Not all swiss army knives are born equal.
Swiss knives are not born & IMHO are irrelevant to this argument.

>>But skepticism
>> is easier to support than belief.
So I see.

>
>I consider the "all languages are equally good" argument
>very silly.
Yeah, about as silly as the "all races are equal" argument!!

>Unless someone defines criteria that are capable
>of independent analysis, there is no scientific basis for
>this belief.
There is.

As Chris Palmer wrote:
"It's more than just perceived/received wisdom. It's fact, and this has
been shown in different ways by all contemporary branches of linguistics,
from computational/Chomskyan, to cognitive, to functionalist."

When, in my country, I find political opponents agreeing & only extremists
on the left & right disagreeing, I take a good deal of notice of what the
non-extremists are agreeing upon.  When in the linguistic field I find both
Chomskyans, functionalists, neo-structuralists &c. agreeing, I do take
notice.

I don't disregard their evidence and say it is neither independent nor
scientific.  By what criteria is _that_ judgment made?

>By every set of criteria, languages do differ
>in utility, beauty, simplicity, etc.
Not the uitility, beauty, simplicity argument again!  :=(
What one person finds useful another will see as pointless.
Beauty is _very_ personal.  I found Quenya to be very beautiful; but
another conlanger found it sounded like a ridiculous parody of his native
language.  And simplicity - a language is simple if it's similar in
structure to your own & more difficult if it's not.

Sorry - but with respect, these are _all_ subjective values & far removed
from the purely linguistic arguments which do exist.

>One might as well claim
>that all XXXs are equal, where XXX ranges over all the nouns
>in any dictionary.
Utterly irrelevant.

>It takes quite a leap of faith to claim
>that two things differing in every respect are somehow the same.
Well, I don't.  I base my views on solid research & theory.

Ray.