Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Hi, gang,

I've been distracted by RL issues for a number of days now, and am again
playing catch up. I'm sure some others have responded to this one
already, but I'll dive in anyway.

Gerald Koenig wrote:
>
> Ray said:
> >
> >I say that the notion that some natlangs are superior to others is just as
> >flawed, meaningless and IMHO dangerous as holding that certain races are
> >superior to others.  To me _both_ notions suck.
>
> Well that to me is a really strange identity. Do you think some
> educations are superior to others? Is not a language an education?
> Does an education add one whit to the inherent worth of the
> possesor? Is the thing contained equivalent to the container?
>
I'd say certainly not. An education is a construct, a program
consciously designed by some group of humans for (hopefully) the benefit
of another group of humans. One can refer to getting an education from,
say, travel, but my intuition says that is a metaphorical use of the
term "education".

What is a language? How about a human-created environment, in the same
sense that a culture is a human-created environment. Of course language
and its culture(s) are interlinked and mutually influencing, but they
are hardly identical or inseparable. And whereas both are human-created,
both are also explicitly *organic*. They grow, they evolve, and not by
design. Neither is consciously created by a known group of people. Hey,
do we have any anthropologists here? Do we really have any better idea
how a culture gets started than we have of how a natural language gets
started? Now don't start with the "complexity" thing. From my limited
knowledge of anthropology, I suspect that a better case can be made for
relative differing complexities between cultures than there can between
languages. But this does not deny the basic property I cite above:
non-conscious evolution.

Laurie
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