Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Tom Wier wrote:

> The underlying logic behind saying _any_
> language is superior and that of racism are at heart the same.
I'd like to clarify this a bit:  I was not imputing any kind of racist
motivations on others here, but that I think it is inherently wrong-headed
and needs to be rethought before we can proceed.

The problem is this, as I see it:  it sounds like people are thinking
conlangs can be superior because they want to be able to do
that with their own languages.  There is nothing wrong in wanting
to do that, but that _no one_ has presented any kind of theoretical
underpinning to their thoughts, in any form.   I would so dearly like
to do that for my own conlang, but it is at base I think an entirely
futile thing, because whatever I might think makes a constructed
language superior will, surely, be said to be exactly what makes
the same language _inferior_ (I'm reminded of the wars about the
Esperanto use of the accusative -n).

This is true for precisely the same reasons that, philosophically speaking,
there can be no objective form of morality, because the mores of a certain
people are based on certain underlying assumptions, for example, that the
rule against murder is based on the idea that a person has a right to exist
in and of himself, or alternately that no other person has the right to take
away what is not his -- we _all_ believe this, I think, but what if you don't
believe that a person has a right to exist, or that you can walk into a place
and take away what belongs to another person arbitrarily?  I mean, it may
sound a little ludicrous, but that's a valid question which can't be easily
answered, because it lies on the assumptions already mentioned.  (For the
above reasons, Kant argued that the only valid moral codes are those
promulgated by God, because he at least is not subject to the mind
body dichotomy on which these problems rest).

Analogously, the question before us of whether or not a language can be
superior is that way for exactly the same reason -- who's to say what
makes a language superior _per se_?  What feature can be shown, in
absolute terms, to be better than another?

I would just _love_ to hear what people's ideas about these are. :)