Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Leo J. Moser wrote:

> Leo Moser adds some comment:
>
> In a message Mike Farris wrote:
>
> >  Actually there is no conflict. As a practicing linguist, I can say the
> >  following: All natural languages are of more or less equal complexity and
> >  efficiency in their sum total.
>
> I know this is the perceived wisdom. And it was surely an important
> attitude after the 19th Century tendency to talk of "primative languages"
> etc. 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 problem here is that you're confusing complexity of the language withthe complexity of
the orthography it uses.  It is for the most part meaningless
to talk about whether any language can be more or less complex, because
a language _relatively_ complex in its morphology to another language may
very well have much more _simplex_ syntax.

Add to this the fact that what you are talking about here, the orthographic
complexity of a language, is in no way related to the phonetic realization of
a language.  There is no inherent connection between writing and speech, and
is just as arbitrary as the connection between speach and semantic meaning.

> >  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.
Of course.  But the problem is being able to _quantify_ this translatabilityon a
macrolinguistic scale, not just on the microlinguistic scale you are
talking about with one or two concepts or phrases.  Only after you have
discovered a way to quantify translatability can you then begin to speculate
on whether a given language is in any sense better equiped for any concept.

> 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?
Again, the relationship between orthography of a language and itsphonetic or phonemic
realization in speech is entirely arbitrary.

> 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?
Not if the phrase became so commonly used that people didn't thinkabout the actual meaning
when it is morphologically broken down.
For example, people don't think of computer "mice" as bad just because
the word happens to be morphologically and historically related to the
word for the rodents which are generally carriers of disease and plague.

> 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
The problem with this line of reasoning, in my opinion, is that it
assumes that the languages control the people who use them, that
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true in its most extreme form ("we
are a prisoner of the language we speak").  Far from it, the languages
which people use are a reflection of what that society cares about.
For example, we in English don't have separate words to correspond
to German "kennen" and "wissen".  We just have one, "to know".
If people actually wanted a new word for these concepts, they
would invent one, just as dialectally Southern Americans came up
with a second person plural pronoun, which is now in universal use
throughout the South: "y'all".   Languages change because people
feel they need to change, and not just individuals, but the people
as an aggregate.

In any case, the claim is specifically _not_ that the languages are
equal per se, but only that they are _roughly_ equal.  The point is
more that no one has yet come up with a way to quantify the complexity
of a language, much less tell whether that means that it is hard or not.



=======================================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

"Why should men quarrel here, where all possess /
as much as they can hope for by success?"
 - Quivera, _The Indian Queen_ by Henry Purcell
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