Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Gerald Koenig wrote:
> I hope your are correct, otherwise I am a damned fool for trying to make
> NGL a better language than English.
First off, you're dealing with an artificial language.  A sword is far
better than a naturally sharp stone.  Secondly, it's only better by your
values.  As Douglas Koller pointed out, is Japanese "better" than NGL
because it encodes the relative status of speaker and addressee?  Is it
"worse" because it makes you do that?  Just because a language is better
in some aspects, doesn't mean it's better overall.  It also contains
features that are worse.  And besides, any language, even NGL, encodes a
specific worldview.  I may think that the worldview encoded in NGL is
inferior to that in English, or I may think it's superior, but that
doesn't make it inferior or superior.  Since there's no objective
measure of superiority/inferiority for languages, we have to assume that
they're roughly equal.

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