Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Leo J. Moser 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.
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.

> 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?
How do you mean? We're generally talking about the semantics, pragmatics,
syntax and morphology of a language when we talk about its complexity.
Writing systems are not language.

> >  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.
It depends on your point of view. From the standpoint of formal semantics,
there is no doubt that any significant sampling of human language is
roughly as complex as any other. From an alternative standpoint like
cognitive semantics, where pragmatics and semantics are nearly
inseperable, the same meaning can never, ever be replicated -- saying the
same thing you said five minutes ago means something else than it did five
minutes ago. But that doesn't speak to issues of complexity, however you
define it.

> 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
Of course not all languages are the same in their ability to communicate
specific things effectively -- it depends on the community of speakers.
Languages are like organisms in that they evolve in reaction to their
environment -- their environment is the semantic demands their speakers
put on them. I think it's quite safe to assume that humans of all cultures
face problems of roughly equivalent complexity, and they need a language
capable of dealing with that.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Reid Palmer : reid@pconline.com : www.pconline.com/~reid/

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