Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> vardi wrote:
> > To me, even saying "he's a superior tennis player" sounds kind of
> > icky.
>
> Really?  That seems pretty objective.  "He's a superior tennis player" =
> "He's better at tennis than most people", "he wins most of the games he
> plays."  You're not saying "He's a superior person".  Oh, well.
Exactly! That's my point. I'm saying that even in a limited field where
it may be relatively possible to rank competing/compared items, I still
shy away from it.  And, BTW, *is* it so easy?  In the last World Cup,
for example, I think I liked Morocco more than Croatia, because I felt
the Moroccans played emotionally, gave everything, didn't make cynical
calculations and visibly enjoyed what they were doing. I suppose by
scientific standards Croatia was a "superior" team, yet here, again, I
baulk at using such a term. Morocco had panache, Croatia had team skill,
Brazil had one outstanding player (!), etc. --- rather as people have
noted for different languages.


> > I must honestly admit that in 30 years of learning
> > foreign languages and 22 years of conlanging, it had never occurred to
> > me to class languages as inferior/superior until this debate began.
>
> Well, I don't think natlangs can be classed as superior or inferior,
> without specifying a qualifier (e.g., "superior for discussing
> technological concepts"), for example "primitive" languages - by which I
> mean languages spoken by people with primitive technology, are inferior
> at discussing computers than English.  For that matter, the written
> language is superior at describing technology than the spoken language.
>
Even your qualifications don't go far enough, IMHO. Written language is
surely better at describing formal technological structure, yet as a
self-taught Windows/Word user who has gone on to teach others, I have
seen that 2 minutes of verbal explanation can succeed where endless
reading and re-reading of the literature has failed.


> But, let me put this out to the list: If God has a language, would not
> that language be superior to all human languages?  Probably impossible
> for a human to learn, but still it would be superior.  That's what I was
> getting at earlier, the concept of a language being superior is valid,
> IMVHO.  However, natlangs are all roughly equal, and I doubt if any
> human being has the capacity to exceed natlangs, so the whole discussion
> is kinda moot.
>
Well, now we're into theology, which will proably lead to an even
fiercer war. Hebrew was, of course, often claimed to be "God's language"
- as in the apocryphal reports of abandoned babies growing up speaking
Hebrew autochthonously.

In Jewish tradition, at least, God is not seen as enjoying superiority
over humans inside the human, material world. That is to say, once
Creation was complete, humans existed, and physical laws were
established, God's actions in the world are within those confines (this
is a brief and possibly subjective summary; other opinions could be
given).

In any case, my personal opinion is that you can no more say that God
could have a superior language than you could say that God could design
a superior car (unless, of course, God - unlike the car manufacturers -
decided not to opt for built-in obsolescence).


        Shaul Vardi