Subject: Re: [lojban] Amusing stuff

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 01:03:34 +0300

Robin wrote:
> Anyone who wants to read yet another example of an ignorant linguist
> trashing IALs can look at a recent entry in my forum (and my rather
> irate reply) at http://www3.bravenet.com/forum/show.asp?userid=dn294893

Interesting. I have a question, Robin. Why do you insist on calling
the chap a linguist? He doesn't come across as knowledgeable about
linguistics at all. (He doesn't come across as a bright person either,
but that's a different story.) I don't blame you for replying in an
irate mode.

A few comments on particular points:

(1) The statement that all languages are equally complex is true in the
sense that all have, at least potentially, the same expressive power.
Which is very different from the sort of complexity that is relevant to
both human and automatic processing (including acquisition). There is
a myth that this complexity is also equally distributed among languages,
because any language that is simpler in some respect would be more
complex in another, but that myth doesn't stand even the most benevolent
scrutiny.

(2) `The set of words of any language is open, so no language has more
or fewer words than another' is true in the same way as `The set of
all natural numbers divisible by 10 is of the same cardinality as the
set of all natural numbers'. Except that while in maths what is
strictly provable takes precedence over what is intuitive, in areas
such as language acquisition it isn't always so.

That said, comparing sizes of published dictionaries is not a sound
way of comparing the sizes of vocabularies, although it is perhaps
useful as a guideline. There are many other factors, both linguistic
(the productivity and predictability of derivation and compounding)
and extralinguistic (the diligence of the lexicographers, the resources
available to them).

I've never approved of the statement `English has more words than any
other language', because I'm not convinced that the people who say so
have done an exhaustive search, or even considered some likely rivals
such as Hindustani.

(3) Languages are not illogical by nature. If they were, modern
theoretical linguistics would not exist, since it is all about
studying language(s) with the methods of exact sciences such as logic.
The prescriptivists' approach to English double negation was a travesty
not because they expected linguistic categories such as negative items
to have counterparts in logic, but because they didn't work hard enough
to discover the right counterparts, and instead relied on preconceived
notions. Which does not imply that it is not possible to formulate
expressions of logic that correctly model the behaviour of double
negatives in such languages as have them (this has in fact been
done in some of David Dowty's recent work).

(4) If English spelling is not ridiculous, that's because it's lunatic.
And so is anyone who thinks that the fact that 90% of the words follow
something that might, with some stretching, be called `rules' is any
relief in the face of the abysmally hard time that even supposedly
literate people have with the remaining 10%, which of course include
the most frequent words. I'm thinking of native speakers here;
non-native learners are better placed to face the challenge.

(5) It has in fact been suggested that irregular inflected forms serve
a purpose (they're a sort of mental shortcuts, since they are looked up
as they are, so no time is spent on their morphological analysis), but
they are certainly not essential; very many languages get by quite well
without them.

Given the current worldwide prominence of European languages, which abound
in exceptions from the regular morphological patterns, it is easy to
overlook the fact that they are rather atypical in this respect. Which is
probably related to the reason for which proposals for morphologically
regular IALs tend to come from speakers of European languages. It is
European languages such as Latin that get artificially regularised,
because languages such as Malay, Quechua, Swahili or Turkish can't be
made more regular than they already are.

(6) It takes quite some nerve to attempt to predict the linguistic scene
in the year 3000. Who could have guessed that Modern English would even
exist, let alone be used for international communication, 1000 years ago?

--Ivan