Return-Path: Message-Id: <9205202112.AA17115@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Wed May 20 20:15:52 1992 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: further response to Edmund Grimley-Evans X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Wed May 20 20:15:52 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!cuvma.bitnet!LOJBAN two points No I was not in any way trying to denigrate the Esperanto community. The Lojban community will be equally diffuse, even if we ever get to the number of speakers Esperanto has. I was attempting to comment from the standpoint of the linguists for whom the Esperanto community is NOT a real language community. To them the language community you are a part of is the German community, of which you are a non-native speaker, and however fluent you may be in German, they would find your expertise on German not useful for research on the language. Hmm. Maybe I should say 'intuitions' as opposed to 'expertise'. To the extent that there is an English speaking community in your area, they would probably be interested only in observing how the dominant German community affects your speech patterns - but I know of no one doing that kind of work. To research on English, linguists would use pure raised from birth Britishers living in as un-foreign influenced a part of England as they could find (or the corresponding for American English). To understand the instinctive nature of language, they are trying to eliminate as much of the analytical habits that adults get into with regard to language. Someone who learns a language as an adult presumably is more capable of such analysis and less likely to rely on the instictive childlike learning that presumably reflects most closely the brains internal/natural mechanism for learning and processing language. I do not say that I agree with all this, but that is the theory. Now the fact that Esperanto norms are NOT determined by native-born speakers is therefore precisely why such linguists do not consider Esperanto a true language yet, as opposed to a creole (which is precisely an amalgamated language spoken by adults of differing native language backgrounds for mutual communication). There are some linguists, but very few, who study creoles, and the creolization process whereby a creole spoken as the dominant tongue in a region becomes a true language because that becomes the language that adults teach their children. These linguists tend to study those processes, not the adult speaking norms, which as I've said are not 'interesting' because they are likely to be uninstinctive in nature and hence not reminiscent of pure linguistic behavior. Linguists also tend not to study written language for roughly the same reason. No matter how alike the written and spoken langauge are in theory, when you write, you take time to think and analyze and choose your words far more carefully and slowly than when you speak at fluent speeds. Hence style and form in written speech is often different than spoken norms. I wish all this were different, but this is why artificial language promoters have such a hard time being taken seriously by the linguists. Until there is a group of Esperantists and/or Lojbanists who st themselves apart as a speech community and live and raise children who grow up speaking the artificial language - and they end up making the natural errors and e evolutionary natural behavior that appears in other natural languages, the vast majority of linguists will consider any insights into language raised by AL people to be extremely suspect. Our best hope, in my mind, is to convince the community of linguists that as simplified languages, the ALs may show things more clearly that can then be looked for in natural languages. Otherwise, we have to wait for a new generation of linguists that is more interested in broader questions of language use then the basic one of why human beings have language and are able to communicate successfully with it. lojbab