From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Dec 11 13:06:26 1995 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Date: Mon Dec 11 13:06:26 1995 Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: buffer vowel To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Status: OR Message-ID: >For the English I speak there is a set of specified rules. For the >English you speak there is a set of specified rules. Noone (who is sane) >would deny that those sets of rules are different. But at the same >time, the differences between them are sufficiently trivial for the >scholar of english to in general ignore them and suppose the myriad >englishes to be all alike. "Specified" implies a "specifier" (aty least to me). NO one has ever list a complete specification on the rules of any one person's English, so far as I know. While I believe in a higher deity, I do not believe that He specified the rules of English from on high. In any event, if you mean "specific" rules, instead of "specified", I still disagree. In the case of phonology, I do NOT think that two people of sigificantly different dialects have rules that are trivially different. Don Harlow cites a few instances where different dialects of English proved sufficiently mutually unintelligible to cause serious problems. When my best friend's wife first came here (from Bolton Lancashire), I couldn't understand more than an occasional word she said (and I've heard Yorkshire dialects are even harder for Americans to understand). But even when the difference are NOT extreme, what we have are different mappings of the phone space to different phonemes. There are even different numbers of phonemes in some different dialects of English, as with my wife and I. But English provides suffcient redundancy and people are skilled enougfh at error recovery through context analysis that we are able to figure things out. Lojban has lower redundancy, but has a more solid prescription on the number of phonemes and their correspondence to specific letters in words of the language. As such there SHOULD be a direct mapping of phonemes in one dialect to phonemes in the other, even if the exact phone space of each phoneme is slightly different. I suspect that, unless a speaker is intentionally being perverse in his choice of phoneme maps, that most Lojbanists will find the differences in Lojban phonology to be far more trivial than the differences between dialects of English. Indeed, if Ivan, Nick, Goran, and Colin, were able to converse in Lojban when they first met, even given that they come from such different language backgrounds, I think this confirms my statement. Turning to syntax and semantics, i would contend that different varieties of English are even less consistent as to rules. I can more easily testify as to Russian - i can talk fluently with 5 and 6 year olds, but cannot understand mroe than a word or two fo adult Russian. Yet per Chomsky, the two populations are speaking essentially teh same grammar. But I think the kids can't process the adult grammar all that much better than I can. The adult grammar has more sophisticated syntax, and complex semantics as well. Likewise, different regsiters of English have substantially different grammars, in my opinion. The English that I write on the net is NOT the same language that I use in conversation in my living room. It isn't simply true that one is a subset of the other. There are things permitted in the spoken dialects that might not be recognized in print (if only for lack of ability to emphasize for resolution) - I can cite the joke about the 11 or so "that"s in a row, which makes no sense in written English, but is quite clear in spoken English. I might use "ain't", not to mention a few expletives in my spoken language that I would not use in written Engish. You can say that these differences are "trivial", But I think otherwise - my daughter who has been a fluent English speaker with no accent for 2 years has SUBSTANTIAL reading comprehension problems because of the suddenly mrore complex syntax that she is running into in 4th grade textbooks. lojbab