From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:46:17 2010 Reply-To: ucleaar Sender: Lojban list Date: Tue Dec 19 17:39:28 1995 From: ucleaar Subject: Re: buffer vowel X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Tue Dec 19 17:39:28 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU 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. It should have been obvious that I was not claiming that grammarians have stated the rules of each of our phonologies. What I meant was that each phonology consists of a set of rules, and that these rules do not shift like quicksand. > 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. Maybe so. But whether it is so or not has no bearing on the nature of the phonological rule system. When I said the interidiolectal differences are usually trivial, I was merely trying to explain to you why your average theoretical grammarian doesn't feel obliged to declare which idiolect is being described, or to remind the reader of this. > 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. > 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. I agree with all this, as I've already said. Lojban grammar prescribes - vocalically speaking - seven countries but no map. No natural phonology is like that; but that needn't be understood as a criticism of lojban. Differences between phonologies are irrelevant to these issues. > Turning to syntax and semantics, i would contend that different varieties > of English are even less consistent as to rules. You may be right, but noone has managed to show it, and that's not for want of trying. While differences are multitudinous, they are tiny as a proportion of what is the same. > 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. That sort of claim wouldn't surprise me coming from a person working on register, but I doubt I'd see it coming from a person working on grammar, since they'd be obliged to show what these substantial differences are. > 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. This is not evidence for grammatical differences. > You can say that these differences are "trivial", But I think otherwise I don't care that much - the extent of differences has no real bearing on theoretical grammar. But still, if anyone tried to verify what you assert then I'd be very interested, but also very dubious. --- And