From jcowan@reutershealth.com Sat Oct 05 16:14:27 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_2_0); 5 Oct 2002 23:14:27 -0000 Received: (qmail 62762 invoked from network); 5 Oct 2002 23:14:27 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m5.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 5 Oct 2002 23:14:27 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail2.reutershealth.com) (65.246.141.151) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 5 Oct 2002 23:14:27 -0000 Received: from skunk.reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[10.65.117.21]) by mail2.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with SMTP id TAA03828; Sat, 5 Oct 2002 19:26:02 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200210052326.TAA03828@mail2.reutershealth.com> Received: by skunk.reutershealth.com (sSMTP sendmail emulation); Sat, 5 Oct 2002 19:13:44 -0400 Subject: Re: [lojban] prescription & description (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism To: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk (And Rosta) Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 19:13:44 -0400 (EDT) Cc: jcowan@reutershealth.com (John Cowan), lojban@yahoogroups.com (lojban) In-Reply-To: from "And Rosta" at Oct 05, 2002 08:15:08 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL6] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=8122456 X-Yahoo-Profile: john_w_cowan And Rosta scripsit: > I think you may have missed the point I wanted to make. Yes, I had. > (4') "'Less people' is not Standard E" I think it would be better to say that people do say it who in other respects speak some approximation to StdE, which is not a well-defined language (what is its phonology, e.g.?) and can be expected to have fuzzy boundaries. It is on the boundary of what can be tolerated in *written* StdE, whereas it will pass in spoken StdE without much trouble. Perhaps this can be best understood by saying that StdE is a mixture of sharply defined StdE (which is like Latin or *there*-Livagian, i.e., a given text either breaks Priscian's head or it doesn't) and spoken English dialects. In places where the written and spoken langs are sharply separated, e.g. germanophone Switzerland, this problem doesn't arise: there is Swiss German and there is _Schriftdeutsch_. Now no standardization can standardize *everything*, so there is always going to be something that has to be classified by hand, as it were. Semantics is of course where this fact is most apparent. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com Unified Gaelic in Cyrillic script! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celticonlang