From a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Sun Oct 06 08:44:58 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_2_0); 6 Oct 2002 15:44:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 92488 invoked from network); 6 Oct 2002 15:44:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m14.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 6 Oct 2002 15:44:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mailbox-11.st1.spray.net) (212.78.202.111) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 6 Oct 2002 15:44:57 -0000 Received: from oemcomputer (host213-121-70-140.surfport24.v21.co.uk [213.121.70.140]) by mailbox-11.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24C161EB84; Sun, 6 Oct 2002 17:44:55 +0200 (MEST) To: "John Cowan" Cc: "lojban" Subject: RE: [lojban] prescription & description (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 16:46:34 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <200210052326.TAA03828@mail2.reutershealth.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=122260811 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin John: > 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. All of this I'm happy to agree with, except for the final sentence, since -- from where I stand as a British linguist -- actual disputes about whether X is or isn't StdE tend to concerns things that are colloquial, so it's more a stylistic issue than a stylistic one. But the general point I wanted to make is that for natlangs, the question "Is X part of natlang Y?" is (what linguists call) an 'empirical' question, whereas for conlangs it isn't, up to a certain point of development, and until that point is reached, the descrip/prescrip dichotomy, as understood from its application to natlangs, does not apply. --And.