Subject: Re: [lojban] Amusing stuff

From: Robin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 14:32:21 +0300

Ivan A Derzhanski wrote:
> 
> Robin wrote:
> > Anyone who wants to read yet another example of an ignorant linguist
> > trashing IALs can look at a recent entry in my forum (and my rather
> > irate reply) at http://www3.bravenet.com/forum/show.asp?userid=dn294893
> 
> Interesting. I have a question, Robin. Why do you insist on calling
> the chap a linguist? He doesn't come across as knowledgeable about
> linguistics at all. (He doesn't come across as a bright person either,
> but that's a different story.) I don't blame you for replying in an
> irate mode.
> 

A few people on Auxlang made the same point. He seems like someone who
studied linguistics some time back, when people were into Generative
Phonology and other weird stuff. The irate tone was largely because I
greatly enjoy writing like that, but usually don't in order to avoid
flame wars (or just hurting people's feelings), so this was a good
opportunity to be venomous.

> A few comments on particular points:
> 
> (1) The statement that all languages are equally complex is true in the
> sense that all have, at least potentially, the same expressive power.
> Which is very different from the sort of complexity that is relevant to
> both human and automatic processing (including acquisition). There is
> a myth that this complexity is also equally distributed among languages,
> because any language that is simpler in some respect would be more
> complex in another, but that myth doesn't stand even the most benevolent
> scrutiny.

.iesai
> 
> (2) `The set of words of any language is open, so no language has more
> or fewer words than another' is true in the same way as `The set of
> all natural numbers divisible by 10 is of the same cardinality as the
> set of all natural numbers'. Except that while in maths what is
> strictly provable takes precedence over what is intuitive, in areas
> such as language acquisition it isn't always so.
> 
> That said, comparing sizes of published dictionaries is not a sound
> way of comparing the sizes of vocabularies, although it is perhaps
> useful as a guideline. There are many other factors, both linguistic
> (the productivity and predictability of derivation and compounding)
> and extralinguistic (the diligence of the lexicographers, the resources
> available to them).
> 
Yes - it all depends on what you count as lexis. As I said, Turkish has
a very small "dictionary" vocabulary, but someone once wrote a book
explaining all the forms of one verb (sevmek) - it had over 1400 entries
(this was originally his PhD thesis, which shows that even having a PhD
in linguistics may not mean very much!). Similarly, what is the
vocabulary of Lojban? The approximately 2000 cmavo and gismu? The
infinite set of possible Lojban words? The set of words that have ever
been, or are regularly used in Lojban?

> I've never approved of the statement `English has more words than any
> other language', because I'm not convinced that the people who say so
> have done an exhaustive search, or even considered some likely rivals
> such as Hindustani.

Not sure on this one. The people at the OED have done pretty exhaustive
research, but then they haven't looked at Hindustani. Similarly with
Ottoman Turkish - one view is that since educated speakers were (at
least) triglossic, one should also include the entire vocabularies of
Arabic and Persian.

> 
> (4) If English spelling is not ridiculous, that's because it's lunatic.
> And so is anyone who thinks that the fact that 90% of the words follow
> something that might, with some stretching, be called `rules' is any
> relief in the face of the abysmally hard time that even supposedly
> literate people have with the remaining 10%, which of course include
> the most frequent words. I'm thinking of native speakers here;
> non-native learners are better placed to face the challenge.

This may be true. My students tend to produce consistent errors, like
"thougth" and "ougth" or suffer from first-language interference, while
many native-speaker friends seem completely at sea. Dammit, I still
spell a lot of words wrong!

> (5) It has in fact been suggested that irregular inflected forms serve
> a purpose (they're a sort of mental shortcuts, since they are looked up
> as they are, so no time is spent on their morphological analysis), but
> they are certainly not essential; very many languages get by quite well
> without them.

Is there any empirical evidence to support this theory? It's
interesting, but historical (and occasionally phonological) explanations
seem more productive.

> (6) It takes quite some nerve to attempt to predict the linguistic scene
> in the year 3000. Who could have guessed that Modern English would even
> exist, let alone be used for international communication, 1000 years ago?

Quite - and how many Medieval scholars would have dreamt that one day
hardly anyone would know Latin? I may have mentioned here that in a
role-playing game I'm running, set in the year 2048, the main
international languages are Esperanto (in the EC), Lojban (for geeks),
Chinese characters and Spanglish. Oh yes, and the main international
currency is the Canadian Dollar ;-)

co'o mi'e robin.