I replied to a message from Dave, and he suggested the group might be interested.
RL
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Sayers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 10 April 2015 11:56 AM
To: Roger Lass
Subject: Re: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English?
That particular website has previously posted stories (and had comments) demonstrating a Utilitarian view of language with a very large 'U'. It's an interesting window into non-linguistic (yet highly professional) discourses of language, at the least. Were you going to email your message to the list as well as just to me? I'm sure others would be interested.
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University (2009-2015) [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
On 09/04/2015 06:44, Roger Lass wrote:
> I rather feel that the question is silly and not worth asking. It's been around for a long time, the idea of creating a 'universal character' that was popular in the 17th century where people made lists (or tried to) of the contents of the world and tried to invent languages to express all of them is a famous example). There is also a nice parody in the scholars of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels. Then later there were sillinesses like Esperanto and other artificial languages (Esperanto is particularly amusing because it's largely Romance-based, so therefore almost universally unavailable)/ Languages are not the kind of things you go out and invent, any more than you invent organisms. Why on earth should one want to create a fake language when there are so many around we don't know much about, and we don't really know what properties a language should have to be usable or even acquirable?
>
> And of course there's also the problem that if someone were able to invent something like a natural language and people actually used it, then it would change (no two utterances are identical, so there is always imperfect replication), and since speakers would be living in different places there would be something like allopatric speciation, and each group would change in its own way, and we would have in the end lots of mutually unintelligible languages whose speakers would discover cute stuff like aspect and ergatives and non-pulmonic airstreams, as they did at the beginning and still do.
>
> There is something curiously naive and early Enlightenment and mid-18th-century about this -- the idea that one can create and (for it to be worth making in the firstplace) 'fix' a language so that it would not split into wildly different dialects and that any dialect would be comprehensible to speakers a couple of centuries later. Even Dr Johnson, the great fixer, gave up in a sad little passage in the introduction to his 1755 dictionary.
> RL
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Dave Sayers
> Sent: 08 April 2015 11:17 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English?
>
> A conspicuously linguistic question in a usually tech-focused website that's part of my daily information diet:
>
> http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/04/08/162231/
>
> Dave
>
> --
> Dr. Dave Sayers
> Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University Honorary
> Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University (2009-2015)
> [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>
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