How do you explain the emergence of Latin as the global language in the past? How do you explain that economic integration is tightly correlated with linguistic integration? How do you explain that both gold and Latin rose and fell together? How do you explain that the beginning of the era of super nationalism correlates with the fall of both?
Like in Code 46?
After your post, I showed that to design a language is not to centrally plan.
What makes this not a spontaneous order?
Human language is the result of biological evolution and not cultural evolution. Nobody invented language just like nobody invented human vision or human psychology. No, nobody is born speaking English or Japanese, but the new born baby is already equipped with innate neural circuitry specifically dedicated for language. The fact that an infinite number of different dialects/“language” can take form and the newborn baby must acquire the local dialect does not negate the innate theory of language. Many psycho-linguistics have already shown how all of the “languages” of the world really converge to a finite set of rules that they term “The Universal Grammar”. All the variation of the different “languages” can be reduced to a finite set of binary parameters that may be can theoretically be set differently for each “language”
That was kindof my point. It is unlikely for an invented language to come under widespread use, as the language will reflect only the creator, not the society that uses it. And if it does, then the process of linguistic evolution will change it over time to match the needs of its users.
Why is that relevant? From your reasoning, no one invented mathematics, either. For we were “already equipped with innate neural circuitry” that defines or lets us understand it.
This sounds like an other revolt against capitalism. The only way that people would choose it is in the situation that it does reflect the society. How is it a problem that it would “reflect […] the creator”? Every good in a market “reflects […] the creator”. But the ones that survive the competition prove that they also “reflect […] the” consumer.
Plus artificial languages are able to incorporate mechanisms that drive their own evolution. For if it includes certain rules of derivation, users are able to use those rules to create words instead of just using words from other languages or something.
(By the way, Esperanto evolved. Yet people still regard it as a constructed language because it retained much of its fundamentals and regularities.)
When it comes to language, my interest lies with the Elder Futhark.
Singapore Vernacular English, commonly known as Singlish is an English dialect used in Singapore. It should not be confused with Standard Singapore English. According to the 2000 census, which does not distinguish between Singlish and Standard Singapore English, 71% of Singaporeans are literate in the English language.[2] Generally speaking, well-educated Singaporeans are able to code-switch between Singlish and Standard Singapore English. Many Singaporeans also do not speak Singlish.
Singlish is commonly regarded with low prestige in Singapore. For this reason, Singlish is not used in formal communication.
The vocabulary of Singlish consists of words originating from English, Malay (mainly Bahasa Melayu rather than Indonesian), Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi and to a lesser extent various other European, Indic and Sinitic languages, while Singlish syntax resembles southern varieties of Chinese. Also, elements of American and Australian slang have come through from imported television series and films. As a spoken language, Singlish is constantly evolving. In the last two decades, an increasing amount of Mandarin words have found their way into Singlish because Mandarin Chinese is taught to most Singaporean Chinese students in school. Japanese words and memes are becoming more common as young Singaporeans become exposed to Japanese culture, particularly through Anime.
The Singaporean government currently discourages the use of Singlish in favour of Standard Singapore English, as it believes in the need for Singaporeans to be able to effectively communicate with the other English users in the world. The government runs the Speak Good English Movement to emphasise the point.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlish
It seems to me that the disagreement (if there really is one) is over what the goods* are. Are the goods whole languages, or are they individual words and expressions?
Individual words and expressions (more generally, memes) are certainly one kind of good. Whole languages are goods as well, albeit very expensive to acquire. Can an artificial language compete with a natural one, perhaps by having a lower acquisition cost (being easier to learn)? Perhaps a modified version of an extant language that is less aesthetically pleasing but, say, more functional, would be sought after. But I don’t think one made entirely from scratch would be.
However, I’m going to put on the yellow hat here and try to make a case for artificial language working despite the spontaneous order argument. To do this I am first going to have to make the wild assumption that the “Universal Grammar” is not a discovery about human instinct but rather a logical/practical necessity. To do that, I will presume there really are only a certain limited number of logical/practical ways for a language to structure itself. I will try to defend that by saying permutations of SVO, SOV, etc. are limited, and even if all languages stick to a smaller subset than all the possible permutations, this is still no evidence of a language instinct because the other permutations may be inherently unstable for other logical/practical reasons.
I’ll let a Google coder maker part of the case:
"One of the universals in Universal Grammar theory, which both Pinker and Noam Chomsky support, is that if a language has verbs before objects, as English does, then it uses prepositions, while if a language has objects before verbs, as Japanese does, it uses postpositions. Pinker mentions a possible reason this universal holds is so the language can enforce a consistent branching decision, either left-branching or right-branching, so our brains can parse it easily.
"Some grammatical English sentences are impossible for our brains to parse simply because there’s too many dangling branches. The first of these examples parses in our brains OK, but the other two simply don’t parse:
(The rapidity (that the motion has) is remarkable).
(The rapidity (that the motion (that the wing has) has) is remarkable).
(The rapidity (that the motion (that the wing (that the hummingbird has) has) has) is remarkable)."
Now it seems pretty silly, prima facie, to call Pinker’s consistent branching decision an instinct hardwired into us. Rather, it seems a facet of the spontaneous order in light of human limitations: after all, no language would get off the ground unless it had a consistent branching pattern, because cases like the above would soon proliferate. In other words, it would lose out big-time on the free market.
So the Universal Grammar has to do with something hardwired into us (a limitation of our ability to parse), but to call it an instinct is sloppy because it implies too much.
Now that I’ve cursorily defended this fairly outrageous claim, I will try to make the case for an artificial language: Perhaps once a few critical choices, such as the preposition/postposition choice above, have been made correctly, it really doesn’t matter how the rest of the language is structured as long as it’s reasonably efficient, logical, and not too ugly. Moreover, any ugly and/or inefficient parts will be able to be (and hence will be) discarded on the “free market” of personal interactions as people habitually use the more efficient or eloquent parts or create new ones.
I’m not really convinced by this, because it still strikes me that, “What would be the point?” I suppose it could be useful given that we live in a Statist world where language and personal movement are fairly controlled, wherein it may be necessary to “fight fire with fire” by artificially modifying language that has already been detrimentally modified somehow by the State. Whether we could find any certain examples of that I don’t know. I’d personally rather create telepathy than worry about this, but that’s just me…
*Metaphorically speaking
would be interesting to see what the situation would be like without the government.
Seems like businesses would want to stick with formal languages, and that these hybrid languages might only live on the fringes where a couple big languages collide and possibly mix in some smaller ones as well.
But then, eventually, if generations of kids grow up learning it on the street and if it spreads out from the fringes in both directions it could be a lot simpler for both cultures to just learn and speak the hybrid than to speak each others language to each other and translate or have to learn two whole languages.
I think language and culture in general is something that might be too often ignored by libertarian types (maybe I am just not looking in the right places). It seems important to people, and sometimes it gets used as a way to justify state action, and helps to reinforce nationalism or at least differences between people of different nations.
It is very relevant because any talk of language design is nonsensical. And it is different from mathematics.
Mathematics must be acquired by conscious training and learning. There are indeed innate cognitive abilities that allow you to learn and understand mathematics but doing even simple mathematical operations such as addition, multiplication, division, etc… must be acquired by learning sequential mechanical steps and procedures that must be practiced. There is no innate circuitry to do long division or multiplication and certianly not more complex things such as algebra or solving differential equations. The process/procedure itself must be learned/memorized and practiced.
Language is different. The extremely complex operations involved in language - grammar, syntax, vocabulary are already wired. They are encoded in the genes. You don’t have to consciously think about the process when encoding and decoding language. This is why babies learn it naturally from the environment without any special effort or conscious training and learning on their part.
Mathematics was developed over time by humans like all other branches of academics. Language was not. There is no such thing as a primitive language or some tribe of clang that do not posses a language that is as sophisticated and complex as any other. But there are many people who have absolutely no training in mathematics.
What I see is a voluntary effort to synthesize various languages into a single language.
I am not sure if I would describe it as an ‘effort,’ seems like it just sort of ‘happened.’ and like I said its important to keep in mind “Singlish is commonly regarded with low prestige in Singapore. For this reason, Singlish is not used in formal communication.” I would guess this is because it would be difficult to do business in Singlish compared to formal English, unless of course the language spread further. Seems to me that language especially in the international business community is very much subject to the network effect
The grammar of English is less (unnecessarily) complicated than French? I’ve yet to meet a native-English speaker who even knows the grammatical rules. And inflammable mean flammable, for gods sake!
Yes, I would imagine that eventually everyone on the planet will speak the same language, given the advances in communication technology.
My first language was Russian. Living in Belgium, I watched French T.V. since I was about… 5 years old I guess, but went to a British school where I learnt English as the main language, but still had lots of French classes. So I speak as someone who tried to learn both as foreign languages, and English worked out much better. Now of course, there was more pressure to learn English in the first place; but I learned French for about 12 years, and still can’t understand the grammar. When it comes to English, although I may not know the names of various grammatical rules, or even know them explicitly, I think I’ve grasped most of them on an intuitive level.
Dude, do you not realize that people construct languages that do work? For example, many people speak Esperanto. My idea is not exactly novel or anything.
I don’t think there are any grammatical rules for English, just some suggestions that rarely seem to be followed. I learned German and English pretty much simultaneously and I found German to be much easier to pick up.
What was your first language?