SPUG: need another list moderator
Michael R. Wolf
MichaelRWolf at att.net
Sun Sep 20 16:39:22 PDT 2009
On Sep 20, 2009, at 9:46 AM, Bill Campbell wrote:
> As languages mature they tend to get less structured, and, to a
> degree, simplified. English is pretty much the mongrel child of
> Latin, Greek, and Germanic languages.
Could you define "mature" and "structured"?
Just for the sake of discussion, I've heard that the "Culture of
English"(tm) is to evolve in creative/practical ways that are not
common in other languages. Specifically, we do not have a "regulatory
board" for English, but French does. There are pros/cons on each side
of this discussion.
And for more discussion's sake, I read[1] that there is no such thing
as an "advanced" language. We're familiar with technology being more-
or less-advanced (bronze age, iron age, etc), but even less-
technoligically advanced societies have languages that are every bit
as advaned as more-advanced societies. As an example, they mentioned
the Maoiri, a society that had not learned to use metals when first
discovered by Europeans, but their language had as many distinctions
as European languages. They may have been on different dimensions
(e.g. tense, honorifics, caste level of speaker, listener, object;
intention; whether it's first-hand experience, second-hand
observation, or third-hand heresay), but (as any non-trivial language
translation will soon uncover) for every dimension lacking in the
comparison in one direction, another dimension was lacking in the
opposite direction. For example, a language that would lack the fine
temporal disctinctions (past imperfect subjunctive pluperfect)
distinctions, it may have much more refined social distinctions (I,
being of less class than you, refer to someone else of unknown class).
Stated more simply: Lisp, assembly, HTML, and Perl aren't better or
worse languages than each other, just solving different problems with
different linguistic structures. I'm not sure how "mature" or
"structured" may map into these languages as they "evolved".
Michael
Notes:
1 - "Language Myths", Edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill
--
Michael R. Wolf
All mammals learn by playing!
MichaelRWolf at att.net
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