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d-miurge
Supreme tranceaddict



Registered: Jul 2004
Location: Unicornland

Jacques Lacan ftw!

Old Post Jun-11-2007 22:33 
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Lira
Ancient BassAddict



Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasilia, Brazil

Hover your mouse over the words with this kind of underline in order to understand its meaning, in case it's a new word to you

Alphabet vs Language

Well, back to the main question: Can the number of alphabets enrich a language? Not really, and the reason why I say there's no link between the two is inspired on a minor detail: the alphabet is simply a way of codifying a language. Just as a telegram is not the news it contains, a writing system is not the language itself, but the medium used to convey a message.

Usually, when there's an alphabet shift, that is, some group decides to use another alphabet to write their language, it's political decision that doesn't necessarily lead to a lexical borrowing of any sort. The Japanese, for example, have borrowed an insane amount of words from European languages, without necessarily using the Latin Alphabet. Mongolian, as I said, doesn't seem to have gone through any major change in its vocabulary in spite of all the different alphabets used to write it in the last century.

Basis for comparison among languages

If you want to compare the structure of a language (i.e. whether it prefers to place the verb at the end of sentences, or whether it tends to bond words together), yes, there is some basis for comparison - that's called Linguistic Tipology. However, if you want to compare whether a language is more developed then another... well, you simply can't.

Different languages engage in different strategies, and they all evolve according to the needs of its speakers. Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had their heyday during the golden days of philology. They were seen as "the best of all languages", because of how they declined nouns and whatnot. In fact, Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, was a specialist in Sanskrit. However, there's a reason why most Latin languages lost these features - you could achieve the same result by just having a more fixed order (reason why you could scramble words in Latin as much as you wanted, although you can't do that in Portuguese, Spanish or Italian, without changing the meaning of the sentence). It's more economic. These Latin languages, on the other hand, usually have a more complex set of verb tenses. I, for example, speak Portuguese which has 21 different time tenses... and I don't miss any of these tenses when I'm speaking English, which has a far less complicated verbal paradigm. In a way or another, I can convey a similar meaning in spite of these meanings.

The "perfect" language

Amount of words and "usefulness" of a language aren't necessarily related either. First of all, words only make sense within a context, and this context only makes sense within a language - and, finally, this language only makes sense to a particular group of speakers. It's utterly useless for a Christian to learn the word "आत्म" without its philosophical background. It's like showing a car to a caveman - sure, the caveman knows its a metallic structure with wheels, but he's not in the necessary social context, so he won't ever learn what a "car" is (unless you take him to civilisation).

Secondly, the whole analytic tradition in philosophy started out with Frege's assumption that words and things don't necessarily have a one-to-one relationship. Several words could mean the same thing, and several things could be described with the same word. It's a mess, really, and no language could fix that because of how human cognition words - every speaker of this perfect language would have to know that Clark Kent is Superman, that George Orwell is Eric Arthur Blair and so on. And, the problem with having way too many words is that some of them might even refer to nothing at all, so you could end up with loads of "useless" distinctions.

Finally, there's a reason why I'm a bit sceptic about computers learning a language as we would expect them to: computers can't access meaning. All they can learn is the morphosyntax... which is quite different from how we think. Unless, of course, you find a way to plug the computer into the world and a particular social life, so it could recognise people, how the concept of atman works and what cars are for


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Old Post Jun-12-2007 02:48  Brazil
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Omega_M
Nostalgia



Registered: Jun 2005
Location: Ether

hmmm...interesting. I will post my thoughts on this later. Don't have that much time right now.


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Originally posted by twilightki : It feels like something you'd listen to at 4 in the morning, or listen to in your car while you're going in a tunnel.

Old Post Jun-12-2007 13:11  India
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Lira
Ancient BassAddict



Registered: Nov 2001
Location: Brasilia, Brazil

Here's a little something you might enjoy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history..._20031218.shtml


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Old Post Jun-12-2007 18:43  Brazil
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