Re: Check out What is Ogam -- Noh-oh-oh! Don't!!

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Saturday, August 17, 2002 1:07 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Check out What is Ogam -- Noh-oh-oh! Don't!!
>
>
> Let me be, for a moment, the devil's advocate here. There's no

doubt

> that the practice of scribes in various monasteries or of the
> chancelleries of rulers has played a large role for the
> general "look" of languages, cf. the "practical", functional look

of

> Czech and Dutch vs the more "impressive" look of Polish and German.
> One might of course argue that this is mere surface, which has
> nothing to do with the _spoken_ substance of the language; but
> consider the concrete situation: you are the head of the clerks of

a

> monastery or chancellery and your scribes ask you: how should we
> write this or that? As mr X from M or as mr Y from N pronounces it?
> In the end you can't, in that situation, free yourself from
> arbitrariness: it is to be written that way because I say so. In

how

> many cases, when we refer to a paricular document as holy writ and
> proof that this is how they spoke then, are we just repeating the
> whims of a dozen people?

--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:

> There's much reason in what _you_ are saying, Torsten, but that

isn't what Edo Nyland understands by "creating" the languages of
Europe. He regards them quite literally as conlangs based on Basque
(or rather what he imagines to be Basque), not merely as more-or-less
arbitrarily codified vernaculars (which literary languages admittedly
are). He goes the full monty, which is why his kookiness is so
spectacular.

>
> Piotr
>
>

I know the ideas of mr. Nyland and I agree with you. Call it a gut
reaction when everyone jumped him.
Since somebody's experiments sometime in the fifties, everyone knows
what a pecking order is. When they meet at the water trough, chicken
#1 will peck chicken #2, chicken #5 will peck chicken #6 etc. But
another finding of those experiments was that when at the water
trough chicken #2 meets chicken #7 or chicken #3 meets chicken #8:
peace and quiet. You might remember it from school: when you're in
fourth grade, third grade is stupid and deserves to get it, but
second grade can't help it that they're dumb. Somehow my cerebellum
picked that up and now, everytime is someone gets bashed in public,
my brain goes: "Ah, they feel they're one grade higher".

Anyway, that was my reaction.

Torsten