At 2:28:00 PM on Monday, October 10, 2005, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:
> (I will not give up the idea that written language is
> indeed a feature of a language that characterizes it)
What you mean is that you won't give up the idea that the
particular notational system used to represent a language is
a feature of the language. Fine, but don't expect me to pay
any attention to arguments for *linguistic* oddness that
rely on it (e.g., the spelling of particular sounds in
different languages); as far as I'm concerned, you might as
well claim that 'is spoken in the southern hemisphere' is an
inherently linguistic feature of a language.
[...]
>>> - as you know, anyone who learns a language that uses
>>> the Roman Alphabet always learns the written language as
>>> well as the spoken language.
>> On the contrary, I know that this is false. I cannot
>> imagine where you got such an idea.
> -- What world are you living in? Who in today's world
> does not learn the written form of a language when he is
> learning it, especially if it is written with an alphabet?
> Come on, nobody nowadays learns an alphabetical language
> solely in its spoken form - unless you mean only to learn
> a few phrases here and there.
What world are *you* living in that has no bilingual
illiterates, and no one, literate in his birth tongue or
not, who learns another *spoken* language by immersion,
or from a horizontal dictionary, or the like? For that
matter, there are an awful lot of monolingual illiterates in
languages that have standard written forms.
And why are you artificially restricting yourself to the
present, unless perhaps because the statement is even more
obviously false if you go back a few centuries?
Finally, 'alphabetical' can no more modify 'language' than
'pink' can; it describes a kind of writing system and
contrasts with 'logographic', 'abjad', 'abugida', etc.
Brian