Re[4]: Language (was: Re: African Languages (was: Re: Re[2]: [tied]

At 3:34:53 AM on Saturday, May 3, 2008, fournet.arnaud
wrote:

> From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>

>> So far as I can see, the invention of formal logic had no
>> impact on the development of human language.

> It led to the invention of science and scientific prose. A
> detail.

Scientific prose is merely a specialized *use* of language.
(And I do not agree that the invention of formal logic led
to the invention of science. Formal logic has very little
to do with science; it belongs rather to mathematics and to
philosophy.)

>>> French and German are obviously languages that have been
>>> consciously made to be what they are.

>> They obviously are not.

> You are generally well-informed so it's quite surprising
> you wrote this.

> French has nearly been invented out of nothing with the
> deliberate purpose of replacing Latin.

No. French developed out of Vulgar Latin by perfectly
normal processes.

> They created the Academie for that purpose :

French had already started to diverge noticeably from Latin
some 800 years before the Académie was founded. Far from
creating a language, it has tried to arbitrate among
competing possibilities (and has often been ignored). And a
de facto official standard already existed in the 16th
century.

[...]

> And German is basically a language invented by Luther with
> the deliberate purpose of translating the Bible.

Luther deliberately chose among *existing* forms to make his
work as widely accessible as possible; he did not invent the
German language.

> I guess that about 50% of German vocabulary has been
> invented out of scratch.

I doubt that this is true even if you count dictionary
entries; it certainly isn't true if you count tokens in
connected text, even if you're (improperly, in my view)
including word-creation by such normal procedures as
derivation and compounding as invention from scratch.

> You must be completely ignorant of modern history to write
> there is no conscious intervention in all that.

I didn't say that there had been *no* conscious
intervention. Obviously there has been some, especially in
the lexicon. But even those changes that originated in
someone's conscious choice are propagated largely
unconsciously.

Brian