A little parable about design choice and parochiality

[lproven]

As I've doubtless bored people silly with for years, another of my non-computery interests is languages and linguistics. One subsection of this is conlangs: constructed languages, as opposed to natural languages

Comments

[watervole]

Thanks for a really fascinating post on languages. (This is the kind of post that explains perfectly why I prefer LJ to Twitter)

[lproven]

Cheers!

It was nicked out of a conversation I was involved in on CIX, so I fear its flow is less than ideal, but I'm glad it entertained.

[sharikkamur]

Fascinating. Thank you.

I trust that you're familiar with BlissSymbolics - an entirely written conlang rather than a spoken one.

[lproven]

"Familiar" is perhaps a bit bit strong, but I've /heard/ of it. :¬) I've not really looked into it, though.

Chinese can function like that, as a purely written language; one of my lecturers at university, the late Dr Nan Duncan, could read and write Chinese well enough to have papers published in Chinese journals on her specialist subject - freshwater limnology - and get invited over there to give some talks at a conference. She accepted but stressed that she spoke no Chinese whatsoever.

They didn't believe her, so when she arrived, no interpreter was available and she had to communicate entirely in writing with them. Apparently, giving the speeches was quite a trial, with a Chinese domain specialist doing the technical terms and a hired interpreter doing the rest of the words...

[lproven]

Actually, no, I didn't know that, but then I don't really speak Nihongo. I can't get much further than introducing myself politely. I hope to remedy this some day.

But fascinating as your comment is - no, seriously, not taking the mickey - it doesn't substantially change my point.

Japanese is not simple

[a_cubed]

Liam

Re: Japanese is not simple

[lproven]

A fair point & thanks for the clarification. In my half-hearted defence, well, see my comment to Dop.

But my general thrust, which is that in daily use Japanese does perfectly well without all this stuff, stands, I think... no?

[lproven]

Er, no - do tell?

[lproven]

True!

Lots of decks & things on the /Red Dwarf/, mind... :¬)

[lproven]

Cheers!