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Hallo conlangers! On Tuesday 31 May 2011 20:20:08, Maxime Papillon wrote: > > Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 16:23:20 +0200 > > From: [log in to unmask] > > Subject: Natlang loglangs? (was: Glossopoeia vs. reconstruction) > > To: [log in to unmask] > > > > "A natlang shaped by deliberate planning" - what? We are > > obviously using the word "natlang" in different meanings! > > To me (and probably to everyone else on the list save you) > > a natlang is a language that grew out of centuries of > > *unplanned* linguistic evolution. > > Every literary language (and surely a number of non-literary languages) has > gone through some degree of planning and control, from artificial > prescriptions becoming common, to prestige dialects erasing less > prestigious ones by law, to complete language reworks and revivals. > "Planned" and "Unplanned" are not purely binary with conlangs on one side > and natlangs on the other; some natlangs were deliberately shaped in some > way and some conlangs obtained some freedom with regard to their original > design. Sure. Many standard languages are to a large degree regulated and planned. The boundary between natlangs and conlangs is a blurry one; there are borderline cases such as Nynorsk and Ivrit. As I have said before, the difference between an artificially standardized language and a zonal auxlang is roughly analogous to that between a dialect continuum and a language family, and there is no hard and fast line. > And was precisely raising the question of whether such a natlang upon which > artificial modifications were imposed is still a natlang, and if possibly > not at what degree is it not? I'm confident that even though some > sociolects of English follow the invented rules of not splitting > infinitives and not ending a sentence in a preposition, what these people > speak is not a conlang, but what about a natlang where a lot of the > morphology was consciously regularized? It is a matter of degree; but to turn a natlang into a loglang, which is the point of this discussion, one would have to restructure the grammar so dramatically that any mutual intelligibility is lost, and the result is a new language, though with an a posteriori vocabulary. (Indeed, many of the words would have to be changed in meaning as well to do that trick.) -- ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html "Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1