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From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Subject: Boring languages (Re: Bajoran language)
Message-ID: <D0JsA6.3zF@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <3be0se$o71@mother.usf.edu> <3bo1od$t45@bcrkh13.bnr.ca> <3bqgh1$njf@fs7.ece.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 14:29:55 GMT
Lines: 46

In article <3bqgh1$njf@fs7.ece.cmu.edu> bruno@ece.cmu.edu (Marcelo Bruno) writes:
>In article <3bo1od$t45@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>, Bob Michael <bob.michael@nt.com> writes:
>|> In article <librikD02q63.Hyx@netcom.com> David Librik, librik@netcom.com
>|> writes:
>|> >...Indo-European (surely the most boring of all language families :->)
>|> 
>|> I've always felt it was, too.  But I figured it's just because I'm a
>|> native speaker of an IE language, thus it's familiar to me.

What, all of it?  Have you looked at Irish, Armenian, Ossetic, Romany?
How familiar do you find them?  I think that the vast typological variety
that exists within the IE family is fascinating.  Now, if all IE languages
were as similar to one another as English and Spanish, that would be boring.

The problem is, of course, that when people say `IE', they often mean
`Romance/Germanic as described by traditional (Latin-based) grammar'.
And of course a conlang following that model is likely to be boring.
(Have you heard of the woman who was making meatballs of different
sizes, because her husband asked for some variety in her cooking?)

Besides, there is a lot of interesting stuff which simply happens to
lie outside of the scope of this kind of description.  A few days ago,
whilst translating Chapter 2 of JRR Tolkien's _Quenta Silmarillion_
into Quenya, I came across the following sentence:

  `Why dost thou attempt
   <<a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority>>?'

In some languages a literal translation of the highlighted part would
be ungrammatical.  Would it work in Quenya?  How do _wh_-dependencies
work there?  (Can there be more than one clause boundary between a
_wh_-element and the associated predicate?)  I suspect that this
is a question without an answer.  It's not the kind of matter
to which language designers are likely to give much thought.

>From the point of view of the linguist, no human language should
>be intrinsically more "interesting" or more "boring" than another.

On the other hand, each of us should be allowed (indeed, expected) to
find some phenomena, and some languages, more interesting than others.

-- 
`That's yer oan problem, Judas', they telt him.  `It's nae concern tae us.'
Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk/chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)  (The G-- G--)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,   Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House E113, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Pk Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
