Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
Like the radicals attaching to the different carbon atoms in an organic compound, every word in this language should have provisions for extension to denote different shades of meaning of the same root word.
Obviously, many languages exhibit such a feature to *some* extent, e.g. via affixes that modify a word in a particular way. But you'll notice that natural languages have generally evolved to use such features fairly sparingly and not always terribly consistently.
If you did try to apply such an approach across the whole language, it's not clear what the global inventory of "shades of meaning" would actually be or if such a thing could even usefully exist.
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
why can't we invent a language understood by both man and machine.
Well, we obviously can do so in a limited way. And for specific tasks where particular machine input is required, we do invent what you might see as highly restricted subsets of languages. But...
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
All languages and the sub languages and dialects of the world have evolved "naturally". But why leave it to nature?
One key reason for leaving it to nature is that natural languages evolve in a way that is bound by how human thinking works with respect to the faculties involved in language. If we invent an artificial language, we might accidentally be doing a worse job than 'nature' because we may inadvertently introduce structures, logic etc that are actually more difficult to acquire naturally.
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
Why should there be two sets of vocabulary, one for the so called 'cultured-elite' and one for the plebeian where some words or phrases are termed as slangs and others not, when "shit" and "excrement" infact means the same thing.
Probably because it turns out that having words of different registers fulfills roles such as marking one's belonging to a particular group, conveying attitude etc. "Shit" and "excrament" actually don't refer to 'the same thing': the way in which these two words are interpreted by the brain are arguably quite different.
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
One may argue that some classical languages follow strict rules and are very "scientific".
In terms of their 'natural' form, there's no basis for such an argument. For example, there's no basis for nonsense claims such as "Latin was a very logical language".
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
Great languages of the world like English and Mandarin are spoken by billions of people. They evolved independently in two corners of the world and are hence poles apart in grammer and lexicon.
This depends on your point of view. All human languages share some very fundamental characteristics. To an alien visiting our planet, all human languages may well appear to them as simply "variants of the same thing".
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
may argue, why the total number of people speaking these language constitute roughly half the population of the universe
N.B. "planet Earth" != "universe"!!! (This is actually not a facetious comment: to what extent features of known natural human language are tied to the specific biology of human beings is a very open question. Would 'language' that evolved in life with different biology to that on earth necessarily share the same features as language evolved in terrestrial biology? Are there constraints on the possible forms of biology-- e.g. perhaps a replicating mechanism close to DNA is necessary or perhaps it can vary considerably-- that fundamentally constrain 'language'?)
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
Why are they so popular?
For sociological and geopolitical reasons and certainly little if anything to do with any linguistic feature of those languages.
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
If we talk of ONE WORLD we must also speak in ONE LANGUAGE, not shoved down through the throat of the people but accepted spontaneously throughout the world for its sheer efficiency.
How many natural languages a 'globalised' world can support is a very open question. However, the fact of the matter is that there has been a general trend towards fewer and fewer languages in any case as, for example, geographical boundaries have become less and less boundaries to social mobility. If your key worry is that there are 'too many languages', this problem may well actually solve itself naturally over time...
Syeda Tanbira Zaman wrote:
It will be difficult at first even to conceive such an idea or to orient our thinking around a language that will be
strictly scientific in structure.
I wonder how you'd even decide on what constituted "strictly scientific" and what didn't.
[Edited at 2012-04-14 15:44 GMT]