further response to Edmund Grimley-Evans

[Logical Language Group <cbmvax!uunet!grebyn.com!lojbab>]

two points

No I was not in any way trying to denigrate the Esperanto community.  The
Lojban community will be equally diffuse, even if we ever get to the number
of speakers Esperanto has.  I was attempting to comment from the standpoint of
the linguists for whom the Esperanto community is NOT a real language
community.  To them the language community you are a part of is the German
community, of which you are a non-native speaker, and however fluent you may
be in German, they would find your expertise on German not useful for
research on the language.  Hmm. Maybe I should say 'intuitions' as opposed
to 'expertise'.

To the extent that there is an English speaking community in your area, they
would probably be interested only in observing how the dominant German
community affects your speech patterns - but I know of no one doing that
kind of work.  To research on English, linguists would use pure raised
from birth Britishers living in as un-foreign influenced a part of England
as they could find (or the corresponding for American English).  To understand
the instinctive nature of language, they are trying to eliminate as much
of the analytical habits that adults get into with regard to language.
Someone who learns a language as an adult presumably is more capable of such
analysis and less likely to rely on the instictive childlike learning that
presumably reflects most closely the brains internal/natural mechanism for
learning and processing language.

I do not say that I agree with all this, but that is the theory.

Now the fact that Esperanto norms are NOT determined by native-born speakers
is therefore precisely why such linguists do not consider Esperanto a true
language yet, as opposed to a creole (which is precisely an amalgamated
language spoken by adults of differing native language backgrounds for
mutual communication).  There are some linguists, but very few, who study
creoles, and the creolization process whereby a creole spoken as the dominant
tongue in a region becomes a true language because that becomes the language
that adults teach their children.  These linguists tend to study those
processes, not the adult speaking norms, which as I've said are not
'interesting' because they are likely to be uninstinctive in nature and hence
not reminiscent of pure linguistic behavior.

Linguists also tend not to study written language for roughly the same
reason.  No matter how alike the written and spoken langauge are in theory,
when you write, you take time to think and analyze and choose your words
far more carefully and slowly than when you speak at fluent speeds.  Hence
style and form in written speech is often different than spoken norms.

I wish all this were different, but this is why artificial language promoters
have such a hard time being taken seriously by the linguists.  Until there
is a group of Esperantists and/or Lojbanists who st themselves apart as a
speech community and live and raise children who grow up speaking  the
artificial language - and they end up making the natural errors and e
evolutionary natural behavior that appears in other natural languages, the
vast majority of linguists will consider any insights into language raised
by AL people to be extremely suspect.

Our best hope, in my mind, is to convince the community of linguists that
as simplified languages, the ALs may show things more clearly that can then
be looked for in natural languages.  Otherwise, we have to wait for a new
generation of linguists that is more interested in broader questions of
language use then the basic one of why human beings have language and are
able to communicate successfully with it.

lojbab