Thomas Chan <tc31@cornell.edu> wrote:
>> Tighten up the definition of an "artificially constructed language"
to
>> be one that has never had native speakers, and you're there.
Separate
>> the evolution of the spoken language from the evolution of the
script.
>
> That sounds better, but that definition of "artificially constructed
> language" would still include some planned languages and artificial
> "standard" versions of languages.
Not only that, but surprisingly enough, in some heavily multilingual
cultures the concepts of "native speaker" and "mother tongue" aren't all
that clear-cut either.
In any case, we are talking about scripts here, not languages, and there
is the additional complexity that there is seldom a one-to-one
relationship between the two. The recent (and ongoing) debate over the
Khmer encoding in Unicode highlights the fact that the Khmer script is
also used to write Pali and Sanskrit. I personally would not have
guessed that, because of the tight concentration of language/script
pairs in Southeast Asia, but there it is.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Mar 17 2002 - 18:17:31 EST