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Edited on Mon Jul-18-05 08:43 PM by igil
The dialect problem in English has continued apace, radio/TV/internet notwithstanding. Even African-American English has continued to diverge in the last 50 years, school integration and the mass media having no moderating effect. Dialect divergence is as much a social effect as it is linguistic, and usually matches perceived unity and disunity between groups.
On the other hand, languages also spread, thereby reducing (rather dramatically) the number of languages and dialects that exist.
The world's linguists need no evidence from me to debunk Whorf-Sapir. It was done long ago, with anthropological linguists, literature folk, and a few linguists whose views crucially rely on Whorf-Sapir holding out. There are a few linguists that continue to hope, and some believe, but the effects they hope to find are usually small and unconvincing by their specificity. Whorf was a bad, but politically important, linguist. Linguists for the most part know the difference. BTW, Whorf based his work on quite inadequate sources that were, well, wrong.
Then again I look askance at those who believe that culture is thoroughly intertwined with language. There's a connection, but I'm not sure they haven't overstated it.
Let us take a man in a newly contacted tribe in the Amazon. "To prevent electrostatic damage to the CMOS device, wear a wrist strap." Their language is unlikely to have a word for 'electrostatic', or have the conceptual structures in place to understand CMOS. He may have the grammatical apparatus, but he lacks the words. Or "Jeffersonian democracy is a proposition at odds with Marxism." Just adding the words won't help. But frequently people are educated in ideas that their traditions didn't incorporate: in those cases language planning is effective. The languages can be provided with words to handle the ideas, but it takes a while, with a fair amount of effort put into producing suitable vocabulary, and then getting people to use it. For this reason, the speakers of many languages use not their native tongues, but languages that already have the vocabulary developed.
Presumably eradicating translators/interpreters would make things more efficient. Frequently the efforts are buried in the organization, and produces little inefficiency; sometimes they produce much inefficiency. But the savings would hardly accrue to the countries that would need the money; it would, instead, either go for government budgets (and be spent on domestic programs, possibly social services, possibly not) or, more likely, corporate profits. Some of that would go to taxes, but not most. We already have enough money and prosperity that we don't need to have the kind of death rate from poverty that we have.
And this is rooted in a deep utilitarianism: there is no need for epic poetry or bards, lays or sagas, traditional songs. Strictly speaking, we should just as well dispose of Hollywood and Bollywood, Sundance and Cannes, the entire iPod and music scene, orchestras, bands, dance troupes and theatre companies. Or restaurants. Or pleasure travel. Because all of those are also unnecessary inefficiencies.
But it's also horribly inefficient to use an artificial language that confers no obvious advantage on anybody: everybody's forced to spend time learning a language, one with only a strictly utilitarian use. And language is not simply utilitarian. But then there'd be a massive corpus planning/language planning effort to get the artificial language in shape to function as a natural language (with all due substratum effects), and then a huge translation effort to get things translated into that language (with much translated poorly, in the absence of native speakers of the target language).
On the other hand, Loglan would be conferring an advantage on the speakers of some languages: some languages would have a grammatical system closer to that of loglan (for example), some would be less like loglan. It's the same kind of problem that makes Arabic and Georgian harder for native speakers of English than Spanish or French.
And, from the purely linguistic point of view, it may be that it's possible to get a window on Universal Grammar via a single language, but one language is far from a sure guide. The more the merrier when it comes to understanding how our minds and brains work.
On edit: I thought the Volupuk business was from a different poster. Re: Volupuk
"Schleyer adapted the vocabulary mostly from English, with a smattering of German and French, and often modified it beyond easy recognizability. For instance, "vol" and "pük" are derived from the English words "world" and "speak". Although unimportant linguistically, these deformations were greatly mocked by the language's detractors. It seems to have been Schleyer's intention, however, to deform its loan words in such a way that they would be hard to recognise and thus lose their ties to the language(s) they came from. Compare the common criticism that Esperanto (not to mention Interlingua) is much easier to learn for Europeans than for those with non-European native languages."
So European based, but idiosyncratically deformed to make it un-European. (I have a fondness for Esperanto, then again I've known Esperanto speakers, and I've done research at a university boarding Zamenhoff Street.)
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