# Difference between artificial and natural languages



## sethmachine

Hello everyone,
                     I was wondering what were the major difference between an artificial language (ie Esperanto) and a natural language, besides the fact that artificial languages generally have very regular and predictable grammars while natural ones generally do not.  Can an artificial language have native speakers (ie if one were to only use an artificial language around a child, would they not learn that language and use it?)?


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## Athaulf

sethmachine said:


> Hello everyone,
> I was wondering what were the major difference between an artificial language (ie Esperanto) and a natural language, besides the fact that artificial languages generally have very regular and predictable grammars while natural ones generally do not.



That's not really true. Creators of artificial languages tend to devise grammars that seem "simple" to them, but in fact carry a huge baggage of silent assumptions from their native languages. For example, I've read testimonies of Chinese students of Esperanto who find its obligatory marking of case and tense extremely confusing and difficult to master. 

Not to even mention the issues of syntax, which is impossible to describe in a simple way (if at all!) for anything that is supposed to be spoken by humans. For example, just try precisely explaining the usage of prepositions in any language, natural or artificial, and you'll end up writing a whole book. Esperanto "en" will be translated as "in" in an Esperanto textbook for English speakers, and as "u" in a textbook for Croatian speakers. Yet, I could go on for hours about various differences in the use of English "in" and Croatian "u" - and I'm sure a fluent Esperanto speaker could do the same when it comes to the differences in use between Esperanto "en" and either of these.

Designers of constructed languages basically want us to use the syntax of their native language for anything that's not explicitly specified (which is to say - the vast majority of the syntax rules for what they consider to be the correct version of their invented language). 



> Can an artificial language have native speakers (ie if one were to only use an artificial language around a child, would they not learn that language and use it?)?


Yes, in fact there have been cases of Esperantists who raised their kids speaking in Esperanto. The famous billionaire George Soros is allegedly a native speaker of Esperanto. 

Of course, it's possible that the artificial language lacks the capabilities to express certain things that exist in natural human languages. In that case, creolization would probably take place in the community of kids speaking such a language.


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## sethmachine

> Of course, it's possible that the artificial language lacks the capabilities to express certain things that exist in natural human languages. In that case, creolization would probably take place in the community of kids speaking such a language.


 
What do you mean by this? How could you test an artificial language for not lacking capabilities for expressing things that exist in natural human languages?
If you are making an artificial language, how do you know when it is complete?
(An irrelevan question to you Athaulf: Do verbs in your language inflect for person, number, gender, and case?)


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## Athaulf

sethmachine said:


> What do you mean by this? How could you test an artificial language for not lacking capabilities for expressing things that exist in natural human languages?
> If you are making an artificial language, how do you know when it is complete?



That is the whole point - it can never be complete. Nobody has ever managed to fully describe a language capable of serving the needs of human communication. No matter how detailed a description of a constructed language you spell out, there will always be an infinity of issues that you've  failed to cover. Thus, what you're basically saying to your audience is: use these rules that are spelled out, but if something isn't covered by them, use the rules of English (or whatever other language you're publishing your ideas in). 

This can work reasonably well if your target audience is limited to people speaking the same language as yourself or other relatively similar languages, whose silent assumptions about the unspecified features will be reasonably close. Thus, Esperanto works reasonably well for communication between speakers of European languages. However, it can be utterly baffling for speakers of very different languages, since their silent assumptions can be very different. 



> (An irrelevan question to you Athaulf: Do verbs in your language inflect for person, number, gender, and case?)


You mean Croatian? They inflect for person, number, tense, and mood, and in the past tense, also for gender. There is also the issue of the (in)famous Slavic verbal aspect. 

The category of "case" generally doesn't make sense when applied to verbs. It is nouns that are marked for case.


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## sethmachine

No, when I said verbs inflecting for case, I was not mixing it up for nouns being inflected for case.  What I mean by verbs inflecting/agreeing for case is like this:
I saw the cat and the man that eats lemons. 

In English, in order to attach the verb 'eats' to something other than the 'I', we insert 'that' after man then the verb which describes something about him.  Instead of having another 'clause', the second verb could simply be coded for man for case and agreement in person to insure that the speaker realizes it is the man who eats lemons and not the cat.


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## modus.irrealis

What you're describing sounds somewhat similar to how participles are used in certain languages. Your example in Ancient Greek might be:

εἶδον τὴν αἴλουρον καὶ τὸν ἄνδρα τὸν *λεμόνια* ἐσθίοντα*
I saw the cat and the man that *eats lemons*

where ἐσθίοντα "eating" is masculine singular accusative to match with ἄνδρα "man" which tells you that "man" is the subject of "eating." I'm not sure if that's what you meant, though.

* λεμόνιον is not an Ancient Greek word but I couldn't find the Ancient Greek word after a quick search so I used the Modern Greek word.


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## sethmachine

yes that is similar to what I mean.


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## Athaulf

sethmachine said:


> yes that is similar to what I mean.



See also what I wrote in the other thread.


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## sokol

To move back to the topic proper, the main difference between artificial language and natural language is that the former has been defined by agreement (by definition of one person, or a group) while natural language has been formed by its speakers - and is redefined each and every day whilst it is used.

Of course an artificial language theoretically could become a natural language through a process of creolisation; to achieve this it would be necessary that a sizeable community of native speakers of that artificial language exists. I don't know if this already is happening for Esperanto - the speakers of Esperanto are spread over the whole world (or at least the western world) and I have no idea at all if any creolisation already had taken place.

With creolisation of course also change would come - certainly in semantics, very likely also in phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax; and the artificial language would have to leave place for this variation because else what would happen would be:
- a still artificial language like Esperanto loosing all its native speakers to:
- an Esperanto creole which would break apart from the original Esperanto

I personally think that it is only possible to express all meanings needed in a society if a given language is used regularly in that society - and if that were not the case, in my opinion, the language will stay a superimposed "foreign language" = artificial language.
I don't think that Esperanto or other artificial languages lack syntactic means to express anything what is needed to express: in my opinion the problem is in _semantics _because words, phrases and text only becomes real meaning through use.
(This also happens if you learn a foreign language: you only get a feeling for it if you start _using _it, the more the better.)


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> I don't think that Esperanto or other artificial languages lack syntactic means to express anything what is needed to express: in my opinion the problem is in _semantics _because words, phrases and text only becomes real meaning through use.


On the contrary, I think that by definition, any artificial language _must_ be lacking the bulk of syntactic means that are necessary for human communication. 

To put it simply, the problem is that for any human language, _we have no idea how its syntax actually works_. The only way to reliably determine whether a sentence is syntactically correct is to ask a native speaker. How exactly a native speaker's brain parses the sentence and what rules it uses to determine whether it's syntactically correct -- that's still _an almost __complete mystery_  for any human language. (And it's an even greater mystery how a child's brain can replicate and internalize these rules perfectly just by listening to other people's speech.) The best linguists can do is to try to come up with complicated descriptive rules of syntax, but none of these attempts comes even close to a precise description. Until perhaps one day brain science reveals the exact details of how language-processing hardware in human brain works, an accurate descriptive grammar is an impossible goal. 

Having these facts in mind, it's obviously impossible to artificially devise a grammar for a practically usable human language. It _is_ possible to devise a complete artificial grammar with full mathematical precision, which can be used to unambiguously determine if any given sentence is syntactically correct --  Lojban is an example of such an artificial language -- but the problem is that such a grammar is extremely unlikely to "click" with the hardware of the human brain, and natural speakers would immediately change it until it became natural enough (which also means that it would become obscure and impossible to fully analyze and describe, just like a natural language!). 

Of course, except for Lojban and perhaps a few other similar experiments, the syntax of artificial languages, including Esperanto, is specified in an extremely incomplete and imprecise way. Esperanto textbooks tell students to use the syntax of their native languages for anything that's not explicitly specified in the rules. Of course, this immediately leads to gross inconsistencies. For example, English students are told to use the Esperanto definite article exactly the way they use "the", Spanish students are told to use it just like their native "el", Germans are instructed to treat it as "der", etc. -- even though anyone with even a superficial knowledge of these languages knows that there are vast differences in the way each of them uses the definite article. Similar issues arise with word order, choice of prepositions, and a myriad other things. 

I don't know how these inconsistencies are sorted out in practice in the Esperanto community, but logically, there are two possibilities. The first is that they just choose to live with the inconsistencies, and that Esperanto in fact consists of as many different dialects as there are native languages of Esperantists. Such a system would probably work reasonably well as long as their native languages are relatively similar syntactically, as European languages generally are, but it would break down if Esperanto were to be used by native speakers of more exotic languages. The second possibility is that among advanced Esperanto speakers, something like creolization has already taken place, so that real advanced Esperanto has a full-blown natural grammar that defies precise description and that can be acquired reasonably well only by listening and practice through a long period of time. 

It would be interesting to hear a comment about this topic from an insider.


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> To put it simply, the problem is that for any human language, _we have no idea how its syntax actually works_. The only way to reliably determine whether a sentence is syntactically correct is to ask a native speaker.


Yes, that is basically what we call _collocation _- even though the basics of grammar can be determined rather easily (by describing a given context systematically) the collocations i. e. the typical, idiomatic use of a language can't - or only to a degree.
(Also because language is changing permanently, but mostly because one would have to describe all texts of a given language = everything known written and a huge sample of spoken language of all regions where the language is spoken - and even then this only would be the description for a certain time, as soon as the analysis would be complete it would be already outdated.)

That is what is basically wrong with Chomsky's famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" which is perfect concerning grammar (and was given as an example for his generative grammar).
This now, Chomsky's generative grammar, was claimed to only produce correct sentences i. e. doing the same what in your opinion, and in mine too, only native speakers can do.
The example given by Chomsky in my opinion is one which prooves that generative grammar can't do that (i. e. can't replace native speakers judgement), but this model is an old one and was refined since, and anyway this discussion is not about generative grammar.

The reason I am mentioning generative grammar at all is because there _is _a relation to the topic of this thread: to analyse a language in generative grammar terms (i. e. with exact defined grammatical relationships which only could lead to allegedly grammatical correct sentences) would put a language near the grammar of an artificial language.

And further I don't think that our two approaches to the topic are so very different, I think we both agree that an artificial language lacks the daily use in a given community which may and will result in changes of the language.
Only that I made my point with semantics while you did with grammar.

However, this I didn't know, therefore thanks for the remark:


Athaulf said:


> Esperanto textbooks tell students to use the syntax of their native languages for anything that's not explicitly specified in the rules. Of course, this immediately leads to gross inconsistencies.


In this case of course we really would have to speak of several "Esperanto dialects" - and further Esperanto then probably, for some Esperanto speakers, could be something like mainly replacing Esperanto words for their native words (of course by following the Esperanto rules of declension, conjugation and so on) and then even the status of Esperanto as "a" language (a single one, not several) might be in doubt.
Such an "English Esperanto" still most likely would be easily understandable for speakers with other mother tongues, but if it were the case that Esperanto already had a sizeable number of native speakers and probably a community communicating daily (e. g. over the world wide web which wasn't possible 30 years ago) I would imagine that one of these "dialects" over time would gain predominance over the others.

But as I don't even know which is the native tongue or "second mother tongue" or whatever one would call the language(s) Esperanto native speakers were surrounded with I can't even begin to guess which language's macro-structure (if any) might be in the process of gaining predominance.
So really the input of an insider would be very interesting.



Athaulf said:


> (...) among advanced Esperanto speakers, something like creolization has already taken place, so that real advanced Esperanto has a full-blown natural grammar that defies precise description and that can be acquired reasonably well only by listening and practice through a long period of time.


But are there _several _Creoles of Esperanto, or is there (more or less) only one? I have no idea at all how close-knit the Esperanto community is. If already creolisation had taken place then of course Esperanto wouldn't be an artificial language any more - it would be a natural language.

Or more precisely: there would be a 'natural Esperanto' and the 'classical artificial Esperanto', probably.


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> In this case of course we really would have to speak of several "Esperanto dialects" - and further Esperanto then probably, for some Esperanto speakers, could be something like mainly replacing Esperanto words for their native words (of course by following the Esperanto rules of declension, conjugation and so on) and then even the status of Esperanto as "a" language (a single one, not several) might be in doubt.
> Such an "English Esperanto" still most likely would be easily understandable for speakers with other mother tongues, but if it were the case that Esperanto already had a sizeable number of native speakers and probably a community communicating daily (e. g. over the world wide web which wasn't possible 30 years ago) I would imagine that one of these "dialects" over time would gain predominance over the others.
> [...]
> But are there _several _Creoles of Esperanto, or is there (more or less) only one? I have no idea at all how close-knit the Esperanto community is. If already creolisation had taken place then of course Esperanto wouldn't be an artificial language any more - it would be a natural language.



I googled about this topic a bit, and I found some interesting information.

Judging by the Esperanto grammar books advertised by Esperantist organizations, it seems like something akin to creolization has taken place. The original Zamenhof's Esperanto grammar was only a few pages long, but the modern "Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko" is almost _seven hundred_ pages thick. For comparison, comprehensive grammar books of English and German published by major houses such as Cambridge UP or Duden have somewhere between one and two thousand pages. (Also, take into account the fact that these houses can afford to employ large, well-paid, full-time staff and get contributions from top-notch lingustic researchers, whereas Esperanto books are most likely products of mere hobbyist work, so they can't possibly be as thorough and comprehensive.) Thus, it seems like real advanced Esperanto spoken in the community of hardcore enthusiasts has developed its own quite complex grammar, and just like a natural language, one cannot learn it properly except by long-time immersion.

I also found this very interesting article written by a Finnish linguist who is also an enthusiastic Esperantist, and who has experimented with raising his kids as bilingual Finnish/Esperanto speakers. Some of his conclusions confirm perfectly what I wrote in the above posts. He remarks that "the norm of Esperanto is partly non-codified, i.e., Esperanto cannot be learnt from textbooks, grammars and dictionaries alone, but only by participating in the speech community", and goes on to argue:To take an obvious example: the proverbial sixteen rules of Esperanto grammar, first presented in Zamenhof (1887) and  declared unalterable in the basic normative work on the language, Zamenhof (1905), do not say anything about word order in simple or complex sentences. Yet it has always been clear that Esperanto is a SVO language with a relative free order of the main constituents; that it has NPs, VPs, PPs; that most specifiers stand on the left of their heads and most complements on the right; and so on. This is so because from the very beginning, the use of Esperanto has been learnt by reading actual texts and hearing actual utterances, first those by Zamenhof, but very soon thereafter by other writers and speakers as well. Thus, it is by actual use that Esperanto has been adjusted to UG [Universal Grammar]: even though the speakers of the language have been mostly non-native, they have not introduced anything into it that a natural language could not contain.​This definitely sounds like some sort of creolization to me.


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> But are there _several _Creoles of Esperanto, or is there (more or less) only one? I have no idea at all how close-knit the Esperanto community is.



We would have to ask an insider about this, but my guess is that the community of real fluent speakers is extremely close-knit, especially in this day and age of cheap travel and almost free electronic communication. Even in the past, dedicated Esperantists were eagerly maintaining international connections (many of them got in huge trouble under various totalitarian regimes because their intensive foreign correspondence and numerous foreign contacts looked suspicious). Thus, it seems like the standard Esperanto has been more or less unified in practice from the beginning.


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## wbhindyou

It is often said that the human brain is built to understand stories, not facts, and so I guess a living, imprecise, nuanced, fluid language landscape is more natural to us than an engineered and rigid construct.

All of us speak in a slightly different way depending on whom we are talking to, and the richness of natural language, and our mutual (but imprecise) understanding of those nuances enables us to do that, in a way that conlangs do not, and by definition cannot..


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> This definitely sounds like some sort of creolization to me.


Some interesting sources you've found here; and I agree, this very much looks like creolisation already had taken place - in which case of course Esperanto wouldn't be any more an artificial language.


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## Nizo

I was asked by Outsider to contribute to this thread, so I will offer a couple of remarks.  I am not the linguist that the other contributors apparently are, but I do speak Esperanto.  I'm not a native speaker but I'm fairly fluent in the language, so I might be better able in some ways to comment on its nature than others.

First of all, the term "artificial" language really refers to Esperanto at its origin and not in its present state.  As with any living language, Esperanto has evolved over the years and has adapted to the modern world.  It's not perfect by any means, but it is as flexible as any other language while still maintaining a standard grammar (which is not without exceptions).  Samples of particularly well done translations and pieces of original literature have been compiled as examples of good style and syntax.  Grammars of the language have been written in Esperanto and in other languages to address finer points.

It should be remembered that Esperanto was never intended to be anyone's native language.  Zamenhof wanted it to serve as a second, auxiliary language to assist in cross-cultural communication.  Its grammar -- while not without its own complications -- is simpler than in most other languages, making it easier to learn than most.  Its vocabulary is rich:  the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes and others have been beautifully translated into Esperanto.  And it's not just suitable for translations of literature; it has adapted well to the modern world.  One of the largest versions of the Wikipedia is in Esperanto.  There is an academy of science that uses Esperanto as its primary means of communication.  Radio Poland broadcasts daily in the language and several Internet sites publish daily news reports in Esperanto (see, for example, www.china.org.cn).

It is interesting to note that knowledge and use of Esperanto is growing rapidly in China and Japan despite its European roots.  Although the politics of European exploration and colonization over the centuries can be debated, Esperanto's roots in "colonial" languages ensures a wider worldwide "learnability" (based on familiarity) than would a language built on, for example, Semitic, Afro-Asiatic, or Sino-Tibetan foundations.

Creolization?  I can't comment on that as I'm unclear on how you're defining the term.  I can say that Esperantists -- recognizing the goal of Esperanto as a tool of neutral, cross-cultural, clear communication -- generally try to respect standard grammar and syntax.  There is concern that without standards the language could devolve into dialects that would make clear communication difficult.

I believe this video message gives a nice presentation by an individual well qualified to comment:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU.

There are plenty of discussion groups, news sites, blogs, magazines, etc., in Esperanto and other languages, where the development and use of the language are discussed in depth.


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## sokol

Nizo said:


> First of all, the term "artificial" language really refers to Esperanto at its origin and not in its present state.


I agree - as already said above.
From the links you posted I gather that Esperanto should be viewed as a language with several possibilities concerning phonetics and word-order, so one already should (I think) speak of several Esperanto dialects existing which however seem to be perfectly intercommunicable.



Nizo said:


> Creolization?  I can't comment on that as I'm unclear on how you're defining the term.


The definition of creolisation originally is one of a pidgin language (i. e. a language acquired only partly as a second language by a community) evolving into a language acquired as a mother tongue.
So in order to have a creole first there should be a pidgin: like Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea which began as a pidgin (a mix between English and native languages) and later became creolised. Creolisation is the process of the community using the pidgin as main or only means of communcation which leads to the newborn of this community acquiring the pidgin as their first (and in many cases only) mother tongue.

Pidgins typically have a rather simple grammar not really fit for all needs of a community while creoles evolve into full-fledged natural languages.
Esperanto could be seen as a pidgin, but only historically - this only was the case at the beginning. But it doesn't look like a _real _creolisation took place because the attitude of most Esperantists, according to your post, seems to be that it only should be an international language and originally wasn't intended as a first language, and the few people whose (first) mother tongue _is _Esperanto may only be the exception that is no proof for anything.

As a linguist I would say, having read your post, that Esperanto had evolved from a _pidgin _to a _standard language_ which isn't really a mother tongue (except for a small and - in the whole - insignificant group) but not into a real creole. (That is, that Esperanto had evolved into a full-fledged natural language without going through the process of a classical creolisation; this process is not completely unsimilar to classical creolisation - it is probably creolisation on an intellectual level, but anyway not the same as happened with e. g. Tok Pisin.)

Because if the latter had happened there should be a sizeable, significant community using Esperanto as main means for daily communication, which seems to not be the case. If such a creolisation were to take place at some point in the future I would predict that dialects of Esperanto quickly would evolve which would over time become at least partially incomprehensible to each other - this would seem to be inevitable, as the Esperanto community is spread over the whole world.
(Yes, there's the www, but or daily lives are not only about news and forums and game communities on the net, they are too about jobs, family, friends, etc. - and these are and most likely will remain local.)


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## Outsider

sokol said:


> The definition of creolisation originally is one of a pidgin language (i. e. a language acquired only partly as a second language by a community) evolving into a language acquired as a mother tongue.
> So in order to have a creole first there should be a pidgin: like Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea which began as a pidgin (a mix between English and native languages) and later became creolised. Creolisation is the process of the community using the pidgin as main or only means of communcation which leads to the newborn of this community acquiring the pidgin as their first (and in many cases only) mother tongue.
> 
> Pidgins typically have a rather simple grammar not really fit for all needs of a community while creoles evolve into full-fledged natural languages.


But Esperanto's grammar was never as rudimentary as that of a pidgin, I think. It was created already with a full grammar, though with no native speakers...


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## sokol

Outsider said:


> But Esperanto's grammar was never as rudimentary as that of a pidgin, I think. It was created already with a full grammar, though with no native speakers...


Yes, the analogy only is a very rough one - Esperanto never really was a pidgin, nor did it ever become a real creole.

The case of Esperanto is a strange one indeed, and a very interesting one I might add.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> But Esperanto's grammar was never as rudimentary as that of a pidgin, I think. It was created already with a full grammar, though with no native speakers...



"Full grammar"? I think you're falling into the common trap of identifying grammar with inflectional morphology.  Zamenhof's original Esperanto grammar specifies more or less only these rules, and says almost nothing about syntax, let alone pragmatics. See the second reference I quoted in the above post #12, in which a very authoritative source confirms this.


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## sethmachine

Is there no way for a language to exclusively rely on inflectional markers (case endings) to convey meaning, where word order is simply communicative and ONLY effects connotation and NOT dictation?


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## Athaulf

sethmachine said:


> Is there no way for a language to exclusively rely on inflectional markers (case endings) to convey meaning, where word order is simply communicative and ONLY effects connotation and NOT dictation?



Well, think about it. Suppose you want to say "red shirt and blue pants" in a language that makes no connection between word order and meaning. Then you could say both "red shirt and blue pants" and "blue shirt and red pants" (among other 118 permutations ) to convey the same meaning -- with appropriate inflectional markers, of course. 

Now, how would you mark the adjectives to make it clear what is red, and what is blue? "Red" must unambiguously match "shirt", and "blue" must unambiguously match "pants". If "pants" and "shirt" happen to be of different genders (or some other sort of noun classes), then the problem might be solved by marking the adjectives accordingly. But remember that the same system must work for any noun phrase "red X and blue Y", and no matter how many noun classes there are, X and Y can always happen to belong to the same class. 

I guess you could introduce some special disambiguation suffixes like e.g. "red-A blue-B shirt-A pants-B", so that adjectives and nouns are grouped according to the suffix. But then you need an infinite number of different suffixes, since you can expand a noun phrase of this sort indefinitely: "red shirt, blue pants, brown shoes, black socks, [...arbitrarily many other items...], and green jacket". At some point, you have to rely on word order to disambiguate the meaning, and you'll again end up with complicated syntax rules. 

It's easy to come up with many different examples along these lines. Also, notice that this example is based on a single noun phrase containing just adjectives, nouns, and conjunctions. Just imagine what happens when you need to string together a whole complex sentence!


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## Hulalessar

sethmachine said:


> Is there no way for a language to exclusively rely on inflectional markers (case endings) to convey meaning, where word order is simply communicative and ONLY effects connotation and NOT dictation?


 
Latin is often cited as a case of a language that has free word order, but in fact it only has comparatively free word order and a preferred word order for utterances where no particular word is emphasised. I am sure it is not the case that when the Romans spoke Latin at home they used words in a random order. The convolutions of Latin poetry are something else.

I suspect it is the case that no language has a totally free word order, but rather that some highly inflected languages have a flexible word order. Also it should be remembered that speech tends to come in short packets. To an extent written language follows this and, high literary style excepted, tends to keep  ideas that need to be associated together so that an adjective for example will usually come immediately before or after the noun it qualifies.


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## Sepia

sethmachine said:


> Is there no way for a language to exclusively rely on inflectional markers (case endings) to convey meaning, where word order is simply communicative and ONLY effects connotation and NOT dictation?


 

Of course this would be possible - only, you'd need a whole lot of markers more than most languages have. 

You could also do without pre- or postpositions as well. Not many languages work like that either. 

But it would be possible. 

If it would be practical and fit into the patterns of thinking of most people is a different story. Imagine that sentence in a language only with markers and a totally free word order. See what I mean?


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## Athaulf

Sepia said:


> sethmachine said:
> 
> 
> 
> Is there no way for a language to exclusively rely on inflectional markers (case endings) to convey meaning, where word order is simply communicative and ONLY effects connotation and NOT dictation?
> 
> 
> 
> Of course this would be possible - only, you'd need a whole lot of markers more than most languages have.
> 
> You could also do without pre- or postpositions as well. Not many languages work like that either.
> 
> But it would be possible.
Click to expand...

 
If you think it's possible, I'm curious how you propose to solve the problem I outlined in post #22 above?


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## rur1920

Athaulf said:


> no matter how many noun classes there are, X and Y can always happen to belong to the same class.


The context helps!  Голубые, красные отдавал мне штаны и кофты. Blue, red he gave me pants and shirts. Don't you know he had only blue shirts?… The reason an orderless language is impossible, though, is that humans do care for the order of words, they cannot evade perceiving that the order is meaningful.


Hulalessar said:


> I am sure it is not the case that when the Romans spoke Latin at home they used words in a random order.


I don't know for Latin, but in spoken Russian the word order is a lot more free than in written Russian for clear reasons. (Lesser requirements on situation-independent expression of thoughts). But, of course, nowhere is the word order 'random'. Freedom means responsibility, which is a principle that may be not realised by those who don't speak languages with free word order. We have to use this syntactical freedom to mean something.


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## rur1920

rur1920 said:


> The context helps!  Голубые, красные отдавал мне штаны и кофты. Blue, red he gave me pants and shirts. Don't you know he had only blue shirts?…


In different words.
The issue "how much word order is fixed and how much is left free" is not an issue of choosing a carrier of information (whether I use inflection or word order to transmit this information? -- this alternative question is meaningless, because there may be no law per which the stated 'information' should be transmitted), it is an issue of exercising additional syntactical constraints. I can imagine a language (I doubt it could develop naturally), in which the word order "red pants and blue jackets" does not guarantee that the pants are red and the jackets are blue; how do I express this fine detail in such language if I really have to? Via the word order. The word order is free (i. e. there is no syntactical constraint), but when I need a certain word order in a specific situation, I use it. A human is not a computer; his most distinctive feature is that a human is able to guess, using no (rigid) logic at all, but experience instead.
Happy New Year.


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## CitizenEmpty

Why does this remind me of hypothetical oligosynthetic languages?


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## luitzen

In Dutch and Frisian the word order is also quite flexible. The most important constraint is the position of the verb, except for that, almost anything goes. Word order is important though as it can subtlety change the meaning of a sentence. Together with stress it can also be used to signify the most important parts of the sentence. Word order is especially flexible in spoken language as it is subject to the chronological order of thought processes. In Dutch, the adjective precedes the noun, but in spoken language it may also come after when someone realizes it's important (though it will probably be preceded by de, het, die, dat). E.g. Kun je me mij mijn broek, die nieuwe, geven? (Can you give me my pants, the new ones?)


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## mataripis

In my analysis, artificial language is the result of combined different languages within short period of time. The speakers want to preserve all /some aspects of each language.While Natural language has its own way and time to change depending on the prevailing situations.Natural one is less stress to use and has healing effects compared to artificial forms.


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## rur1920

mataripis said:


> In my analysis, artificial language is the  result of combined different languages within short period of  time.


As if a human cannot create something by himself… Indeed, most apriori  languages to date have an unnatural logical character (Tolkien's  languages look like an exception, even though they are drastically  incomplete), but I think that creating a langauge that draws its  inspiration for choosing ways of naming things, relationships, and  complex events, from purposes (so-called "spirit of the language") that  would look natural for us, rather than from some logical principle, is  possible, if such purposes are studied well enough. These purposes must  be related to elements of natural organisation of a talking party's  thought, of course, as thought lacks much quality if not aided at least  at some point by a language (recall mauglis); and they must reflect such  illogical, yet not irrational, mode of doing that allows the talking  party to make decisions that are based on guesswork and experience,  rather than on strict consideration of effects of limited theories  (humans can think and act because they can change theories per which  they act, and a natural language is one that serves compliantly  requirements of a human).


luitzen said:


> Word order is especially flexible in spoken language as it is subject to the chronological order of thought processes.


Extremely beautiful and short description of what word order is for Russian as well; both spoken and written. And the chronological order of thought processes does mean a lot. 

PS: well, my program finished, abort.


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