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Any human language would fail at one point or another when you need a strict interpretation, a strict pronounciation, and a strict syntax. It's a inherent human
by SundayLinguist 12y ago
Any human language would fail at one point or another when you need a strict interpretation, a strict pronounciation, and a strict syntax. It's a inherent human species trait to make the language evolve in inconsistent ways on all fronts.
A good candidate would have to be specially created with unambiguity in mind, like with formal languages, but as importantly, it would have to be aggressively controlled to avoid any misuse or divergence of usage. The later is most probably impossible in practice: enforcement would not scale. A simple question: how would a user of that language deal with a concept for which no word exists? The only possibility is to formulate that concept in lengthy sentences (Ents do speak like that), until a word is officially adopted by the language conformance body. Of course, people wouldn't be able to wait for that adoption each time they stumble on the issue, and it's bound to happen all the time. From then, one or more unofficial words would pop up for ideas yet inexistant in the language lexicon, and of course subtle semantic differences would crop up among these variants. Or maybe the author is implying that agglutinative languages don't suffer from that problem?
I am only talking about vocabulary, because this issue alone is enough to demonstrate the problem. For grammar, Lojban and a few other artificial languages have been created with syntactical unambiguity as a goal.