Vladimir_M comments on Language, intelligence, rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (56)
How do you know that? To support this claim, you need a model that predicts the actually occurring sound changes in natural languages, and also that sound changes would not occur in a language with self-segregating morphology. Do you have such a model? If you do, I'd be tremendously curious to see it.
Sorry, I should have said that it's not necessarily the same animal. The whole mountain of evidence concerns natural languages, right? Do you have any evidence that an artificial language with a self-segregating morphology and a simple sound structure would also go through the same changes?
So I'm not necessarily saying that the changes wouldn't occur; I'm simply saying that we can't reject out of hand the idea that we could build a system where they won't occur, or at least build a system where they would occur in a useful way (rather than a way that would destroy its superior qualities). Where the system starts would determine its evolution; I see no reason why you couldn't control that variable in such a way that it would be a stable system.