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Lojbab: > At 05:08 PM 4/29/03 +0100, And wrote: > >#There's no difference. Languages are languages (strings of symbols, > >#presumably with meaning) > > > >That sounds very much like Chomsky 1957. But, as I say, that was > >an aberration. A language is a set of sentences consisting of a > >pairing of sound and meaning. Or it is a set of rules defining possible > >sentences > > I don't know anything about the theory stuff you are discussing, but I > believe that the Loglan/Lojban formal grammar philosophy derives more > directly from the work of Yngve, and not Chomsky. Yngve's name got tossed > around a lot at the time, at least > > The relation, if any, between Yngve and Chomsky, someone else will have to > elucidate I haven't read anything significant of Yngve's. He's a pretty marginal & rather atavistic figure in linguistics. I don't mean that derogatorily. But what you say here would square with what I know of Yngve's ideas, since I understand him to view grammar as formal patterns inducible by statistical means. But Yngve champions a vigorously empirical approach to grammar, whereas mainstream linguistics takes a more rationalistic approach (saying "Let us suppose a language to be a code. Now, let us try to work out the rules of that code."). It seems to me that language-creation very much calls for the rationalistic approach. --And.