From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Tue Nov 27 2001 - 07:39:28 MST
On Monday, November 26, 2001 10:28 PM Andrew Clough aclough@mit.edu wrote:
> As Anders mentioned
> in his recent post, having more tenses or modifiers for different types of
> knowledge would also be good.
Maybe so, but the history of natural languages seems to show the opposite
tendency. As a language evolves, such as English, tenses and modifiers tend
to diminish. In fact, the most primitive or sheltered languages -- e.g.,
Navajo -- tend to have many more tenses than widely use and advanced
languages.
Perhaps this will be different for posthumans -- at least, some types of
them. I think some of the same evolutionary tendencies will play themselves
out, that with slightly different initial and within very different boundary
conditions. (After all, posthuman languages are likely to evolve from
existing human ones, though the underlying psychological and social
structures are likely to be different.)
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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