There have been a few discussions on www.reddit.com about
"Constructed Languages". It surprised me that there are such
graduate programs. There is also a reference to The Language
Creation Society (www.conlang.org) Mostly, these studies apply to
artificial natural languages such as Esperanto and Klingon.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2evjri/graduate_programs_for_constructed_languages/
Most of the Reddit discussions pertain to whether Constructed
Languages are really languages. Some seem to believe that a language
must have an evolved history and been in use by a community before
it is meat for a linguistics discussion.
The linguistics community has no consensus on an appropriate
criteria for acceptance as a language. However, for me, the overall
discussion of Constructed Languages seems to touch on
Controlled/Constrained Natural Languages. This is important, I
believe, because we are in for an extended era of many CNL's as
people partition core and technical vocabularies in various ways,
trying to satisfy needs for particular disciplines and markets.
Chomsky defines a set of sets of languages that have formal grammars
are a hierarchy.
Chomsky Formal Grammar Language Hierarchy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
It seems to me that there should be a taxonomy that includes all
languages and what I call "language shorthands" such as chemical,
math, Feynman diagrams, etc. My question is whether ConLangs,
shorthands and CNL's are entities of Chomsky's hierarchy of
languages? He seems to say that there must be start and end symbols
and these are not represented in mathematics notation. The
difficulty with this is that in many shallow/deep constructions, the
start and terminal symbols are understood according to some
protocol. SGML allows <cr> as a terminal in some cases and
speech is terminated when someone stops talking, or it can be
semantically terminated when someone says, "That's all I have to
say."
Is there a more complete grammar in existance that includes
additional forms of sentences? Should we define a super-set of all
languages that is more inclusive such as might be found in
semiotics? Finally, would we segregate the taxonomy and its elements
in an ontology?
A Feynman Diagram
-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA
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