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1 Constructed Language and Linguistic Theory Marc Van Oostendorp To Constructed language and linguistic theory Marc van Oostendorp To appear in: Klaus Schubert (ed.) Planned language: From plan to reality. Association Belgique de Linguistique Appliquée, 2000. 0. Introduction ‘Natural language’ is arguably the most central concept within linguistic theory —it defines its object of study —, but it is hardly ever discussed outside the first pages of introductory textbooks. It is usually taken for granted that everybody knows what the label means, and that it can be applied to American English, Yidiny and Eastern Javanese, but not to tonal music, the programming language Prolog, or the languages of the Elves in the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Many interlinguists — those scholars concerned with the study of consciously planned languages meant for international communication — follow this line of reasoning to some extent, if they defend the validity of their interest in Esperanto (cf. Schubert 1989, Tonkin and Fettes 1996 for fairly recent overviews). They argue that Esperanto is markedly different from other planned languages, because it has been used in a much wider range of communicative situations, because it has become associated with a separate ‘Esperantist culture’, or because it is learnt by children as one of their native languages. For this reason, Esperanto would have started to differ from its competitors: it would be the only ‘language project’ that has succeeded in becoming a ‘real (natural) language’. This line of argumentation is examined in this article. I study the relevance of some planned or constructed languages other than Esperanto, viz. Interlingua, Ido, Europanto and Spocanian. These have been made up in slightly different ways, all serve different goals and different philosophies have guided the construction of their respective grammars. Neither of them has any real native speakers, as far as I am able to tell. In my view it is still worthwile to consider projects such as these, because they can be seen as extreme cases. It is a standard practice in at least some branches of science to look at the behaviour of the object of study in some extreme circumstances: how does a plant grow in a spacecraft in which it does not experience gravity? What is the behaviour of chemical elements if we put them under conditions of extreme heat? If we consider language to be a natural object of some sort, it is interesting to see what remains of this ‘naturalness’ after extreme forms of conscious human intervention, such as happen in the construction of a language. Is it possible to really construct a new human language? To what extent is such a language different from other ones? As already indicated above, interlinguists often draw a distinction between ‘language projects’, which have been proposed (e.g. for which somebody wrote a prescriptive grammar and a vocabulary) but which never functioned as a means of communication inside a community, and ‘real languages’ on the other hand. In this article, I will be concerned mainly with a different dimension, and argue for a distinction that is orthogonal to the traditional one. I claim 1 that we should differentiate between ‘actual languages’, ‘possible languages’ and ‘impossible languages’. This terminology derives from the study of phonology and morphology, where one can distinguish between ‘actual’, ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ words of a language. The paradigm case of this, due to Halle (1962) are the strings brick, blick and bnick. Of these three, brick obviously is an actual word of English, with a reasonably well-defined meaning attached to it, and known by most speakers of the language. Blick cannot be found in an English dictionary, but it still is a possible word of English: it conforms to the phonological laws of the language, and one could imagine that somebody would start using this word with a special meaning one day; other speakers of English would have no problem accepting it. In fact, most English speakers would probably have to check with a dictionary in order to be sure that blick is not an actual word of their language, which just happens to have a very specialized meaning they did not know before. This is not true for *bnick, however, or, more extremely, for *bdick, *bnck or *bdrckni, which do not even sound as English words. Nobody would be led to think that bdrckni was an actual word of English he just happened to never have heard before. These forms are therefore impossible words. Everybody can invent new possible or impossible words; only the possible words stand a chance to become actual words, but it depends on many external factors, such as fashion, the need for a new word within a community, and coincidence, whether a given possible word will ever grow into an actual word. The ideal linguistic theory can predict whether a given string is a possible or impossible word; but it probably cannot predict whether it will ever grow into an actual word, because this is dependent on too many factors that are not in our grasp. I propose to extend this threefold distinction to the realm of languages, and speak about actual, possible and impossible languages. People can construct a language, which will be either possible or impossible. Only the possible languages have the potential to grow into an actual language, but if some project never grew into an actual language (i.e. a language that is used by some community in the way other languages are used in other communities), this does not mean that it is an impossible language. The fact that Esperanto now functions in a limited way as a language, proves that it always was a possible language; the fact that Leibniz’ project Lingua Universalis never functioned as such does not in itself prove that this ever was an impossible language (even though there may be other reasons to think it was). It is one of the tasks of linguistic theory to characterize the notion ‘possible natural language’; studying extreme, constructed, cases is one way of approaching that topic. This is what I will set out to do. I will concentrate on grammatical theory, although some attention will be paid to sociolinguistics and other branches of linguistic theorizing as well. Before I will delve into the details of the four language systems in the sections 2 (on Interlingua and Ido) and 3 (on Europanto and Spocanian), the next section first gives some general background information on the role of the notion ‘linguistic naturalness’ in linguistics and in interlinguistics. 1. The place of interlinguistics within linguistics Many linguists prefer to see themselves as scientists, working on empirical problems in the natural world. The precise form of the natural object they are studying varies among practitioners of the field. In historical linguistics 2 for instance, people have sometimes talked about languages as if they themselves were natural, living beings, that could produce offspring -- French and Italian are ‘daughters’ of Latin -- and that could die, and hence become ‘dead’ rather than ‘living’ languages. Psycholinguists (Levelt 1989), and to a certain extent generative grammarians (Chomsky 1988), see the language capacities of the individual human being, preferably so-called ‘native speakers’, as their main object of study. Sociolinguists concern themselves with the linguistic behaviour of groups of human beings; for them language is an emergent property of a social group, rather than of an individual (Labov 1994). It seems to me that these various branches of linguistics have in common that the issue of the human free will is left out of consideration. There certainly is a sound methodological reason behind this, since so little is certain here. The free will is a topic that is outside the realm of human understanding almost by definition. (If we would understand it, we could predict its behaviour and it would no longer be free; therefore, either the free will is an illusion, or it cannot be explained. Either way, it can hardly be part of explorations by science.) Furthermore, if we need to acknowledge a free will, we need to say as well that human behaviour is unpredictable to a certain extent, and this in turn would leave the study of this behaviour outside of scientific inquiry, where testing predictions counts as the most important means to assess the value of a given theory. It thus may seem safer to abstract away from the free will, either by studying the behaviour of larger groups of people (or larger corpora of text) in which the free will is avaraged out as it were, or to concentrate on the capacities of human beings rather than on the way in which they use these capacities in a given situation. In general terms, this may be the reason why so many linguists find it hard to accept interlinguistics, the study of so-called ‘planned’ languages, as a proper field of inquiry. Planning, inventing or constructing a language such as Ido (Beaufront 1919) or Glosa (Ashby and Clark 1984) — both proposed in the twentieth century as alternatives to Esperanto — is an act of free will, if ever there was one. Everything imaginable is possible if one wants to invent a language. The act of language planning therefore cannot be studied in the usual scientific way. Language planning poses a particularly hard methodological problem for sciences concerned with the grammatical structure of language, since planning of an international language usually targets precisely the grammar next to the lexicon. No matter whether a grammarian is interested in Minimalism (Chomsky 1995), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), or some other form of modern grammatical theory, one of his goals usually is to characterize the notion ‘possible grammar’, and, derived from this, the notion ‘possible language’.
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