Re: simple vs complex languages

> It goes a little beyond that. It's not merely something that's
> precise and unambiguous, it's also ideally something that doesn't map
> to ambiguous concepts and ideas in the human brain.


Well said. Every language designer should be forced to consult a perceptual
psychologist before being allowed to let his new design loose on mankind 8-|.


> In natural languages, I think a word's ambiguity is often a vital and
> irreducible part of its meaning; if we pick just "one meaning or the
> other" we lose a nuance of what's being communicated. IOW, I think
> ambiguity is a very important feature of human communication


Quite agreed. Isn't "semantic field" the term used by linguists? When
I'm asked to translate a word between English and German, I'm
sometimes at a loss because the "literal" translation looses too much
of the nuances, and I just can't bring myself to provide a translation
that looses so much of what is meant.


> (This is an unorthodox opinion,


Really? I would have thought this was obvious to anybody reasonably fluent
in more than one language.


Jan

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