Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> The natural language has a rigorous grammar plus a lexicon that includes
> a number of idioms. Nobody has so far been able to codify a natural
> language completely because the rigorous grammar consists of maybe
> 10,000 rules.
If nobody has codified the rigorous grammar, how do they know it is
rigorous?
Given how natural languages are constantly in flux (in both space and time),
I don't even know how you could define all the rules of a grammar
rigorously. By the time you finished, it would be different.
Of course, some rules are more rigorous than others. No English speaker
would consider a sentence like
Can me cheeseburger has?
as grammatical. But how about:
I can has cheezburger?
If grammar is defined by usage, not formal rule books (which don't exist!),
then surely LOLspeak is grammatical. (It's probably closer to an argot than
a full language, but even so.)
--
Steven
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