Thomas Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Tighten up the definition of an "artificially constructed language" to >> be one that has never had native speakers, and you're there. Separate >> the evolution of the spoken language from the evolution of the script. > > That sounds better, but that definition of "artificially constructed > language" would still include some planned languages and artificial > "standard" versions of languages.
Not only that, but surprisingly enough, in some heavily multilingual cultures the concepts of "native speaker" and "mother tongue" aren't all that clear-cut either. In any case, we are talking about scripts here, not languages, and there is the additional complexity that there is seldom a one-to-one relationship between the two. The recent (and ongoing) debate over the Khmer encoding in Unicode highlights the fact that the Khmer script is also used to write Pali and Sanskrit. I personally would not have guessed that, because of the tight concentration of language/script pairs in Southeast Asia, but there it is. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
