The wikipedia article on Asperger syndrome says those who have it have poor prosody.But isn't dependence on prosody for conveying information really a sign that the language is poor? When I say language I mean in the sense of English, Latin etc are languages.When I asked chatgpt about prosody it gave this as an example of what prosody is.>How the voice rises at the end of a sentence to indicate a question:>"You're going to the store?"In English you can change the word order to indicate a question, but nevertheless this is an example chatgpt gave, and something people often do, to use this word order and yet mean it to be a question. However in Latin this is not a problem because Latin originally didn't even have the question mark, but instead used the suffix "-ne". A question mark is in writing only, it does not transfer to speech, just like a comma. You don't say out loud "question mark" or "comma", but rather this is conveyed by prosody, in the example above by rising voice.My point is that while the question mark often requires prosody to convey its meaning in speech, the suffix "-ne" does not. And it's the same thing with comma, Latin didn't originally have the comma, and it doesn't transfer to speech other than through prosody. Instead Latin conveyed the meaning through other means such as suffixes which you have in speech just as much as in writing, ie there is no need for prosody to communicate a suffix.Given that English relies on prosody to convey the equivalent in speech in many instances where there is question mark and comma in writing, and given that Latin didn't even have question mark and comma originally, and both before and after the addition of question mark and comma to Latin it does not require neither these forms of punctuation, nor their speech counterpart which is prosody, I'd say that Latin a) is less dependent on prosody than English, b) is a richer language, and c) English uses punctuation and prosody to try to make up for its poverty.
Why would you avoid using oral tools to convey a message? And if you use them, and most people use them, the normal thing to happen is the simplification of language. Generally, what is good for literature is opposite to what's good for the average speaker. But how are you going to evaluate the language as a whole without linking the evaluation to a purpose? Latin may be better for literature, but maybe it wasn't the best for many other purposes, and thus why it dissappeared. Plus reality is constantly changing so language has to adapt to those changes (which imply new purposes of speakers) and new vocabulary is probably not enough; as there are many implicit metaphysical assumptions in language, maybe grammar evolves with them, or viceversa (I guess it would be a bidirectional influence). >what you say is relativismI don't think it is, I think languages can be compared but given certain purpose. Maybe we could achieve a global comparison if we evaluate the most important and noble purposes, but that would need a thorough examination, and I don't think that would be a sensible project, since we would have to compare languages (in this case, latin) at purposes which didn't exist back then, which is the very reason why they dissappeared in the first place.
>>24727314Wikipedia likes to fabricate shit as usual. Not newsworthy.
