vael:

demi is rude by accident, forgets that vael does not know everything

vael says knowledge gained by money (aka post-secondary education) bothers him, asks for psychoanalysis

        I don’t start abnormal psychology until second semester :( So I don’t want to provide theories that essentially consist of shots in the dark. Could be that we (people who are specializing in something very specific) tend to be condescending about our subject of study or some other attitude related thing. Or maybe your decision not to study something has something to do with it.

        Did I say I wouldn’t do that? I did. Oh well.

        What I can do, for certain, is provide a psychological reason for what is and isn’t a language! If you’re interested, check out my notes for the first chapter of my linguistics class, in particular the “design features of a language” section that provide the (more or less) official list of criteria for language status. Essentially, a language is a distinct (perhaps not unique - some languages are, of course, related historically) way of communicating messages. This extends to every single part of the language - its sentence structure, its word structure, even the sounds it uses to make those words. For example, when I write a sentence in French using English sentence structure, it sounds weird and my teacher tells me to change it. And I have no idea what’s wrong with it because I have no clue how to formulate a sentence in proper French.

        A code, however, is just a different way of using the same language. It won’t have its own unique sentence structure, word structure, set of sounds, grammatical rules (these are different from what you learned in school, but we won’t get into that), and more importantly, you can’t learn it natively. You can grow up speaking English, Klingon, and even American Sign Language (it has a sentence structure entirely different from English, and uses signs for words). But you can’t grow up speaking Signed Exact English II (uses English sentence structure, uses signs for letters), because it’s a code, not a unique sign language. The reason for this is that in order to speak it, you need to speak English first. This is great if you lose the ability to speak and know English perfectly well, but if you’re born deaf, American Sign Language is practically essential. You might learn English later, for the sake of reading maybe, and then learn SEE II, but signing the spelling for English words is really damn slow.

        *deep breath*

        Does that make sense? I may have forgotten to explain certain things. We’ve been dealing a lot with sign language in my applied linguistics class, but there’s a lot of linguistics in there as well. Linguistics chapter 1 covers what signed languages are, what codes are, and what languages in general are. Some of my applied linguistics notes, for example the day we had a presentation from a deaf professor, are pertinent.

        Anyway, so the reason Utopian isn’t a language is because all it does is spell English words differently. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize it isn’t even a code - it’s a cipher. It might not accept non-Latin alphabets (how does it do with letters that aren’t in English, by the way?) but it would work perfectly well with a French sentence like “Quand j'arrive, je vois quelque chose dans l'eau…” A cipher is a cryptology thing, where you swap letters around with a very specific algorithm, and they have to be re-ordered by the exact same algorithm. Or maybe that algorithm in reverse. But the fact that (I assume) you need to pass any message you send or receive through the English-to-Utopian machine establishes it as a cipher.

        I know some people can memorize the switched letters in something like Al-Bhed from FF X, but it’s still a cipher even if you memorize it.

        edit: the relevance of me forgetting that vael doesn’t know everything is that, in my mind, I was merely reminding him of something to correct a poor choice of words