This is in reply to a comment I've received.

Any linguist (like me) will tell you that your principal assertion (that there is more than one language) is more than absolutely correct.

Right, literally, that there is more than one language, is pretty obvious as soon as you accept the existence of, say, English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, etc. My personal assertion goes a bit stronger to say that actually, everybody is speaking their own personal "language".

You can even decompose constructs like dialects into smaller units of ideolects.

After reading about Idiolect, I can see my idea was not novel, which is as I suspected. Surely then, the phenomena of a person using a different idiolect depending on the audience they are speaking to, must have been studied to some degree and named as well. The language one uses with one's superiors (boss, teacher, military sergeant, etc.) is quite different from that from distant peers, subordinates or close friends. Any clues on what that name might be?

I am SHOCKED in fact to hear that anyone believes that there is only one language.

I may have been "unfairly" concising their arguments such that the absurdity of what they were saying were more obvious. In retrospect, I somewhat regret it, as it's a form of strawman: probably (though I did not explicitly ask), they accepted the existence of English, French, Japanese, etc., and so opening the argument that way may have characterized my opponent as not to be taken seriously early on, so that even if their later arguments were reasonable, they would be dismissed. However, I was not sure how to best express their position, since I disagreed with it -- perhaps that everybody who speaks "Canadian English" is speaking the same language? If I had presented their argument that way, I suppose I would counter it with "No actual one person speaks Canadian English. Instead, the language exists as a platonic ideal, and there exist people who speak variants of Canadian English which are close enough to the ideal that communication is possible." Something like that, anyway.

Regarding the link between computer science and linguistics: There is indeed a strong (and recognized) one. The majority of the cross-over exists in the fields of morphology, syntax and semantics. Fields like neurolinguistics don't play a role because they aim to describe how the language facility works: computer scientists CREATE their (analogy of a) language facility. Unless they wanted to parallel the human brain, it would likely be of little use to them.

I don't know what you mean by a "language facility", and CompScientists trying to create one. Can you elaborate on that? "Neurolinguistics" sounds like it'd be the bridge between CompSci and Linguistics, but whenever I look at neurolinguistic texts, they seem to be "overly" obsessed with biology. They can't see the network for the neurons, it seems.

I wonder if your closing statement is of your own design (which I don't at all contend is improbable), as it's one of pragmatics' principal tenets, phrased almost exactly!

You're asking whether I came up with it, or if I read it somewhere? As far as I know, I came up with it, but it's far from improbable that I might have read this passage a couple of months ago, consciously forgot (but subconsciously remembered) about it, and then regurgitated it here.

I would add that Dr. Mark Liberman (the author of the cited rant) is a figurehead at UPenn, Trustee Professor of Phonetics and Director of Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) and the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). What was your rant against him exactly? Especially given that it seems you're under the impression that he believes that, say, the OED is /the one source/ for the /one/ English. He doesn't: see Spelling Rage.

Ah yes, I was going to mention earlier that a little bit of rebellion against the "academic authority" isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I didn't, and now seems like an opportune time to do so (and I just did). I don't really remember what I was thinking when I wrote this blog post (it's been a rough week... or has it been 2 weeks now?).

I think I may have been thinking of another person, and Dr. Mark Liberman accidentally got hit with collateral damage there. After re-reading his post, I can see he is mostly in agreement with me (or, I guess to make myself sound more humble, I am in agreement with him): Specifically, that if a dictionary gives a certain definition for a word, it means you can safely assume that that definition is in common use, but you cannot safely assume that any other definition is "wrong". Taking a step back, if you accept my premise that everyone speaks their own language (or idiolect), then it doesn't make sense to speak about "right" or "wrong" definitions anyway. Definitions can be "useful" or "useless" (circular definitions tend to be useless, for example), and they can be "common" or "unorthodox" (defining "red" to mean "skimming across the water" would be unorthodox, and thus probably present difficulties when communicating with others), but I don't think one can ever say a definition is "wrong".

In particular, I was in an argument with someone a long time ago about the possible definitions for "lying". We had both read a text which contained the term "lying", and the other person felt that the author of the text was being offensive for falsely accusing people of "lying", where she interpreted "lying" to mean "to intentionally tell a falsehood". I pointed out that perhaps the author of the text meant "To tell a falsehood", without the requirement that it be intentional (thus making the author's text a statement of fact, rather than a guess at another's intent, and hopefully therefor less offensive). She disagreed, insisting that the only "correct" definition of "lying" was "intentional lying".

She could not seem to accept the idea that there might exist people who might associate a different connotation with the term "lying", and therefore could not accept the idea that the author had intended this "unintentional lying" definition. When presented with some definitions from online dictionaries which do not make "intention" a requirement (E.g. wordnet.princeton.edu gives "lie: a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth"), she responded that she'll only accept definitions from "authoritative" sources. When pressed, she listed a few, though I forget what they are now (perhaps something like Oxford, Cambridge, etc.).

Funnily enough, I tracked down a definition from one of the dictionaries she cited as "authoritative" which defined lying in such a way so as to allow for the possibility of unintentional lying, but I think we had reached the "no communication possible" point by then.

Anyway, all of this is essentially a re-iteration of my previous post: dictionaries disagree with each other, so obviously they cannot be accepted as the ultimate form of authority on the definitions of words. Linguists disagree with each other, so they cannot be accepted as the final authority on usage of languages. Languages are outside the control of any one person, and they constantly evolve whenever interaction happens between two agents speaking those languages. Remember the whole purpose of language in the first place: to allow for the possibility of communication. When communicating with someone else, take into account the fact that they are not speaking the same idiolect as you are. Trying to force them to speak the same idiolect is futile.