… or because of pure happenstance, i.e. it just didn't come up?
Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language.
My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is.
As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as English — and actually more so, for the things that are natural to a non-linear or recursive way of thinking.
Obviously we haven't gotten to everything. The lexicon, and grammar, are nowhere near complete. So, yes, we'll need to make lots more to cover everything.
Though also, we deliberately don't make every distinction English does, and we make distinctions English doesn't. It's a very noob move to make a conlang lexically (or even conceptually) 1:1 with a natlang.
It took us several months to figure out a non-linearly-natural way to express "if", for example. A noob would have just chucked in a new glyph and called it a day. We had to rethink fundamentals (like the scoping of irrealis); the result, IMO, is far more interesting.
As for optimality, that has nearly nothing to do with how natlangs spread. You learn a language because you need to — economically, socially, or militarily — not because it's better.
And how they evolve also has almost nothing to do with optimality in any hackery sense. That's an entirely different, stochastic process. It has some tendencies towards eg simplicity, regularity, etc, but just as many against.
In any case, the result is that natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become "better" over time, just different.
"natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become «better» over time, just different"
I remember reading about the dynamic of language evolution, where an influx of new (and language-wise uneducated) speakers tend to botch and thus simplify much of the existing linguistic constructs. Then there is the opposite effect, where once the group of speakers becomes more uniform and educated, people become more willing to adopt/respect language conventions and even go on looking for ways to express more nuanced distinctions and improve the language in general.
Another way to express the latter is that if something becomes too popular, upper socioeconomic classes will want to adopt something else, so that they can preserve a class distinction of "higher register" speech. Meanwhile, lower ones will try to adopt the style of the higher register, since it's perceived better. That's an endless cycle.
Same thing for euphemisms, insults, etc. And uniformity was far less common before mass media and centralized schooling…
Linguists have a much more descriptivist way of looking at language use and change.
Nuance is not a feature of education; focus is. E.g. AAVE (AKA Ebonics) is currently considered a lower class register, but it has grammatical distinctions that standard English doesn't (like whether an action is part of a pattern, vs a one off).
ETA: also, an influx of non-native speakers tends to result in borrowing of both words and grammar from their native languages. Not just in the development of creoles. What's "correct" is purely defined by consensus; if there are lots of new speakers, that's of course going to shift towards their preferences.
Extant natural languages (including dead ones) do not come anywhere close to coming the entire ambit of what could happen in a language.
My interest as a conlanger is precisely that — exploring the boundaries of what language can be, not merely what it is.
As for expressiveness, I think that, within the things we've gotten to, it's just a expressive as English — and actually more so, for the things that are natural to a non-linear or recursive way of thinking.
Obviously we haven't gotten to everything. The lexicon, and grammar, are nowhere near complete. So, yes, we'll need to make lots more to cover everything.
Though also, we deliberately don't make every distinction English does, and we make distinctions English doesn't. It's a very noob move to make a conlang lexically (or even conceptually) 1:1 with a natlang.
It took us several months to figure out a non-linearly-natural way to express "if", for example. A noob would have just chucked in a new glyph and called it a day. We had to rethink fundamentals (like the scoping of irrealis); the result, IMO, is far more interesting.
As for optimality, that has nearly nothing to do with how natlangs spread. You learn a language because you need to — economically, socially, or militarily — not because it's better.
And how they evolve also has almost nothing to do with optimality in any hackery sense. That's an entirely different, stochastic process. It has some tendencies towards eg simplicity, regularity, etc, but just as many against.
In any case, the result is that natural languages don't have teleology; they don't become "better" over time, just different.