Dublex

Ray Brown scrivei:
>>Moving on to the general Dublex experiment, I don't really see
>>anything magically special about roots. The inventory of
>>a language's morphological or etymological roots tends to be
>>rather accidental -- accidents of history. They don't represent
>>semantic primitives or anything truly elemental to the cognitive
>>structures underlying language.
>
>That's exactly how I feel about the matter.  Are there such things as
>"semantic primitives"?
Well, there's Wierzbicka's list, explained e.g. here:
http://www.geocities.com/polkacats/semantics/index.html

Which basically includes, "I" (first person), "thou" (second person),
"someone", "something", "people" (in general, I think), "this", "the same",
"other/another", "one/one of", "two", "many/much", "all", "some/some of",
"more", "think/th. about", "know/kn. about", "want", "feel" (undifferentiated
between what we'd call 'emotions' and 'sensations'), "see", "hear", "say/say
to/about", "word" (...which I understand is not a very certain entry in the
list, because of Chinese), "do", "happen", "move", "there is/are", "alive",
"good", "bad", "big", "small", "when/then", "before", "after", "a long time",
"a short time", "now", ...

... Why am I doing this?  It's all on that page.

The thing about primitives is they are _primitive_.  Ordinarily we work at a
much higher level... you have to add a lot to "something" before it becomes
"machine", and more yet before you ever get as high as "door" or "lynx".

     *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/