Re: Relational language

On 3/16/07, Ben Haanstra <kof@...> wrote:

> Now think of this, a chair is a "platform" with at least 1 leg with an
> uptional possibility back that sides for 3 or an ufo-like surrounding (a
> baby/kid chair like a table onto the chair)(1 leg for example at the bar u
> sometimes see a chairleg of steel supporting the seat), on top of this,
> surface is transparent(no color or such attached), no special lengths to the
> parts as well, therefore it can be a bigger chair, etc. you get the idea..
>
> As you see this can be very complex and as a little training for myself to
> get it all organized I started off with thinking off superclasses for verbs
> (indentification, existance, create, destruct, etc..) and check a list how i
> would be able to construct those words with those classes (with some
> regularity in it).
You might find Rick Harrison's article on verb aspect useful
for ways to derive a lot of specific verbs from a few verb roots.

> > The whole idea behind 'relational' language:
> to describe areas/surroundings/fantasy/etc better then before. Language as
> we speak is very ambigu to me, even using very specific with many adjectives
> will still make it somewhat ambigu.
Interesting.  Lojban and some other engineered languages aim to
eliminate syntactic ambiguity, but regard a fair amount of semantic
ambiguity as unavoidable even in a conlang with no arbitrary
homophones.  It sounds like you're trying to create structures
to reduce semantic ambiguity to an arbitrarily small amount?

>Next to it all it should be with some
> short words and easy pronunication(no weird triple C's or odd sounds or
> clicks) to do it somewhat efficient, as to provide easier communication
> situations.
I suspect that may be contradictory with your other goal, but I wish
you luck.  Having easy pronunciation (meaning, I guess, a relatively
small phoneme inventory and restrictive phonotactic constraints)
means that you're not going to have very many possible short
words.  Then either you assign multiple senses to the same short
words (hopefully in widely different semantic fields, so they won't
often occur in the same context and cause confusion, but even
so that seems to contradict your other goal).  Or you expand
your vocabulary to have many highly precise roots and plenty
of affixes to make them even more precise, but would then have
to use a lot of longer words.

> More professional goals:
> - Describing maps/routes/surroundings effectively
> - Describing the placing of things in rooms/places
For describing motion and position, in addition to Ithkuil's
spatial coordinate system, you might look at my gzb's
spacetime postposition system.  It's not perfect -- there
are a few annoying gaps -- but it has the advantage over
Ithkuil of being proven by nine years of experience
to be learnable and speakable in real time.  (I'm not
perfectly fluent in gzb yet, but the postposition system
is one aspect I have learned to use fluently, constructing
ad-hoc precise postpositions for particular situations on the fly.)

> - The relations in a face (i believe this could be a good way to remember
> faces or to describe) as how they're structured.
Interesting.  You could have a number of short morphemes
for shapes and angles, and a number/measurement system
that lets you describe the relative sizes and distances of
different facial features...?

> Hope you like the idea.
Indeed.  I hope you'll show us your work in progress.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm