Re: OT: Nutrition and pleasurable sense data

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 09:45:17 -0400, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
> wrote:
>>Does anyone have nutritional terminology in their conlang?
<snip heaps of fascinating organic chemistry>

>>I don't think my chemistry knowledge is up to snuff for deriving
>>all those systematically, yet.
>
> Realistically they won't be able to taste the presence or absence of everything
> they have to eat to survive, so I don't know that they need all those words at
> all.  Deriving them all systematically may not actually be an issue (unless you
> just decide that it should be).
gzb is not a language for a fictional human culture; it's a personal
language I use everyday.  Detailed nutritional terminology isn't
as important as basic stuff like waking, sleeping, working,
driving, etc., or terminology for things I deal with all the time
like writing software and fiction and devising conlangs; but
it would be ideal to have such terms that I can talk about
whatever nutrients I need to pay attention to in arranging my
diet or use of dietary supplements.

Whether I or any other human can taste the presence of a given
nutrient is not an issue; humans in our culture have other sources
of information for knowing what nutrients they need and what foods
or pills they can get them from.  Deriving words for nutrients systematically
follows from the general design principles of gzb, being lexically
parsimonious except in areas which are most often talked about
or most conceptually central to the ethos of the language.
Nutrition isn't going to be one of the most often talked about
subjects, so words for this semantic field don't need to be
particularly short, but precisely because they won't occur
often in the corpus, they need to be perspicuous or at least
mnemonic compounds or derivations, since memorizing a root
word that I would use only once in a few weeks or months is
not a good use of mental energy.

> The vitamin humans need is ascorbic acid (Vitamin C). ("Ascorbic"
> means "without scurvy", btw.)
> I don't know if humans can even taste ascorbic acid;
I know that vitamin C pills have a very distinctive taste, if you
take them with water instead of some other liquid that masks
the taste.

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