Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences

Yoon Ha Lee scripsit:

> > There is a third way: the Loglan "Chicken McNuggets" words, which are designed
> > to resemble, without actually being the same as, words from various
> > (numerically) great world languages.  Thus, *mrenu* 'human being' is designed
> > to suggest both English 'man' and Chinese 'ren2'.
>
> <laugh>  I like the idea.
There is a perpetual argument in the Loglan/Lojban community that it would be
better to use words from a single language (somehow, it always turns out
to be English).  The counter-argument is that adopting words directly from
English, or any other language, brings with it the language-specific
semantics of that word.  This is fine for "spaghetti" (and indeed the
word is "djarspageti" in Lojban, where "dja-" is a prefix meaning "food"),
but terrible for core vocabulary words.  Loglan/Lojban's autonomous
vocabulary makes it possible to maintain autonomous semantics.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter