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Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Sunday, April 1, 2001, 18:27
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