Re: Unilang: the Lexicon

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 06:38:38 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:

>I think so.  Whatever one may think of Esperanto, Zamenhof gave it a
>decidedly distinctive flavor; and IMO that distinctive flavor has probably
>be one the main reasons why it has attracted people.  Bland "Euroclones"
>lack the distictive flavor.  Indeed, other conIALs that attracted a wide
>following in their time, i.e. SolReSol and Volapük, clearly had distinctive
>flavors of their own.
With my current design criteria, Unilang will either be completely without
flavor, or very spicy :) The question is, will a balance of features make
for something very bland, or something special? I may need to take special
action to add to the distinctiveness, though anything drastic would be
contrary to all the other criteria.

---

However, I'm not sure if I'm actually making this language in full. One of
my initial premises are that Unilang cannot be created by the perspective
of only one man. By drawing on the council of this list, I am of course
trying to widen that perspective. Well, I'll just continue working out my
thoughts on the matter, and if I'm still itching to go on, I might make up
some words and other details; it's all just for fun, after all.

---

Regarding lexical design:

The Unilang lexicon would not be well designed by simply spurting out a
bunch of random phonological outputs and assigning them English
equivalents. That's bad technique in any conlanging. What needs to be done
is a careful listing of minimal semantic items. Abstractions must be
specially handled. A line must be drawn in what earns its own morpheme, and
what could be expressed with a combination of other morphemes. I should say
that in this matter I would be generous in the handing out of morphemes; I
don't agree with derivations for simple concepts, as is done in Esperanto,
for example: "father" is "patro", and thence "mother" is "patrino" (using
the -in infix of femininity). The learning advantage of this feature is
even to be doubted; one still needs to learn, and record in one's mental
lexicon, that the "mother" item is expressed with the "father" morpheme
plus a feminizing infix, instead of having its own phonological sequence
(projected: "matro").

I think that the natlang tendency here is to generously assign word stems
to material items, such as living creatures of all sorts, and visible
natural phenomena; while abstract concepts are more generally expressed
through combinations of morphemes, often quite arbitrarily. Anyone agree
with this impression? I will have this pattern in mind as I design the
lexicon for Unilang.

Regards,
Óskar

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