Re: Unilang: the Lexicon

At 12:05 am -0400 21/4/01, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>Lexicon, good old lexicon... Probably the biggest issue argued over by
>auxlangers. "Every educated person has some knowledge of a Romance
>language"
Yes - I've had many an argument over this on Auxlang. There was one guy
there who used regularly to reply to me that an auxlang should be for the
EDUCATED [sic] inhabitants of the world.  By 'EDUCATED' he meant, as he
often explained, those who knew or were familiar with a western language.
Not a view I share.

[snip]

>
>I've never seen a unilang created by anyone from the domain of a non-
>Western lingua franca.
The inventor of Frater IIRC was Vietnamese and the inventor of Babm was
Japanese.

[snip]

>The problem with an a priori ("out-of-thin-air") lexicon is its
>basic "unattractiveness" to the layman. Who wants to speak this "nonsense"
>language? This hasn't appealed to the general auxlang community,
..tho apparently SolReSol was successful as an auxlang for sometime before
its eventual demise.  (There are, I believe, some trying to revive it)

[snip]
>
>So that's it then, a posteriori ("same-old-tired")? Not quite. The result
>would be one of following:
>
>* if only one general source of words is taken, that's cultural bias, and
>probably reduced functionality (due to overly localized concepts).
>* if we collect words from a selected list of "major languages", we'll end
>up with a hashed-up, hardly recognizable, lexicon that might as well be a
>priori.
>
>So what to do?
What Leo Moser did with his Acadon project was to look for the widest
spread of words or related words among as many of the world's languages as
possible.  I think he spent some seven or so years this - it's not an easy
undertaking.

>Once again, I think the key-word is _balance_. Something like "a mediori"
>(in pig-Latin :p). The basic items in the lexicon would probably best be a
>priori, while more specific concepts, and certainly all local/culture-
>specific items, would be borrowed.
I think a certain amount of a_proriism is not a bad thing in an IAL.  Some
have criticized Esperanto for having a_priori elements in its 'table of
correlatives' and having apparently made-up words like _edzo_ "husband".
But I disagree, as long as these features don't get out of hand.  It gives
a language a distinctive flavor of its own.

The idea of a basic a_priori vocab, with a_posteriori borrowing for more
specific and for local/cultural specific items is certainly an interesting
idea; it looks like a neat balance between the universal neutrality a
a_prioriism and a_posteriori familiarity of more specific concepts.  Go for
it!

>But we must also consider the inner
>structure of the language; words like "democracy" and "philosophy" might be
>tempting to borrow, but perhaps some fairly logical constructions from
>native morphemes would do better.
Doesn't Icelandic favor that?

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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