Re: Concept_sitting

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 08:23:22PM +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> David J. Peterson wrote:
> > The task you're doing can be done to any concept pretty much
> > however you see fit.  If "rain" is "sky + water", perhaps "sky" is
> > "up + air".
>
> True - the splitting could in fact go on ad_infinitum. We could
> certainly split 'air' and, I guess, if one wanted to, it wouldn't be too
> difficult to split 'up'. 'water', of course, can be readily split.
One might wish to make a language in which every concept is expressed as
a combination of semantic primes - but primes which are no longer
meaningful in isolation!  So "rain" would be the archaic words for "sky"
and "water", but "sky" would instead be the archaic words for "up" and
"air"... etc.

Obviously if done without exception, this would be rather artificial, and
kind of reminiscent of that Star Trek language with "Shaka, when the walls
fell" or somesuch.  Probably a few of the old words should remain usable
in isolation.

(This also reminds me a bit of the use of Chinese characters!  Once (almost)
all words in themselves, now they are often paired to make words.  IIRC
this was because of falling-together due to the erosion that brought tones
to the language.  Maybe erosion could drive your language into oligosynthesis?)

Also, one nice touch would be to have a few remaining uses of the archaic
words in frozen formulas.

This is beginning to sound like fun!

tylakèhlpë'fö,
Amanda

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