Re: Concept_sitting

Tanks for the
> Natural Semantic Metalanguage
it will be a great help for me

About this:
> This results in some very long and convoluted definitions that lack  
> transparency.
  after little study of chinese i feel totally free with the  concept  
of "short expressing"
The langages use the length they need to express concept.  some time  
the difference between Words and sentences is  tiny. look at the  
translation of modern technical concept in chinese.
http://www.cojak.org/index.php?function=Msyllables

> The decision to call a given word a semantic prime is somewhat  
> arbitrary, and depends on the purpose to which derivations will be  
> put. Thus "dog" might be considered to be a primitive concept,  
> since dogs are familiar in virtually all human populations.
i totally agree with you, such a langage as i 'm talking about would  
bearly have a definite glossary apart from the roots list (brick  
words) , the only rule is : i 'm i understood ?
dog can be a defending animal, a barking one, a human near one. ...
I feel it could be like the pronoms in japanese you only precise what  
you want, if needed.

About the lack of tranparency let's be clear: my purpose is NOT to  
remplace the natural langages wich are rich and beautifull. The kind  
of langage i mean would be an approximative communication. like the  
morse was once. It's not perfect but there are no other way of  
talking in the given situation.

the concept "young" is , I think, to be reconsider in each sentence.
in a song I translated there was : "the girl was young"
And I felt natural to translate :
"mag itch maga vana"
mag(a): small, short
itch: life
vana: woman.

But if I wanted to translate "young tree" i would say :
"alu tul"
alu : new, new period, this year...
tul: tree

In an another text I've translated "tree" as :
"sil fi"
sil: string, string form
fi: vegetal

...
Erb



Le 15 janv. 09 à 01:13, Gary Shannon a écrit :

> --- On Wed, 1/14/09, Erbrice <erbrice@...> wrote:
>
>> yes but how do you split "chair", is it a concept
>
> My own random thoughts:
>
> The decision to call a given word a semantic prime is somewhat  
> arbitrary, and depends on the purpose to which derivations will be  
> put. Thus "dog" might be considered to be a primitive concept,  
> since dogs are familiar in virtually all human populations.
>
> It could also be claimed that "dog" can be factored into "canine  
> animal" except that "canine" intrinsically implies "animal" so the  
> explicit mention of the word "animal" is redundant, and we discover  
> that "canine [n]" is really just a synonym for "dog [n]". We might  
> also decide to define "dog" in terms of a narrative description  
> that uses only words from some specified set of semantic primitives  
> as done in "Semantics: Primes and Universals" (Wierzbicka, 1996).  
> This results in some very long and convoluted definitions that lack  
> transparency.
>
> For use as a practical language building tool, a prime would be  
> more like a word that might be found in a Swadish list, and a  
> derivation, or factorization of a composite word would be  
> expressible using two or three factor words, at most. Thus the  
> primes would be more like axioms in Euclid than like actual primes  
> in number theory.
>
> Consider the concept "young" in:
>
> 	puppy = {young dog}
>
> We might define "young" as "recently created", although the word  
> "created" might not be applicable in a particular instance. We  
> might prefer "recently made", unless the young thing in question is  
> not something that is made. Thus, what we really need is a word  
> that means "made or created or having come into existence" We can  
> consult the thesaurus and try other words until we hit upon one  
> that seems to capture the essence. For example:
>
> 	young = {recently emergent}
> 	young = {recently manifest}
> 	young = {recently instantiated}
>
> If we choose, for example, {recently manifest}, then we could also  
> factor "puppy" as:
>
> 	puppy = {{recently manifest} dog}
>
> The reason why this is not the best choice is that the concept  
> "young" is itself so useful that we are better off defining "young"  
> and then, once defined, using it.
>
> We can also decompose "recent" as "near past", where "past" might  
> be defined as "before now":
>
> 	past = {before now}
> 	recent(ly) = {near past}
> 	young = {recently manifest}
> 	puppy = {young dog}
>
> Which could be combined into:
>
> 	puppy = {{{near {before now}} manifest} dog}
>
> but clearly the stepwise definitions are easier to follow.
>
> --gary