Re: "Transferral" verb form in LC-01

David Peterson writes:
 > In a message dated 06/24/02 4:14:04 PM, butsuri@BTOPENWORLD.COM writes:
 >
 > << So, does this seem like a reasonable feature? >>
 >
 >     Sure.
 >
 > <<Do any natlangs feature
 > something similar?>>
 >
 >     I'd guess no.
 >     Anyway, wow!  Man, that is really breaking it down!  I admire you.  It
 > might be interesting to see how far you could break it down...  For example,
 > could you derive everything from one word?  Hmm...  Anyway, I'd be interested
 > in hearing more about this language.  Maybe you can get a webpage up, if you
 > don't already have one...?
 >

Hi.  I'm glad you liked it.  I'll certainly put a webpage up at some
point, but probably not too soon - very little of the language is
complete enough to document, and it seems like whenever I write up
something in enough detail to consider putting it up, it rapidly
becomes obselete... The script I would put up, it's nearly complete
enough to describe the language and I'm pleased enough with what I
have to want to show it to people, but I don't have a scanner or a
graphics tablet.  Of course, it's possible to draw the script using a
mouse, but it's time-consuming, and I won't do so until I'm pretty
certain it won't need to be redone.

Besides, there's not that much more in existance than what I put in
that last post... or rather, there's a good deal more, but it's a
matter of vague ideas or scribbled notes on the kind of thing that
should be implemented.

I'll see if I can draw up a list of _goals_, with examples where they
exist.  That, at least, should be fairly solid.

---

I did think about "how far you could break it down", theoretically, a
while back.  I don't think it would make sense to speak of deriving
everything from a single root, as ultimately your inflectional
morphemes would, in effect, become roots.

As for a language based on a truly minimal set of "semantic
primatives" the conclusion I reached was that while such a thing must,
logically, exist, it would be almost useless (at least for humans).
If you take all the words in a language, and replace them wherever
possible by an exact definition in simpler terms, and continue this
until it's impossible to go any further, then we have a minimal
vocabulary.  But while this works well for concepts which can be
described as Platonic ideals, like "square" or "temperature", it's
almost impossible to give an exact definition of other concepts
(particularly lifeforms or cultural ideas).  These concepts are better
described in terms of Wittgenstein's "family relationships"; we have
an idea of a stereotype, and things fit it better or worse, and if
they fit badly enough we can't apply the term.

I'm not prepared to accept that something like "dog" is any sort of
universal primative, but in order to define what the word means - as
opposed to just describing it in enough detail to distinguish it from
anything your likely to confuse it with - takes a lot of writing, and
when you have to do the same thing to every word in that definition of
the same character the single word ends up filling an encyclopaedia.

So, as far as practical conlanging goes, I'm not interested in
achieving that goal.  I'm just deriving in order to avoid wasting
roots (current rules allow only 2630 roots, although these are due for
renovation) and to make the language as transparently predictable as
possible.