Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

From: "Andrew Nowicki" <andrew@...>
Subject: Re: Comparison of philosophical languages


> Even the English
> language has some of this ability: police-man,
> fire-man, work-man, crafts-man, journey-man,
> milk-man, gentle-man, noble-man, water-man, air-man,
> horse-man, herds-man, boat-man, cave-man, sky-man,
> country-man, woods-man, trades-man, yeo-man,
> weather-man, gun-man, clergy-man, house-man...
> Is it difficult to tell these words apart?
As I've mentioned to you privately, I'll now mention here on the list.

The concept of compounding lesser words to make more specialized or defined
ones is a really good way to expand a vocabulary.  What I think a main
problem with Ygyde and other such languages is is that their root words are
too few in number.  So you get stuck with "noun-food-green-long-round" to
mean cucumbers or zucchini/courgettes.  What would work better is if your
roots were more specific.  Then you might have "cucumber" as a root.  Or
"squash" as a root, with "green-squash" meaning zucchini.

One easy thing to fix is the order of your word-parts.  If the first part
were the specific and the last part the general, words with similar meanings
would only have similar endings (cf. your list of words with -man endings).

> On the other hand the English language has some
> nasty near homonyms: She sells sea-shells. I had
> a hot hat on my head.
So does any language, even Ygyde.  Remember North and South America?
They're horribly close.  And unlike "hot" and "hat", you can't tell them
apart by context.

> Another flaw of the English language is that a
> novice listening to a fast speech cannot tell
> where one word ends and another word begins.
This isn't English, it's language.  I have this problem when listening to
Spanish, French, etc. when they're spoken quickly.  But as I get to know
more of the words, I can separate them out much more easily.

I'm going to post a copy of my proposal (that I sent to you) for changes in
the Ygyde concept, as they apply equally well to all philosophical
languages.

Joe Fatula