Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

>JL> How about roots like . . . earth, water, fire,
>JL> air, light, sound, life, death, birth,
>JL> same, not, opposite, inner, sun, moon . . .
>
>Most of them are already defined.
But most of them aren't roots though.

>"not" and "opposite" are redundant.
No they're not. They're different concepts, and both crucial. there's a
difference between "non-" and "counter-" It is non-cold (not cold) in this
room right here without being counter-cold (hot). I can be non-happy
without being counter-happy.

>It takes
>hundreds of hours to design and test a set of
>roots that makes sense.
So? It could still be done.
One thing I suggest is to look at what are "root" words in natural
languages. A lot of things which are roots in those are not roots in Ygyde
and must be expressed by compounds. I know the aim of Ygyde (as with many
philosophical languages) is to reduce the number of roots for the sake of
simplicity, but you've got a sort of tug-of-war here: The fewer roots you
have, the more you must compound. And we've seen that Ygyde compounds seem
to have to be learned as if "a priori" anyway, since they don't describe
that well. So you might as well tug in the direction of more roots.
I suggest allowing the CVV syllables. You cannot do this at present, since
you have assigned all the CVVs to be long variants of the CVs for "those
who cannot pronounce some phonemes of the Short Ygyde". But is this
practical? For example, the long version of "ba" is "bau", which still
requires that they be able to say "ba", since "ba" is included in "bau".
Likewise, the long version of "tu" is "tui". And so on.
You could have at least a couple hundred more "roots" if you allowed CVV
root words. Allowing more concepts to be roots would improve the
descriptive ability of compounds while also allowing more things to be
expressed with less compounding.

M

Replies