Re: Comparison of philosophical languages

Mike Ellis wrote:
ME> I know the aim of Ygyde (as with many philosophical
ME> languages) is to reduce the number of roots for the
ME> sake of simplicity, but you've got a sort of
ME> tug-of-war here: The fewer roots you have, the more
ME> you must compound. And we've seen that Ygyde compounds
ME> seem to have to be learned as if "a priori" anyway,
ME> since they don't describe that well. So you might as
ME> well tug in the direction of more roots.

We have define our goal before we do this. There always
will be poorly defined compound words, for example
flora, fauna, and geographic names. I guess that a root
word is useless unless it is a necessary ingredient of
at least one hundred compound words.

ME> I suggest allowing the CVV syllables. You cannot do
ME> this at present, since you have assigned all the CVVs
ME> to be long variants of the CVs for "those who cannot
ME> pronounce some phonemes of the Short Ygyde". But is
ME> this practical?

I do not know. No matter what I do, conlangers criticize
my work.

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Josh Brandt-Young wrote:
JBV> p b f w[v] m t d s z n c[tS] j[dZ] k g l

JBV> This phonology almost *begs* for an [h]; and though
JBV> you've expressed concern with the consonant "y" ([j],
JBV> that is) sounding too much like "i," the fact is that
JBV> [j] is typologically among the most common of sounds,
JBV> and your preset syllable structure precludes the
JBV> possibility of confusing it with a vowel.

JBV> That only yields 14 additional roots, but even just 14
JBV> could be quite useful.

True. "H" is as common in natural languages as c[tS].
I made only 32 glyphs, including numerals so that
Ygyde text can be coded with 5 bit bytes (2^5=32).
We are really groping in the dark, because we do not
know if larger number of roots will improve compound
words. I believe that we have to make a list of badly
needed root words before we modify Ygyde. I think that
"criminal" root would be useful. At present I define
criminal as "opposite legal."