Re: The Philosophical Language Fallacy

Hi!

li_sasxsek writes:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Harrison
>
>> i have experimented with making a taxonomic philosophical
> conlang. It seemed
>> to me that some concepts simultaneously needed to be in 2 or
> 3 different
>> categories, e.g. "president" goes in the "people described by
> their
>> occupations or social roles" category and also in the
> "government" category.
>
> This is why I gave up on that approach a long time ago.  I do
> still see value in an oligosynthetic system.  At least there
> will be some mnemonics to aid in learning vocabulary.
My way of learning that it is hard or maybe impossible of finding a
good lexical taxonomy was simply that it never worked well when I
tried.  I gave up because I was very frustrated and lexical design
took long without making the result pleasing.  (Lexical design
*always* takes a very long time for me, but e.g. for my historical
conlangs, the result is pleasing.  That's a nice reward.)

Newer engelangs like Qþyn|ài do not try to have a strictly
hierarchical lexical structure, but the lexical atoms are meant to be,
well, nothing more than atoms.  I do the same for a newer
oligoisolating (or -synthetic, not decided yet) language, although I
do group the lexical atoms semantically a bit.

**Henrik