The Philosophical Language Fallacy

On Sat, 2008-07-05, Joerg Rhiemier wrote:

> Yes.  Compounding is a very useful and also natural device.
> However, if you use a closed set of roots, your compounds
> soon get pretty long and clumsy.
This is rather a matter of taste. In English and, to a lesser extent,
German, we are used to a lot of short words. If you speak Mohawk, then
yontaterihonnyennìtha must sound no stranger than "school". For a
conlang, using a very large set of phonemes, Circassian or Nootka style,
to get an ample supply of monosyllabic roots would help: I'm currently
thinking of doing a language with words of the ƛ’ïnmoq‘raʒħəɬ type.

The real problem of starting with a thesaurus in ones own language is
the semantic bias. An English or German speaker with verbs of movement
like "push" and "roll" might not consider the Romance system with verbs
of motion encoding direction, or the Athabascan one with verbs encoding
the shape or consistency of the moving object.