Re: basic morphemes of a loglang

Ray Brown scripsit:

> Interesting - so all the Loglan derivatives basically just took JCB's list?
Yes.

I had quite forgotten about Helen Eaton's semantic frequency book.
This was compiled in the 1930s, and was a list of the highest-frequency
concepts in four languages: English, Spanish, French, and German.
Apparently JCB worked his way through the list, assigning roots to
the most frequent 1000 concepts unless there was an obvious two-part
compound for them.  He then did the next 2000 concepts, adding roots
where absolutely necessary.  This gave him 750 roots by 1962.

(Interestingly, Helen Eaton worked for IALA, the Interlingua people,
and was in fact responsible for recruiting Alexander Gode, originally
as her research assistant on this project.  So there is a tenuous but
real link between Interlingua and the Loglans.)

The list grew rather idiosyncratically over the next twenty years with
very little weeding: at that point, there was no concept of borrowing,
so if a concept couldn't be expressed as a 2-, 3-, or 4-root compound,
it went in.  Borrowings were finally added to the language when it was
realized that certain semantic fields were "broad but shallow" (see below)
and borrowing was the best way to handle them.

Lojban extended and regularized the set of cultural words in the list,
while recognizing that borrowings would have to be used for most cultures.
Several reviews were then constructed against Roget's thesaurus to make
sure that various semantic groups were sufficiently complete.  The last
few additions were done around 1990, and the list has been stable since.

An article by Lojbab is available at
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9105/msg00030.html .  The
Lojbanisms are as follows: _gismu_ 'root', _rafsi_ 'combining form',
_le'avla_ 'borrowing' (modern Lojban _fu'ivla_), _lujvo_ 'compound'.

> Now this pinpoints one of my problems. If I'm not specific, then
> obviously I have to use compounds.  I suppose, e.g. something like
> "oil-fruit" for 'olive'.
There are certain fields of semantic discourse, notably cultures,
foodstuffs, places, personal names, and organisms, that are "broad but
shallow"; one needs huge numbers of extremely specific words in order
to handle them.  There are 6000-7000 languages just to start with, and
giving each of them a name quickly outruns the capacity of any reasonable
BrSc or Loglanish design.  Foods and prepared dishes probably run in to
the tens of thousands, and organisms into the millions.  Furthermore,
there are no internationally agreed-upon names for most of these things,
with the exception of Linnaean binomial nomenclature.

The Loglans, therefore, have long recognized the necessity of borrowing
in one way or another, since the best names for these things are either
the names used by international agreement where such agreement exists,
or the names used by the people most closely concerned.  One can hardly
write such a simple sentence as "Mahogany trees grow on the island of
Borneo" without introducing them: one might be able to find a compound
that can be deciphered as "mahogany", but what is one to do with Borneo?

> I know, despite what one or two have said, BrSc is not a loglang.
> So I have other considerations for my basic wordlist.
Indeed.  The Loglans have always tried to assign short words to frequently
used concepts ("Zipf's law"), but brevity as such has not been a concern.

> And what compound does one have for "mushroom"? 'edible-fungus' won't do
> because many types of fungi, besides agaricus campestris are edibled?
Well, it seems to me that "mushroom" has two prototypes, one to do with
shape and the other with edibility.  "See the mushrooms over there?"
leads me to expect something that may be edible or poisonous, and I certainly
wouldn't expect A. campestris.  In a discussion of cookery, though, mushroom
does fairly well mean "edible fungus", though I wouldn't say that blue cheese
contains mushrooms!

My personal preference is to leave all this up to context, in the Italian
style, in which dishes are simply "con funghi".  Anyhow, my favorite fungi
are the puffball (_Lycoperdon gemmatum_), eaten raw in a juvenile state on
a picnic, and the morel (_Boletus edulis_, and rightly so named), delicately
sauteed in butter.

> (What's Classical Yiklamu's word list?)
It's the WordNet semantic list, which currently contains about 100,000
terms.  This list was also used by xuxuxi, which is basically WordNet
vocabulary, AllNoun grammar, and a unique phonology.

--
It was impossible to inveigle           John Cowan <jcowan@...>
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Into offering the slightest apology     http://www.reutershealth.com
For his Phenomenology.                      --W. H. Auden, from "People" (1953)

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