Re: Langauge Constets (was Natural Semantic Metalanguage)

--- Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly <mungojelly@...> wrote:

<snip>
>
> We all need to loosen up the way we're thinking about it in order to
> come up with really good ones, though.  We're so used to inventing
> concepts for languages with thousands of words.  I think that a tiny
> language is going to need a different kind of word, one that has a
> tremendous broadness, and also some special quality of refinability
> and combinability.
>
> "Mal-" in Esperanto has just what's needed; if only there were a way
> to invent nineteen more "mal-"s.  Hmmm...
>
> <3,
> mungojelly
>
Perhaps instead of each word adding more meaning to the sentence, each wourd
could subtract meaning from the sentence. Use words so broad as to be
essentially meaningless, but when combined with other words take the meaning(s)
_shared_ by the two words.

For example, "glundi" means "large, blue, glowing, animal", and "finja" means
"red, glowing, automobile, animal", and "wagnus" means "tree, horse, broken,
cloud". So it's clear that "glundi finja wagnus" can only mean "horse".

--gary

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