Re: Dublex (was: Washing-machine words (was: Futurese, Chinese,

Jeffrey:
> Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> comunu:
[...]
> > At 6:08 am +0100 15/5/02, And Rosta wrote:
> > [snip]
> > >(unambigously analysable) compounds. I don't see much advantage in
> > >a *regularized* rafsioid scheme of the sort you describe. Overall, I
> > >think compounding is very overrated.
> >
> > I'm coming to that conclusion also.
>
> Them's fighting words. :-)  Not really, of course, but since it flies in the
> face of my whole experiment I have to ask you both why you think that
> compounding is overrated.
Two main reasons.

(1) Compounding is not the only alternative to creating a new and
totally unanalysable root. There are various alternatives, including
* arbitrary or quasi-systematic modification of an existing
  semantically related root or stem
* derivational affixes
* having very many roots, but organizing them into paradigms such
  that roots with related meaning have similar forms, possibly in
  a relatively systematic way

-- Sometimes, these alternatives yield apter stems than compounding
does. A compound X+Y is apt if the denotatum is X and is Y, or if
(in a head-final compound) it is a Y a salient characteristic of which
is saliently associated with X. But not all new concepts can be
expressed by such apt compounds.

(2) Compounding yields unnecessarily long stems. Suppose all roots
are three segments long and that on average each segment can be
followed by any of 12 other segments. That gives 1728 roots. Two
segment roots would number 144. Now, if you rely solely on
compounding, then all words but the 1728 root words with be
at least 6 segments long, and many will be longer. Suppose
words average 8 segments. That means that there's vastly more
wordspace -- half a trillion, even counting words up to only
8 segments long -- than is actually needed to accommodate the
total number of words needed in the language. If you care about
concision -- and almost all language users do -- then you want
words to be as short as possible. This would mean that after
the 1728 3-segment words have been used up, the next 20736
words should have 4-segment forms. The specific number are used
simply to illustrate the general point.


Moving on to the general Dublex experiment, I don't really see
anything magically special about roots. The inventory of
a language's morphological or etymological roots tends to be
rather accidental -- accidents of history. They don't represent
semantic primitives or anything truly elemental to the cognitive
structures underlying language. Hence although your Dublex goal
interests me by virtue of being an engelanging exercise, its
specific goal is not one I myself think worthwhile to the world
at large.

--And.

Reply