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

Ray:
> >* having very many roots, but organizing them into paradigms such
> >  that roots with related meaning have similar forms, possibly in
> >  a relatively systematic way
>
> Won't that tend to create 'pseudo-morphemes' as people start imagining
> patterns in related similar forms?
I don't see that as a problem. -st in 'east, west' could be called
a pseudo-morpheme, and likewise the -male in 'female'. Where's the
harm in those? Were you thinking of something different and more
problematic?

> >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.
>
> That's exactly how I feel about the matter.  Are there such things as
> "semantic primitives"?
No (-- unless, as Muke Tever noted, you're Anna Weetabix).

But the practise of some linguists doing lexical semantics is still
to try to reduce word meanings to more basic elements that recur
and recombine in the meanings of other words.

--And.

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