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

At 3:02 am +0100 17/5/02, And Rosta wrote:
>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?
If the "paradigms such that roots with related meaning have similar forms"
amounts to more than the sort of examples you give, then obviously there's
no problem.  But I thought you thinking of larger paradigms.  In truth, I
was not clear on what precisely you were suggesting here & wanted clarity.

>> >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.
I can well believe that - but all attempts to reduce meaning to 'essential
basics' from the "catalanguage" IALs of the 17th cent to the Dutton's "491
root-ideas" of the 20th cent. and contemporary Dublex's 400 primitives,
have seemed to me to create more problems than they solve.

(Sorry Jeffrey - but as And says:
At 3:02 am +0100 17/5/02, And Rosta wrote:
>
>For my own conlanging, the 400 roots are an irrelevance, but a list
>of high quality compounds could be quite useful.
)

In "Serendipities" (subtitled 'Language and Lunacy'), Eco give an account
of Gabriel de Foigny's account of the language of "La Terre australe".  It
is a paradody of the a_priori 'perfect' languages of people such as Lodwick
(Common Writing - 1647), Dalgarno (Ars Signorum - 1661) & Wilkins (Essay
Towards a Real Character - 1668).  The Austral language has, it seems:

5 primitives denoting 'simple bodies':
a - fire
e - air
i - water
o - salt
u - earth

17 primitives denoting qualities:
b - clear
c - hot
d - nasty
f - dry
g - bad
h - low
j - red
l - wet
m - desirable
n - black
p - sweet
q - pleasant
r - bitter
s - white
t - green
x - cold
z - high

Example compounds:
aeb - fire+air+clear --> stars
aab - fire+fire+clear --> sun
oef - salt+air+dry --> birds
uel - earth+air+wet --> man
af  - fire+dry --> to love
la - wet+fire --> I love [secretion that the fire of love produces in one]
pa - sweet+fire --> thou lovest [sweetness produced by the lover]
etc.

Ray.


=======================================================
The median nature of language is an epistemological
commonplace.  So is the fact that every general
statement worth making about language invites a
counter-statement or antithesis.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
=======================================================

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