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

At 2:54 pm -0400 15/5/02, Jeffrey Henning wrote:
>Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> comunu:
>
>>Yes, Jeffrey's list of Dublex compounds was very instructive.  It confirms
>>to my mind that compounding will not enhance BrSc's compactness any more
>>than it enhanced Speedwords.  It also seems to me to underline the
>>drawbacks of relying heavily on compounds.
>
>I beg to disagree.  You could convert the 400 Dublex roots into two letter
>roots (20 initial sounds times 20 final sounds) and have 160,000 possible
>two-root compounds of four letters.  Or you could have 26*26 (676) roots by
>identifying the most common Dublex compound pairs and making them roots in
>BrSc.
How would you pronounce the words?  Presumably you'd have to use the Roman
letters as a syllabary as Babm [bO"A:bOmu] does.

>And the advantage of the Dublex Compound Interest spreadsheet is that you
>could have a 5000-word vocabulary in an evening of work. Just generate the
>root permutations, plug them into the spreadsheet and you'd be all set:
>http://www.langmaker.com/dublexcompoundinterest.htm
>
>Here's a quick example of the nonce language Vlvc (velocity+word):
>
>bc: alphabet -- a system of writing tending to represent individual sounds
>rather than representing individual syllables or individual meanings (e.g.,
>hieroglyhs, Chinese characters)
Hieroglyphs, by the way, for the most part represent _lists of consonants_
where the sets have either 1, 2 or 3 members, eked by a set of
determinatives to give a general meaning in order to diambiguate consonant
groups with more than one meaning.  It is quite different from the Chinese
system.

[snip]
>vl: fast object -- something travelling a relatively great distance per unit
>of time [scalar]
>vc: word -- a unit of language that native speakers can identify
>
>And 34 words from these roots. This would have to be cleaned up --
Yes, I note that this needs "cleaning up", but just a few observations (I
haven't time to review all the compounds):

>bcbc: writing system
alphabet-alaphet - How does that mean "writing system" which must include
syllabaries, and systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese and
ancient Sumerian?

>bcbe: preliteracy -- the fact (of a civilization) of having no written
>language
Pre-alphabetic, surely?  I.e. denoting early systems like Egyptian
hieroglyphics, Egyptian hieratic, and the various cuneiform systems (except
the Ugarit alphabet)

>bcvc: initialism -- an abbreviation (such as CIA, MTV, LSD, DJ or CD)
>pronounced by sounding the name of each constituent letter
Which, of course, is what one does with Babm and, presumbably, must do with
'vlvc'.

>bdbe: apterygote -- one of the primitive wingless orders of insects
"body part + before" - suggests an amoeba to me!

[snip]
>bibc: hieroglyphics -- the system of letters and pictograms used in
>Ancient Egypt
'building + alphabet' ? Nor would I describe Egyptian hieroglyphics as a
system of letters and pictograms.

[snip]
>vcbc: kanji -- the Japanese characters that represent an entire word
word-alphabet?

>vlbc: Gregg shorthand
fast-alphabet?  Surely this denotes a system like Speedwriting or,
possibly, T-Line.  In any case, why 'Gregg shorthand' specifically?  What
would 'Pitman shorthand be'?

Some of these compounds seem to me to be in head-modifier order & others in
modifier-head order.

But even supposing we vigorously revise the list, making sure either all
are head-modifier order or all are modifier-head order, and making the
bimorphemic compounds as accurate as possible - this would be OK if the
resultant language had just monomorphemic and bimorphemic words. But if we
allowed further compounding, e.g. (random sequence) -
fgdshjkl, it starts getting tricky to read.

I suppose we do have self-segregating morphemes in the written form in the
sense that all morphemes consist of two letters.

Reginald Dutton used about 500 basic roots for his Speedwords and then used
compounds very much in the same manner as Dublex or Vlvc.  In the case of
Speedwords, one has to have a dictionary to make sure which, of several
possible meanings, a compound actually has.  The examples you give (most of
which I've snipped) do not reassure me that this is not also true of Dublex
and Vlvc.  If one has to resort to a dictionary, what advantage does
compounding have over having a separate word?

I'm sure some Vlvc compounds, just like Speedwords compounds, will be
longer than the equivalents in a natlang.  What are the Vlvc words for:
lion, tiger, puma & lynx?

>> 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.
Any experiment IMO is worthwhile.  But...
---------------
At 2:09 am +0100 16/5/02, And Rosta wrote:
>Jeffrey:
[snip]
>> 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
Yes, Dutton made extensive of derivational suffixes as well as compounding;
this has, indeed, generally been a feature of con-IALs.

>* 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?

[snip]
>
>
>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"?

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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