Re: Conlang Books - ASP & CL101

On 10/10/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:

> > Remember that Wikibooks and Wikipedia are under Creative
> > Commons licensing, so we can re-use material from the Conlang
> > wikibook and various linguistics and conlanging-related
> > Wikipedia articles with credit.  I'm not sure how specific the
> > credit needs to be to comply with the license, e.g. would each
....
> I've taken a look at the license. A couple things that bother me (and
> I'd appreciate someone with a better knowledge of them answering):
> * a requirement for text on the front / back cover
> * a copyleft requirement for any "modifications" - e.g. does the
> entire book then become required to come under the same CC license,
....

There's probably some talk page at Wikipedia which
is appropriate for asking questions about this.

> > Looking at the book outline at
> > http://www.writely.com/Doc?id=dct5h6zd_7c96khk,
> > the main omission I see is a chapter on semantics.
> > Maybe you intend to cover this in the chapter
> > on "vocab generation"?
>
> What exactly do you mean by 'semantics' here?
I mean issues of how the infinite range of real-world meanings
can be mapped to a finite set of words in various possible
ways.  Color vocabulary, for instance; kinship terminology;
folk taxonomy vs. scientific taxonomy; literal and metaphorical
meanings of spatial adpositions; etc.  Talk about how to
analyze a semantic field, notice how it is divided up
in a particular way in your native language (what meanings
are lumped together and denoted by the same word,
which ones get distinguished by unique root words or
by derived words, what meanings can only be expressed with
a phrase), and think about alternative ways it
could be divided up in a conlang.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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