Re: How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")

Hello,

  <<Do we have any native Chinese speakers on the list?  That was
  one of the languages where it seemed that the notion of "word"
  wasn't as relevant as the notion of "character", which is sometimes
  equivalent to the Western notion of "word"; sometimes smaller;
  and sometimes larger.>>

 I'm not a native nor did I study how the Chinese languages came about, but
I've always felt that a character was always a word. Then suddenly there were
too many concepts to put in characters and the list of characters was growing
too long, so they made combinations of characters to mean a word. When I was
learning Chinese, I would not only have to do exercises like "Use this word in
a sentence" but also "Use this character in a word".

 A character is pretty well defined. It is one syllable and takes up one unit
of space in written form. The semantic space does vary from one character to
another.

  -Leon

"David J. Peterson" <dedalvs@...> wrote:  Stevo wrote:
<<
On the other hand, "WORD" is one of the 60 or so words in NSM, Anna
Wierzbicka's Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which is postulated to
contain only words
which are found in all languages, and which can't be defined more
simply in
terms of other words.
 >>

Do we have any native Chinese speakers on the list?  That was
one of the languages where it seemed that the notion of "word"
wasn't as relevant as the notion of "character", which is sometimes
equivalent to the Western notion of "word"; sometimes smaller;
and sometimes larger.  Taking a look at the NSM...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Semantic_Metalanguage

...I see it has a hearing bias, which I suppose can be forgiven ("say"
is primitive, but not "sign".  Why shouldn't the primitive simply
be "express", and whether it's done in writing, with speech, or
with hands be a manner adverbial?).  The primes "HAVE" and
"WANT" are also not uncomplicated, considering that the English
word "want" comes from a verb which meant "to lack" (and
which still can, in certain contexts), and that many languages
have separate notions of "having".  I'm also not impressed with
her sample: 9 languages, two IE languages, no sign languages,
no African languages...  Curiously Mandarin is there!  I wonder
if she tested how the concepts were realized, or what her criteria
were?

Anyone want to start a new topic specifically about the NSM
and semantic primes?  This is the first I've heard about it.  Is
John Clifford on the list?  I don't believe he talked about the
NSM in his presentation at the LCC.

-David
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-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/



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