Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

Marcos Franco wrote:

> I think that in English happens that it has the same form for the
> gerund and the active participle (-ing) (this doesn't happen in e.g.
> Spanish), and hence the confussion.
I think I agree with your position; natlangs are often imprecise
or ambiguous in ways that a loglang might be designed not to be.
I am thinking of elementary logic, where it was necessary
to break away from natlang confusions by defining a few
unambiguous well-defined terms/symbols. E.G., English "or"
in "Who did it?" "Jane or John." It seems easy enough to
merely add a word for the inclusive/exclusive distinction,
but after a millenium English still has the ambiguity.
Natlangs have different priorities, and histories,
and imperfections.

Now, if the loglang well-defines approximately 10 words,
it can do propositional logic; 10 more, and it can do
predicate calculus. If nouns are defined carefully with
respect to set theory, ontologies should not be a problem;
WordNet and many other projects have done so. Animals are
not really all that mysterious ... Adjectives and verbs
are more problematically interesting, but at least
several classes of words can be well-defined.

The odd thing about the UTL project is that it will be
both a loglang (to *some* extent) and an auxlang (like Ido).
Though the mathematician Couturat had a major role in
designing parts of Ido, and Peano (famous for his set theory)
invented an auxlang (Interlingua, the first of that name),
neither was especially logical in its design or constructions.