Re: THEORY: Deriving adjectives from nouns

On 6 Jun 99, at 20:20, Tom Wier wrote:

> Marcos Franco wrote:
> > Perhaps in English "animal" has more than one meaning (I
don't know),
>
> It does.
>
> > but a loglang would have just one of them (the main one, I guess).
>
> Such a system would, if it were used by actual people in a large
> community, begin to break down almost immediately.  Because people are
> individuals, they feel the need to extend and expand the language to fill
> their own needs, and often that means making meanings of words or
> constructions conscientiously less clear.  One can't anymore force one and
> only one meaning on a word than you can force people to use that meaning
> (and I don't think we need to recount how often *that* has sucessfully
> been tried in history).
We can observe this to have happened in the history of Esperanto;
words started out with a fairly narrow definition, but in the course of
a century of usage they've acquired broader meanings in all cases
and multiple meanings in some cases.  It's still a far less
ambiguous language than, say, English or French, but it was
inevitable that the meanings of words would get less precise as
more people use them in more contexts.  I expect the same thing
will happen to Lojban if it's used on the scale that Esperanto is
used.




Jim Henry III
Jim.Henry@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com/~jim.henry/gzb/gzb.htm
*gjax zaxnq-box baxm-box goq.