Re: building from primitives (was Re: Langauge Constets)

--- Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

> Hallo!
>
> On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:45:33 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
>
> > While I agree with Jörg about the essential dangers of making people
> > think like computers I can sympathize with the desire for a limited
> > vocabulary.
>
> The problem I see with such schemes is that the world is way too
> complex.  How do you say 'spaghetti' or 'kimono', or 'quantum
> chromodynamics' or 'morphosyntactic aligment', in an oligosynthetic
> conlang?
When I think of "building from primitives", and what my original intention was
when I first brought up the subject, was to have a basic vocabulary of 1000 or
so words that would be used to DEFINE new words. It was not my intention that
new words be derived from, or built up from the basic words, only that they be
definable in terms of the original core vocabulary so that once a new learner
learned the core vocabulary he or she could use the dictionary to learn learn
new words without recourse to his or her native language.

The new words themselves, beyond the core vocabulary, could be loans from other
languages or complete neologisms created by pulling Scrabble tiles out of a
hat.

--gary