Re: building from primitives (was Re: Langauge Constets)
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, November 28, 2007, 23:31 |
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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? In http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/auxlang-design.html
I have pointed out this kind of problem, and that it is a good argument
for an a posteriori design. Any scheme using a limited vocabulary to
which no new roots can be added runs into serious problems with
scientific and cultural concepts, let alone proper names. I feel that
you always need some kind of "escape mechanism" that allows for the
importation of arbitrary lexical material from elsewhere. This is
the main reason why none of my own experimental engelangs (see
http://wiki.frath.net/X-languages ) went anywhere, and why I added
just such an escape mechanism to X-3.
> However any classificatory scheme will get dated, mostly
> sooner or later - witness Dalgarno and Wilkins.
Amen.
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
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