Re: restricted semantics language

David McCann < <li_sasxsek@...>david@polymathy.plus.com>
> An interesting attempt at an auxiliary language of that type was Kenneth
> Searight's Sona, with just 375 roots. You can download his book from
> http://www.sonayagema.org/eng/sona_book_html.zip
i have heard of this language, but now that i browsed the book, i will take
a closer look on it, thanks!

li_sasxsek@nutter.net
> I have an oligosynthetic loglang that I've been working on.  I'm
> still not sure how many simple primes I'll have but I'm ultimately
> working on as few as I can possibly get. The biggest obstacle right
> now is that I'm attempting to create a system of phonosemantics to
> underly the basic morphemes.
phonosemantics sounds interesting. does this mean that you invent a
phonosemantical system on your own from scratch or are there any sources
from other languages that you refer to? that's about the only thing i could
think of that wouldn't have to be "a priori" in my language, if there are
good reasons.

unfortunately i think that i initially gave the impression, that the
language that i am interested in would have to be oligosynthetic. that is
not the case. i anticipate hundreds or perhaps thousands of primitives. the
"restriction" in "restricted semantics" was meant to be qualitative, not
quantitive.

Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>:
> Do you already have some conlangs to show or are the following for
> first ideas for one?  If you have some, it would be particularly
> interesting to see whether they already try to achieve something
> similar.
unfortunately i have no language yet to show. the idea for such a conlang
was spinning around for quite a long time now, but i was never sure how to
take the first step or respectively, how to get primitives i will be
satisfied with.

my not quite so humble idea is to create a "speakable universal
documentation language" which should be able to describe any state or action
in the most precise and unambiguous way. to make this possible, my intention
is to create a large corpus of terms that are well defined in their meaning
as well as in their relationship to each other. to make sure that the terms
are well understood without further definition one should confine oneself to
expressions that are abstract in their nature (such as mathematical symbols
or function words) or expressions that describe human perception (like color
terms or other possible classifications for visual and auditory perception)
rather than to assume "things out there" (countries, life, software,
gravity, god).

MorphemeAddict@WMCONNECT.COM:
> I want to do something like this, but I am not good at defining words with
her primitives.
> I hope to build a language from her primitives, from the bottom up, rather
than top-down,
> the way natlang definitions are done.
that sounds a little like the approach i thought would be helpful to get
useful primitives. but meanwhile i've come to the point that this project
isn't something that can be done alone. perhaps there is someone who could
think of a collaboration? i could think of a wiki or something alike.

if anyone has thoughts on this, please share them with me.

nils.

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