Re: Formal vs. natural languages (was Re: Oligosynthetic languages in nature.)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:13:43 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>> I've always been a little puzzled why, in fact, the term
>> 'oligosynthetic' is in fact used for these putative languages. Surely in
>> the strict meaning of its two compounds (i.e. oligo- + synthetic) it
>> ought to be (more or less) synonymous with 'isolating' or 'analytic'?
>> Wouldn't 'oligosemantic' or 'oligomorphemic' be more descriptive?
Actually, a strictly isolating language has no synthesis, whether poly-
or oligo-. But one would have expected 'oligosynthetic' to be the
opposite of 'polysynthetic' and, therefore, to describe a largely
analytic language with little synthetic elements, i.e. modern Chinese or
English.

> Blame it on the dreadful Benjamin Lee Whorf.  He invented
> the term.  Indeed, "oligomorphemic" would be better.
Oh, so he's the culprit!

[snip]

>> [...]
>> I see oligosynthesis working only with a community that is isolated from
>> the rest of humanity and retains a conservative world-view that
>> understands everything in terms of a closed set of semantic primes. That
>> is  possibility in an alternate history or a science fiction scenario.
>
> That community would also have to be inhumanly hidebound
> - unable to invent or imagine anything beyond their very
> restricted world view.
Quite so - completely isolated and inordinately conservative. I was
imagining something like a group isolated in some remote Himalayan
valley which knew only the 64 Yì Jīng (I Ching) hexagrams, read them as
64 distinct syllables, associating a 'semantic primitive' meaning with
each. This was their language by they expressed all they needed.

> I could imagine a race of non-sapient
> beings such as _Homo erectus_ speak an oligosynthetic language,
Never thought much about whether _Homo erectus_ had speech. I suppose,
if they had language (in the linguistic sense) it might be of the
oligosynthetic type - I don't know.

> but I find it hard to imagine a culture of _Homo sapiens_ get
> along with such a language.
True.

--
Ray
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