Re: "Russian lawn"

As I recall from Mark's discussion of the idea when he was on this list, a
"Russian Lawn" is a large, grassy field without any paved walkways. People
traversing the lawn will eventually wear paths in the grass, which can then
be paved over. The paved walkways are thus established according to the
natural habits of the pedestrians who traverse the field.

The analogy to grammar was to have a language without any derivational
machinery; all concepts (I believe he used WordNet) are mapped to roots of
roughly equal size without any systematic attempt to relate one idea with
another. The roots that are used more frequently are retained, while the
less frequently used forms are eventually dropped and replaced with forms
derived from the frequent items. In this way, the language should reflect
the natural habits of its users, much like the pathways of the Russian Lawn
reflect the natural habits of pedestrians.

I have always thought it to be an interesting idea.

Dirk

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 2:37 PM, <MorphemeAddict@...> wrote:

> This excerpt from the Widipedia article on engineered language used the
> phrase "Russian lawn".  Does anyone know what that means?
>
> "John Quijada's <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil_language">Ithkuil</A>
> is designed for maximum morpho-phonological
> conciseness. R. Srikanth's <A HREF="
> http://www.iiap.res.in/personnel/srik/Lin.html">Lin</A> is designed for
> maximum orthographic conciseness. Mark
> P. Line's <A HREF="http://www.polymathix.com/yiklamu/classical/index.html">Classical
> Yiklamu</A> is designed as a basis for a <A HREF="
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_lawn&action=edit&redlink=1">Russian
> lawn</A>
> experiment, starting with grammatical simplicity and a large lexicon with
> no
> derivational morphology."
>
> stevo   </HTML>
>


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