Re: The philosophical language fallacy (was ...)

Hallo!

On Sat, 5 Jul 2008 18:51:59 -0400, Herman Miller wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
>
> >> Well, proper names aren't usually translated anyway,
> >
> > I have seen at least one taxonomic language scheme that derived
> > place names from geographic coordinates!
>
> I hadn't thought of that. Kind of like the systematic naming of stars in
> some star catalogs.
Yes.

> >>        but that could be
> >> an issue if the standard name for something is based on a proper name,
> >> like "hamburger" from Hamburg, or "watt" from James Watt. Some of these
> >> sorts of names could be fit into an oligosynthetic scheme, I guess. You
> >> could have "single reed conical metal wind instrument" for "saxophone"
> >> if naming it after Adolphe Sax doesn't fit well into your system.
> >
> > Your 'saxophone' example illustrates the problem very well.
> > The compounds get very long and clumsy.  Your compound consists
> > of (at least) six morphemes, and in English, it is 12 syllables
> > long.  (In a speetalk-type language, this is not a problem though,
> > as the whole shebang will be just six phonemes.  As long as you
> > can pronounce it, of course.)
>
> "Metal reed instrument" might suffice, if you can distinguish "metal
> (reed instrument)" from "(metal reed) instrument". I can't think of any
> other common reed instrument that's typically made of metal these days.
> But "reed" and "instrument" are unlikely to be single morphemes in a
> limited-vocabulary language. But "hamburger" could be worse, if you have
> to come up with a word for "cow" and a word for "bread" from a limited
> vocabulary ("cooked cow meat between round bread slices"?). You could
> paraphrase it as "cow bread".
Sure.  That's the way compounding works in natlangs: not every
single chunk of information needed to uniquely define the thing
goes into the compound, but only some salient features, such as
the blackness and the birdness in the case of _blackbird_, even
though there is more to being a blackbird than just being black
and a bird.  (German uses the entirely arbitrary monomorphemic
word _Amsel_ for the same species.)

> > I have mentioned chemical nomenclature earlier in this thread.
> > The "rational nomenclature" of chemistry works quite much like
> > a taxonomic language: the "rational" names are build from
> > elements which represent the atoms and atom groups the compounds
> > are made of, and are compounded in such a way that you can
> > derive the structure of the molecule from the name.  However,
> > only with rather simple compounds, such rational names are
> > actually used - because those names quickly become very long
> > and unwieldy.
>
> I could use some 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione right now.
> Let me find those Camellia sinensis leaves I've got around here
> somewhere and heat some hydrogen hydroxide to put them in.
:)

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