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

From:<li_sasxsek@...>
Date:Saturday, July 12, 2008, 2:34
> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Jorg
Rhiemeier
> > No, it's not easy but it's only difficult if you take it to > > extremes as with AUI or Toki Pona. I have an
oligosynthetic
> > project in the works, but there is also a phonosemantic
schema
> > that will underly the root morphemes. It's just an idea
I'm
> > playing with right now. I don't expect to reduce everything > > down to 32 roots, though I'd be happy to get it down to the > > 500-600 range. > > In my opinion, *all* closed-vocabulary schemes run into > this sort of problems, only to a lesser degree if the set > of roots is larger. There are always things that cannot > easily be captured adequately by any construction of > reasonable length. Of course, you can define it with, > e.g., the word list of Basic English. But what if the > definition of something is 100 morphemes long? In a pure > closed-vocabulary language, you'd have to repeat the > definition every time the concept is mentioned in the text. > Hardly practical, especially if you are talking about a > subject matter where such things occur frequently. You > will want to assign a shorter name to it.
Sometimes, it's possible to have a shorthand form. Used contextually, this can often be enough. My longlang is primarily verbal so a lot of "things" will have meanings that refer to what they do. I've set up basic morphemes of the shape CV(n), but I'm also going to have a disyllabic shape CCVCV(n) or CVCCV(n) for the less common ideas like chemical elements and other technical terms that will need their own morpheme.