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

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.

>>        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".

> 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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