Re: Bootstrapping a cooperative conlang

In a message dated 11/19/2007 12:01:50 AM Central Standard Time,
hmiller@IO.COM writes:


> > What do you mean by "a technical set of words for basic meanings"?
> > NSM uses only the simplest words as the basis for definitions (actually
> > explications, a sort of scenario explaining the meaning).
> > Everyone already knows the semantic primes, just not that they *are*
> semantic
> > primes.
>
> They're technical in the sense that their meaning is very specific. You
> need to understand the theory before you can use them. How is "move"
> distinguished from "go"? Which meaning of "think" is intended -- as in
> "I'm thinking about (contemplating) designing a language", or  "I think
> (believe) this language is a good idea"? But the fact that so many
> fundamental words need to be derived from these "semantic primes", in
> some way that isn't at all obvious from looking at the words themselves,
> is the biggest drawback.
>
> Take a really simple word like "red". If you had a definition for
> "apple" -- no, some apples are yellow -- if you had a word for "cherry"
> and a word for "color", you could say "color of a cherry". But why a
> cherry and not a tomato? And although it might be possible to eventually
> define a cherry or a tomato without referring to its color, how do you
> know there isn't some other fruit of a different color that fits the
> definition? Red is such a fundamental sensation that you need an easy
> way to express it (if your language has words for colors at all).
>
> How do you express causation? That seems pretty fundamental. Many
> languages even have a grammatical way to express it.
>
> It's just not clear why these words have been singled out. At first
> glance, some of them can be defined in terms of others (far = not near),
> and yet other fundamental ideas are left out (left, right, turn,
> straight, away). No doubt this is all explained in the expensive book
> that was mentioned, but for conlanging purposes, I don't see the benefit
> of such a minimal set of words. I don't know what the optimal number of
> basic words for using in definitions might be, but I have the feeling
> that most people who might otherwise be interested in a collaborative
> project would have little patience for this kind of a system.
>
One can think of the semantic primes as atoms to build molecules.  Once you
have built some very common small molecules, you can use those to build
slightly bigger molecules, then still larger ones, until you get to the largest size
you need.  Done in small increments, the load for each word should not be too
large.  Explications of English words in NSM are so big because the words
already have their complex meanings.  Building the words from scratch would allow
much smaller explications.  Creating an equivalent of the word "mouse", e.g.,
could be done in several stages, rather than all at once.

The semantic primes are analogous to machine language.  Using that machine
language you can quickly build higher and higher-level languages that can
accomplish a lot with relatively few statements.

stevo   </HTML>

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