Re: The philosophical language fallacy (was Re: Evanescence of information (was Re: Going NOMAIL: Honeymoon))

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 19:48:53 -0400, Rick Harrison wrote:
>
>> I have experimented with making a taxonomic philosophical conlang. It seemed
>> to me that some concepts simultaneously needed to be in 2 or 3 different
>> categories, e.g. "president" goes in the "people described by their
>> occupations or social roles" category and also in the "government" category.
>
> Right.  I tried to overcome this in my PhD thesis by fiddling
> about with what I called "orthogonal trees", i.e. graph products
> of several different classifications based on different criteria
> (i.e. building a "facet classification" of sorts), but it all
> turned out to be mayhem.  When researching whether other people
> had tried similar schemes, I found two or three such projects
> which all had been quietly abandoned.
I can imagine it would get messy. Actually it would probably work out
about the same as having a word in more than one place in a single
hierarchy, with the sorts of cross-referencing that you'd need to do,
but using a more complex data structure. Those kinds of classifications
can be useful in some limited areas, though -- the periodic table of the
elements might be an example. Plants can be classified as trees, vines,
bushes, etc. The category of "keyboard instruments" includes musical
instruments from many different families (or more than one at the same
time, in the case of a typical pipe organ).

Maybe the thing to do would be to have a single master classification,
with a set of auxiliary classifications for reference. You could have
living things categorized by biological resemblance in the main list,
with additional lists arranged by the type of climate or ecological
niche they occupy, or by geographical range, or by their relevance to
human life in another list (e.g. edible plants could be sorted according
to which part of the plant is used; disease-carrying organisms could be
listed together in another group).

>> I could never think of an elegant way to mark multiple categories on a
>> single morpheme so I abandoned the idea of doing a taxonomic conlang. The
>> last thing I need is more langs anyway. I often wish I could be faithful to
>> a single conlang but I have a wandering eye.
>
> The focussing problem - I know that quite well.  I have a main
> project in the realm of conlanging - Old Albic - which receives
> most of my attention, but there are several others which I
> occasionally work on.  And then, there are yet other things in
> my life than conlanging.
>
> On the other hand, one should indeed have more than one conlang
> going.  Otherwise, you are likely to incorporate all your ideas
> in one conlang and thus end up with a kitchen sink language or
> whatever.  I have several ideas which I wish to try out, but
> which I feel have no room in Old Albic.  So I apply them to other
> conlang projects - some of them diachronically related to Old
> Albic, others not.
Over the last few years, when I've had time, I've been more focused on
working out the details of musical notation for microtonal music (based
on the Sagittal notation developed by Dave Keenan & George Secor). But
I've continued to develop Minza, and I bring up old projects every once
in a while to work on them. I'm currently trying to get Tirelat in
order, and I've had some ideas on what to do with Jaghri. (I think it's
a Sangari conlang, or maybe even an auxlang.) The thing about Minza is
that its kitchen-sinkitude was a deliberate feature to begin with,
combining features from Lindiga, Tirelat, and other languages. I'd hoped
that Minza would help me to develop my other languages, but that hasn't
worked out as well as I'd like.

> On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 23:14:05 -0400, Dana Nutter wrote:
>
>> This is why I gave up on that approach a long time ago.  I do
>> still see value in an oligosynthetic system.  At least there
>> will be some mnemonics to aid in learning vocabulary.
>
> Oligosynthetic schemes suffer from many, though not all, of the
> problems that weigh down taxonomic schemes.  It is not easy to
> break down reality to a restricted number of semantic primitives,
> and how do you handle proper names and such?  You need an "escape
> mechanism" which allows for "importing" arbitrary lexical material.
> At least that is what I feel to be the case.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Well, proper names aren't usually translated anyway, 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.