Re: The philosophical language fallacy (was Re: Evanescence of information (was Re: Going NOMAIL: Honeymoon))
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, July 5, 2008, 13:50 |
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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 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.
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
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