Re: OT: In the 'ignorance on parade' file

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 08:24:30 -0500, "Thomas R. Wier"
<artabanos@...> wrote:

>There is, for example, no such thing as a 'fish';  there are only individual
>entities which we to greater or lesser degrees choose to categorize in
>the slot arbitrarily marked 'fish'.  Where we draw the line between one
>category and another is entirely up to us, and not something that we can
>find out through the world around us.  All this means that any word you
>choose to use will be semantically ambiguous, because you could be more
>specific in refering to a particular entity, rather than to the type.
Not entirely up to us ... well, in theory someone might put elephants in
the "fish" category and clams in the "bird" category, but no one would see
those as "natural" categories. Whether or not to include sharks or whales
in the "fish" category is a matter of opinion, but there are limits beyond
which it starts making less and less sense to extend the boundaries of the
category. Even color categories, which you might expect to be arbitrary,
seem to have some natural basis in the process of human color vision.
Still, in most cases there's no obvious place to draw the line between
categories.

>(And therein rests my apologia of artlanging.  Here I stand; I can do
>no other.)
>
>It is for these reasons that I gave up on Degaspregos as a profoundly
>naive attempt to systematize and organize the world through language.
>I decided though that rather than obliterating the work as a failure, a
>greater testament to that failure would be to leave it be, unchanged
>and incomplete, analogous to the way that logical systems must be
>incomplete.
Organization isn't easy. I've given up on creating vast organized lists of
vocabulary (as I've tried in Eklektu, Ludireo, Tilya, and Czirehlat, among
others), but I still find it useful to organize words systematically in
limited semantic areas.

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