Re: Toki Pona survey

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Jörg Rhiemeier scripsit:
>
> > Nope.  The misguidedness of closed-vocabulary schemes lies in their
> > vocabulary being closed.  Reality is too complex to capture in a
> > closed-vocabulary scheme.  Mark Rosenfelder put it bluntly:
> > "Ogden and Richards cheated"[1], and he is right in my opinion.
> > Closed-vocabulary schemes invariantly have to take recourse to
> > idiomatic expressions (the smaller the vocabulary, the sooner)
> > which have to be learned just like words.
>
> Lojban is a mixed case: it has a closed vocabulary (I assume we're
> only talking about content words here), but a fairly large one for
> such a language (1550 words), and two conventions for creating
> compounds: one for idiomatic compounds, one for transparent (or
> hopefully transparent) ones.  In practice the idiomatic compounds
> are mostly used in a transparent fashion.
>
> But there is an additional vocabulary which is open, and is used for
> broad but shallow semantic fields such as living things, foods,
> and cultures and their unique products.   With tens of millions of
> species, tens of thousands of food dishes, and thousands of cultures,
> no closed vocabulary could possibly cope.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. Just combine Khoisan phonemic inventories with
Georgian syllable structure, and you're looking at millions of distinctive
_syllables_ already. Waitaminnit, and I'll get my virtual envelope ...

Lemme see; CCCCCCVCCCC syllable structure, 30 vowels and 100 consonants make for
some 30*100^10=3*10^21 syllables already. That gives us many times more
four-syllable words than there are electrons in the visible universe. Should
take a while yet till we need that many words, I should think.


:)

                                                            Andreas