Re: Toki Pona survey

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.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.  --Oscar Wilde

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