Re: Tong-cho-la, a philosophical language

On Thu, Apr 17, 2003 at 07:02:45PM +0200, mathias wrote:
> Joe Fatula wrote:
> > As promised, here is a little sample of Tong-cho-la, which is (sort of) a
> > philosophical language.
> [snip]
> > A word like "automobile" makes a lot of sense, seeing that it is capable
> of
> > motion on its own.
>
> I myself am capable of motion too but I hardly look like a car. The problem
> with encyclopedic philosophical lingostuff since eons is that each inventor
> picks for each concept an entry that makes perfect sense for him and none
> for another.
That happens in every language, not just philosophical ones. Any terms are
necessarily vague and arbitrary. If you're targeting mathematicians and
rocket scientists, you may be more precise, but things will necessarily be
arbitrary. You cannot precisely define a 'car' in a single word; you'd
have to use a spatial/geometric description language to specify precisely
what a car is. And even then, it is insufficient to capture the concept of
'car' as we understand it today; there are countlessly many shapes and
different details cars can have, and there is no way to precisely specify
all of them as parameters in your precise specification of 'car'. Even if
you managed to do that, does it mean that your 'car' excludes a new design
that your parametrized definition fails to account for?

You have to start somewhere, and I submit that arbitrarily-assigned words
with some mnemonic meaning (as Joe has done above) is infinitely more
useful and feasible than any attempt to be geometrically or conceptually
precise. You can't go around mumbling 50000-syllable nouns that precisely
describe their referents in all possible conceptual variations.

> Is a cow more related to "milk", to "beafsteak", to "horn" or to "mooh"?
> Is car more "wheel" or more "vehicle"? Is "house" more "dwelling"  or
> more "building"?
The point is not so much in creating words that completely describe
themselves, but in creating words from mnemonics that would make it easy
to recall *once you've learned it*. If mnemonics are chosen carefully, it
might even provide clues for someone who doesn't know the word to make a
semi-informed guess of what it means.

> As a result you need learn each compound as a new word, which altogether
> Learning the sinojapanese vocabulary gives a good insight of that issue.
> makes many more words to learn than in any natural languages.  Learning
> the sinojapanese vocabulary gives a good insight of that issue.
[snip]

Not necessarily. A lot of Chinese words are built from more-or-less
arbitrary compounds. E.g., the previous layman's term for 'computer' was
'electronic brain', and now it's 'computing machine' (which is the same
word for 'calculator', incidentally). You still have to memorize what it
means, but the mnemonic composition of the word helps in remembering it.
Much better than /kong1bu3de2/, a phonetic rendering of 'computer', which
would be just as arbitrary, but harder to remember 'cos it has no mnemonic
to it other than the similarity of sound to an English word.

So I think a slightly mnemonic method of word construction is far better
than a completely arbitrary one.


T

--
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