Re: Tong-cho-la, a philosophical language

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

> in the "ta" category, indicating that it is mobile and animate on its own.
Swahili does that: "bird" and "plane" only differ by their respective
classifiers.

> But if there were some confusion between a car and some strange alien
> creature, newly discovered, that happened to possess wheels, we could add
> "metal" or "oil-eating" or perhaps "human-controlled" to the car's
> description.  But once everyone in the conversation knew that we meant a
> car, simply "ta" might be enough to refer to it.
Rick Morneau's Katanga does that too. He lists all roots by function (in
connection to a process) and description (free from any process).

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