Re: Tong-cho-la, a philosophical language

On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, mathias wrote:

> At least one real, daily spoken natlang connects them together. Why discuss
> whether a natural language is wrong or right to name a cat a "cat" and
> according to what standard? As to the frequency of the use of a root, this
> completely depends on the way one makes one's own vocabulary. Philosophical
> auxlangers try and describe the real world and our imaginary as if it could
> be decomposed into smaller and smaller parts, molecules and atoms. But
> languages and human intelligence work through analogy as much as through
> analysis. Therefore, a language could use "groove" in the words "career",
> "follow", "launchpad", "stubborn", in the same way that we use "leg" in
> "chairleg" and "neck" in "bottleneck" despite geometry, the fact that chairs
> never use crutches and bottles never drink wine. :-)
Just a note on all these minimalistic compounding projects, you may find
the Upper CYC Ontology database someone useful. If I understand it
properly, it's a db of the terms the CYC people found most useful in
defining everything. CYC (pronounced like 'Psych') is basically a db of
common sense (the kind of common sense that everyone has, like if you turn
a cup upsidedown, anything inside will fall out (or so it was introduced
to me)). Someone may've already brought this up and I missed it, in which
case sorry :) I'm also not sure if you'd be able to define *everything* in
these terms, but you'd probably come close. (There's about 3000 entries,
apparently.)

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
                      - fortune.