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Re: THEORY: Re : Universal Translation Language

From:Charles <catty@...>
Date:Saturday, May 29, 1999, 16:18
Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> At 2:58 pm -0700 28/5/99, Charles wrote:
> >I don't feel comfortable without some kind of adjectives, though. > > But a lot of natlangs feel quite comfortable :)
Stative verbs as in Japanese, maybe? I'd like to learn how they work.
> >Ido's part-of-speech marking really simplifies the grammar; > > It also IMO fossilizes a pattern of language analysis derived from > traditional grammars of Latin & Greek which are alien to many natlangs.
Yes, and it might be fun to go in the opposite direction, have some sentences without "verbs", and such.
> >prepositions are more plainly seen as "transitive adverbs", > >which is unclear in English even though we use them that way: > >"go up" versus "go up the stairs", rather than "ascend the stairs". > > Indeed - which calls into question, surely, the traditional analysis into > 'adverbs' and 'prepositions'.
Adverbs and particles and trace elements and other miscellaneous things. A discussion earlier (on sci.lang?) evolved to a consensus that there are far more than 5 or 10 "parts of speech", depending on how detailed the analysis ... But an IAL might be easier to learn with only a simplified few of them. I have argued before that creoles might be "the" way for a useful IAL; there is the example of the Lingua Franca. This runs completely counter to the purpose of a loglang, naturally.
> >Might turn out a bit Ent-ish but that's OK ... > > Umm - that might be a good thing for an IAL! If it takes all afternoon to > utter one sentence & the rest of the evening to get the reply, it might > give the two speakers time to cool down and think - and we might get less > conflict & more harmony. But somehow, I find it this somewhat unlikely. > As any Ent would point out, if you are patient enough to listen, humans are > "very hasty" creatures :)
I wanted to sneak in a comment by one of the AUXLANG people, that people only really hear and understand about 50% of the words said. Redundancy may be what gives us time to think during all the talking.