Re: Futurese

At 2:57 pm +0200 14/5/02, Kala Tunu wrote:
[snip]

>the thing to keep in mind is that there are as many valid lists of roots as
>there are conlangs and conlangers. one will select "shellfish" as a root,
>another will make it "sea"+"shell"+"animal", some will say "juice" as
>"plant+sap" and "blood" as "human+sap", others will have separate words for
>"blood" and "sap", etc.
Aye, that's the rub.  If you're designing an artlang there is, of course,
no problem.  But if you're trying to get a cultural neutral basic set, it's
difficult.   Dutton certainly tried to do that with his Speedwords, and I
think other IAL inventors have also tried.  But it's very difficult to
shake off concepts that have been part of one's cultural baggage for
decades, still less, it seems to me, to pick a set in which no-one detects
cultural bias.

This is not to say that one may not try, but one should be aware that it's
not a trivial exercise.

>i made my own list of roots as a mix of the joyo kanjis
>(each tunu root can be written with a specific kanji), the basic english and a
>list of "useful words" i grew through learning and translating other
>languages.
   :))

It's one of the problems which worried me with BrScA.

>it's my root list, only worth for my own language.
>>>>
[snip]
>Thus, "steam" would be written as "hiz was" (vapour water)
>instead of "hizwas" (vapourwater), "apple juice" as
>"suk pom" (juice apple) instead of "sukpom" (juiceapple),
>"sake" as "xin rim" (alcoholic-beverage rice) instead
>of "xinrim" (alcoholicbeveragerice), etc.
They remind very much of Dutton's compounds, but he wrote them as single
words - he was, after all, concerned with compactness.  But a (partial)
derivative of Speedwords called ISO does keep morphemes separate in writing
(tho it does use a hyphen to show compounding), e.g.

  XAU FUN KUX I KUF.   KUF-FAB   FIT   VASI BY HEN IP XVIT.
brother 5 lie in bed. bed-fabric through wet by he self sweat.

X = [S]

There was no translation given with this that I recall, but I assume it means:
"5 brothers were lying in bed.  The sheets were wet through with their own
sweat."  [I assume it must be part of a story]

It's noticeable that morphemes except VASI are monosyllabic.

Ray.



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The median nature of language is an epistemological
commonplace.  So is the fact that every general
statement worth making about language invites a
counter-statement or antithesis.
                                 GEORGE STEINER.
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