Re: Thoughts on Word building

Hi,

The one thought that occurs to me reading this is the time frame in which
these words develop.
For example:

know -> know-stuff (knowledge) -> know-stuff-give (to teach) ->
know-stuff-give-person (teacher)

I could imagine that know, know-stuff and know-stuff-give might develop
around the same time as these concepts are similar. But the teacher for
example is more something institutionalized - something which requires the
concept of institution first - though history provides enough background to
indicate that such things developed fairly early. In that view certain words
which are already prefixed but have lost their association to their roots
might in turn be prefixed in some other fashion to provide a whole score of
new words and of course might look very different from the original word.
Of course that doesn't really answer your question, but I was also wondering
if there are such words in natlangs and in how far conlangs have taken that
into consideration.

Greets,
Eduard



> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] Im
> Auftrag von Gary Shannon
> Gesendet: Samstag, 3. Dezember 2005 22:51
> An: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Betreff: Thoughts on Word building
>
> Prefixes and suffixes added to a root word can be used
> to derive more words in languages structed that way.
> But what is the "best" root, and the "best" set of
> derivations for any given concept. The derivation can
> proceed in any direction, but there must be some
> particular root or set of roots that results in an
> optimal tree with the shortest or most understandable
> derivatives. For example, given a set of words having
> to do with information: to know, knowledge, known,
> knowledgable, to teach, to learn, teacher, student, to
> forget, to remember, lesson, ignorance, scholar,
> dunce, etc. ANY ONE of those words can be used as the
> root from which all the others can be derived.
>
> know -> know-stuff (knowledge) -> know-stuff-give (to
> teach) -> know-stuff-give-person (teacher).
> teacher -> teacher-job (to teach) -> teacher-job-stuff
> (knowledge) -> treacher-job-stuff-have (to know).
> ignorance -> ignorance-remove (to teach) ->
> ignorance-remove-person (teacher) ->
> ignorance-remove-person-client (student).
>
> If all these words were arranged in an interconnected
> multi-dimensional network, where the paths linking
> adjacent words (nodes) represented the meaning of the
> prefix or suffix connecting them, then there cannot be
> such a thing as a "most primative" word. Any word can
> be taken to be the most primative word and all other
> can be shown to be derived from it.
>
> So the question is not what words are more primative,
> but rather, what distribution of arbitrary root words
> in the network result in the "best" set of derived
> words? Here, "best" will have to be defined according
> to the design goals of the language.
>
> So the first question is what is the optimum set of
> affix pairs? They will be pairs because they must be
> bi-directional as in doer/job (to_teach + doer ->
> teacher; teacher + job -> to_teach) so that each
> member of the pair un-does the other member. (doer +
> job = NULL, so that to_teach + doer + job = to_teach).
> How many affixes exist in English? There must be a
> bunch of them. In five minutes, just off the top of my
> head I have: (The letters in brackets are replaced by
> the suffix)
>
> -[ce]-tific science -> scientific
> -[y]-ic geology -> geologic | history -> historic
> -ic[]-al geologic -> geological | tropic -> tropical
> -[os]-ic cosmos -> cosmic
> -[o]-ic volcano -> volcanic
> -n[]-ic titan -> titanic | electron -> electronic
> -[an]-c barbarian -> barbaric
> -[an]-ism barbarian -> barbarism
> -[]-agoric phantasm -> phantasmagoric
> -[e]-ic -> automate -> automatic
> -[y]-iance comply -> compliance compliance | vary ->
> variance
> -[]-ance -> appear -> appearance | accept ->
> acceptance
> -[]-ence correspond -> correspondence
> -[ect]-igence neglect -> negligence
> -t[]-ion invent -> invention
> -[y]-ial deny -> denial | try -> trial
> -[y]-ful beauty -> beautiful | pity -> pitiful |
> plenty -> plentiful
> -t[e]-ion obligate -> obligation | automate ->
> automation
> plus -able, -ible, -ment, -er (doer), -ive, -ative,
> -ish,
>
> And on and on. It seems like it would be very handy to
> have a systematic list of such derivational
> components. Even things like being able to derive
> "pizzaria" from "pizza" and "happy" from "sad" makes
> the job of vocabulary building much simpler.
>
> So anyway, the point of all this rambling is; it seem
> like a very good starting point for a conlang
> (assuming it is structed to be able to use prefixes
> and suffixes) is to collect a comprehensive set of
> conlang affixes and compounding rules. After that, one
> single primative root can yeild dozens, or maybe
> hundreds of additional words by affixing and
> compounding.
>
> But is there in existence on the web such a list of
> affix functions?
>
> --gary