Re: Thoughts on Word building

I think that Roget's Thesaurus, the old one, before they started doing
the "dictionary style" thesauri, contains a good list of about 1000
concepts. A language that has a word for each Roget category would be
able to say most things, and would make a fine parent for a language
family. At least so goes my thinking.

Also, there may be a dictionary of IE roots somewhere. If such a thing
exists, I would be most interested in learning where it is, because it
would enable me to make a very compelling language. Possibly.

þ

Gary Shannon wrote:

>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
>
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