Re: In defence of philosophical languages (was: RE: Comparison of philosophical

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:23:43AM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
> > Natural languages seem to be sufficiently easy to learn.  All three of
> > my children have learned/are learning two--English at home and
> > Spanglish at school for the older two and English and ASL for the
> > youngest (no, he's not hearing-impaired, he picks it up from some
> > other kids at his daycare)
>
> I don't find any languages easy to learn. And in conlangs you can
> simplify and regularize the grammar, but learning the vocab
> remains a major hurdle. I do find that regularities and patternings
> in vocab make it easier to learn. If you don't, and don't believe
> that people generally do, you could try asking Peter to poll
> conlangers on whether they do.
[snip]

Iconicity is *definitely* an indispensible factor in my familiarity with
Ebisedian's lexicon. I must admit that when I started out, I wanted to map
every syllable to a meaning, much like Andrew's Ygyde tries to do.
Fortunately, I found out quickly the impracticality of it. And happily, I
also found out that you don't *need* to map *every* syllable. It is
sufficient to have the occasional common prefix/suffix/infix among groups
of related words.

And guess what---I didn't have much trouble learning the oddballs in
Ebisedian's lexicon, irregulars like _fiKi'_, _dami'l_, _Ta'lin_, as well
as words with a small common part that describes a broad, vague category,
such as: _milu'e_ (to help), _miza'i_, (to marry), _mipipi'_, (sympathy).

OTOH, I *do* have trouble remembering overly-regularized words like the
anatomical terms, which, when I made them, I went a bit too far in reusing
common morphemes.

So there you have it. Completely arbitrary words aren't as difficult to
learn as you might think, because uniqueness makes it harder to confuse
with other words. (Also, in the examples I cited above, I do have a mental
image associated with each word. This is where the uniqueness part is
important--if words were too similar, the mental associations wouldn't
stand out as well from other similar words, and so I'd have more trouble
remembering it.) Words that are overly regular are difficult to remember,
because you confuse them with each other too easily. Words that are part
arbitrary and part regular seem to be the best balance between either
extreme.


T

--
A programmer is a device for turning computer programs into spaghetti. A
*good* programmer is a device for turning spaghetti into computer programs.

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