Re: Taxonomic list (and Re: poll 30? (long...Sal at her most voluble)

Sally:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>
> > > That's where I began to wig out.  Too many flowers to invent names for
> >
> > I like doing flower names. Lots of scope for phonaesthesia & no nagging
> > sense that there should be any systematicity to the names
>
> Actually, you have a point there.  I can go back to my earlier phonaesthetic
> invention.  Norrela for "daisy" is one of my oldest.  So is bovob /'buvub/
> for "bluebell."  I should have a purely Teonaht word for "rose."
Which reminds me, I preferred the native Teo words to the IE borrowings.
Partly because I prefer apriori conlangs, and partly because in an
aposteriori artlang I want to be able to scrutinize it close up & for
it to still seem real.

> > How did you come up with the English entries? It seems both more and
> > less detailed than an English thesaurus would yield
>
> How so, exactly--more and less?  I'm curious, because I think I know what
> you mean.   I haven't consulted a Thesaurus for years.  A Thesaurus, as I
> understood it, was a book for helping you find English synonyms!  When I
> was young, I misused it terribly, and have avoided it since
Less detailed for the obvious reason that it lists fewer items in fewer
categories. More detailed in that certain categories contain items that
would not be found in your average thesaurus. (AFAIK there is no
thesaurus counterpart of OED/Webster's 3rd -- that is, no thesaurus
that lists everything.)

The point of using the thesaurus as a conlang resource is not fot the
listing of synonyms but for the taxonomic grouping of vocabulary. (Not
all thesauruses do that: some really are synonym lists, so you look
up "angry" & in that entry it lists synonyms. These are no use.)

> My example for this thesaurus was taken straight out of Hildegard of
> Bingen's taxonomy.  I intended to describe the Teonaht world in the form of
> its inhabitants, its households, its cities, its gardens and farms, its
> foods, its justice system, etc.  Hildegard is doing the same with her abbey
> She starts with God and moves down through the members of the family to the
> parts of the body, to illnesses, to the offices of the Church, to the
> structures of the church, to the vegetables in the garden, the fruit trees,
> and so forth.  I've changed her order around, and vastly increased the list
> Basically it was this:   start with the name of the group, and move from top
> down: great to small or most to least important item.   For the body, I
> started with the head.  (I realize that I forgot to list the words for
> eye-color!)  For the foods, I started with the meats and ended with the
> spices (some would question my sense of importance here!!)   For the animals
> I started with the large mammals.  For religion, I started with the one with
> which I was most familiar (no top down sense there, please).  For concepts
> and sensations, this was just a hodge podge.  I should perhaps alphabetize
> those sections.  For the most part, I just went plumb nuts
Ah, I understand better now. This explains the cultural bias of the list.

> > I'm always on the look-out for some sort of magic list of English words
> > as ingredients to build a basic vocab. I must get round to seeing
> > whether I have a copy of Rick Harrison's ULD on my hard disk
>
> Tell me about that one.  Some of my lists are too detailed, and the basics
> get lost in the complexities.  I have started a 501 Teonaht Verbs list,
> though. :)  :)
Way way back in the early days of Conlang, the illustrious Rick Harrison
compiled the Universal Language Dictionary, which, iirc, was a list of the
2000 most basic 'concepts' in a language. The list was compiled by
synthesizing many different sources, and was compiled for the benefit
of conlangers. I find I do not have a copy of the ULD, & it seems not
to be publicly available any longer. DOES ANYBODY HAVE A COPY??????
What I do have, though, is a file compiled by Rick to supersede the
ULD, called "Vital English Vocabulary".

Here are excerpts from the intro to the file:

# In an effort to determine the most important words in the English
# language, with an eye toward creating a list of `core concepts' for
# use in constructing artificial languages, I have surveyed five word-
# lists and created a sort of spreadsheet showing the items and
# indicating which lists include each item. There are 2,327 items listed.
#
# I surveyed two constructed dialects of English that have been extensively
# tested and have shown their usefulness. (I deliberately avoided contrived
# subsets of English that have only been `tested' by their own enthusiastic
# devotees, such as Ogden's Basic English and Hogben's Essential World
# English.) I also examined two word frequency surveys that were both
# readily available and also seemed most likely to provide useful real-
# world information. And in an effort to make the project slightly less
# anglocentric, I included information from the Japanese language.
#
# The word-lists used in this project are:
#
# Special English, a variety of English developed by the United States
# Information Agency for use in some of the Voice of America's
# international news broadcasts and entertainment programs. Using this
# limited vocabulary of about 1400 items, it is possible to discuss
# current events and a variety of other topics. (Note: numeral words
# like two are not explicitly listed in the Special English vocabulary,
# but I suspect that they are indeed part of the language.)
#
# The Longman Defining Vocabulary. All the definitions in the Longman
# Dictionary are written using this limited vocabulary.
#
# Eaton's Semantic Frequency List, which purports to be a survey of the
# most frequent lexical concepts in English, French, German and Spanish.
# I limited my use of this list to the 1018 most frequent items.
#
# The most frequent 1,000 English lexical items according to a survey of
# the British National Corpus, circa 1996.
[...]
# The first 881 items in the Jooyoo Kanji (characters for daily use) List
# recommended by the Japanese Language Council in 1981. These 881
# characters are taught during the first six years of school in Japan.
[...]
#
#shortcomings of this project
[...]
# Inventors of new languages must be careful not to assume that a word-
# list is a list of concepts. Many common English words represent two
# or more different concepts. For example, spring can mean `the season
# that precedes summer' or `a natural source of water' or `an elastic
# metal helix.' Also, it is common to find that a single concept is
# represented by two or more different words, e.g. `approximately' and
# `roughly.' Other languages do not map and overlap concepts in the same
# way as English.

Following on from these points Rick makes, I should mention that for
Livagian I briefly considered working from the BNC frequency list,
but ran into these problems: the most frequent words are all highly
polysemous.

Another problem is that it is particularly difficult to come up
with lists of needful verbs. Nouns are easier to taxonomize, so
one can just say to oneself "Right, I need words for kinds of
crockery" & if necessary find in a thesaurus or elsewhere a list
of names for kinds of crockery. But it's much harder to do this
with verbs.

--And.

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