From tpeterpark@erols.com Mon Jul 31 22:23:54 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 2282 invoked from network); 1 Aug 2000 05:23:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 1 Aug 2000 05:23:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO smtp01.mrf.mail.rcn.net) (207.172.4.60) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 Aug 2000 05:23:52 -0000 Received: from 209-122-225-26.s26.tnt1.nyw.ny.dialup.rcn.com ([209.122.225.26] helo=umktgghc) by smtp01.mrf.mail.rcn.net with smtp (Exim 3.15 #2) id 13JUWs-0006QU-00; Tue, 01 Aug 2000 01:23:50 -0400 Message-ID: <39865E6C.1AC1@erols.com> Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 01:21:48 -0400 Reply-To: tpeterpark@erols.com X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01C-DH397 (Win95; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com, IALlist@egroups.com Cc: cbrooks@pilot.infi.net, lojbab@lojban.org, RAllaire@aol.com, oldocjk_a@yahoo.com, RobertD325@aol.com, gledbet@tfn.net Subject: Oligosynthetic languages Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: "T. Peter Park" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 3779 Dear Lobypli and IALlistsibs, In my "Beyond Whorf" post, I mentioned a "thought experiment" of inventing a language containing only quality-words and no thing-words, raising a child taught only to speak that language, and seeing whether or not the child develops the concept of "things," "objects," or "substances" on his own. Actually, a few dozen artificial languages of this type have been invented in the last few centuries. They start in the 17th centrury with the erudite attempts at a "characteristica universalis" by John Wilkins, George Dalgarno, Francis Lodwick, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. They come down from the Baroque Era to bizarre 20th century creations like the Austrian-American psychiatrist John Weilgart's *aUI* (pronounnced "a-OO-ee"), the "Language of Space," allegedly taught to Weilgart as a young boy by a little green elf-like space-man, as well as semi-moronic crackpot efforts like dero-and-tero mythographer Richard Shaver's "Mantong Alphabet," the supposed primordial tongue of ancient Atlantis and Lemuria still preserved in the letters of the English alphabet, published in his 1940's *Amazing Stories* tales about the sinister doings of the deformed, dwarfish subterranean "dero" in their cavern-cities. Umberto Eco described many of these "logical," "rational," and "philosophical" languages in *The Search for the Perfect Language* (Blackwell, 1994). Benjamin Lee Whorf, early in his linguistic career, toyed with a hypothesis of "oligosynthesis" ("synthesis from a few elements"), the suggestion that some natural languages (like Hebrew, Mayan, and Nahuatl) might (1) have vocabularies very largely built up from strings of 2, 3, or 4 short one- or two-phoneme basic roots and (2) have a relatively small total repertory--only something like 40 to 60--of these roots. In such "oligosynthetic" languages, Whorf believed, the words for such common concepts as "mother", "dog," "tree", "eye," "sun," and "moon",for instance, might be analyzable as compounds of two or three short one-syllable (or even one-phoneme) roots, meaning something like, say, "female-caring-person," "people-friendly-animal," "tall-erect- growing," "see-body-part,""big-up-light," and "little-up-light," respectively. A language composed mostly of such "oligosynthetic" compounds would not TOTALLY dispense with nouns, to be sure--but would still keep their number to an absolute minimum, with most objects in the world denoted largely by chains of "adjectives." All these "rational," "logical," "philosophical," or "cosmic" languages, from Wilkins and Dalgarno to Shaver and Weilgart, break down the thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands) of concepts of ordinary natural human languages into some 25 or 30 to 50 or 60 basic simple concepts, each designated by a single letter, sound, syllable, or symbol, with complex concepts expressed by stringing together the letters, syllables, or symbols for simple concepts. Thus, for example, they all express "mother" by something like "human-female-progenitor,"or"reproductive-human-female-living-creature,"or again like "not-active-round-person." These languages likewise represent "apple" as something like "plant-reproductive-red-round" or like "red-round-seed-holder-vegetable-living," "gold" as something like "material-hard-shiny-yellow" or like "yellow-color-beautiful-matter," "dog" as something like "powerful-with-people-living-thing" or "animal-domestic-four-legs-barking," and "I, me" as something like "this-person," "person-here," "person-speaking," "this-human," or "this-human-spirit." All these languages, in fact, have a few "nouns" or "thing-words." However, by and large, they do strive very hard to denote as many objects as possible as the sum total of their specific qualities or characteristics. Thus, if anybody wanted to perform this experiment, it would not be necessary to invent a "logical language" from scratch. The experimenter could use the creations of Wilkins, Dalgarno, Lodwick, or Leibniz, or more modern counterparts like John Weilgart's *aUI.* Linguists sometimes talk about the "poverty" of language as what makes it useful as a medium of communication. The "poverty" of languages is the fact that they do not have a separate word or name for each and every particular individual object, event, action, or occurrence that we could conceivably ever encounter, but only a few hundreds or thousands of words for large broad general classes of objects, events, actions, or processes. This is precisely what makes human languages useful as tools for communications. If we had, for instance, a completely different and unrelated word for every single horse but no general word for "horse," farmers could never communicate their anxious concerns to veterinaries, and racing enthusiasts would have a very hard time collecting their winnings. Instead of giving separate names to every single individual object or occurrence, human languages divide the world into a large but finite collection of classes or categories. Speaking of those classes and categories, we make ourselves understood, and get the practical business of our lives carried out. We rely on our friends, neighbors, and colleagues understanding what we mean when we talk about "horses," "dogs," "trees," or "cars." Of course, our languages and cultural linguistic conventions also do make it possible for us to talk about individual members of a broad class if we really need or want to do so: if we need to, we can talk about "Socrates," "Plato," or "John Smith" as well as about "man," about "Dobbin," "Boukephalos," "Traveler,' or "Secretariat" as well as about "horse," about "Fido," "Spot," "Rover," and "Towser" as well as about "dog," about "Mississippi," "Hudson," "Amazon," and "Nile" as well as about "river," about "Sirius," "Procyon," "Polaris," "Deneb," "Capella," "Alpha Centauri," "Tau Ceti," "Epsilon Eridani," and "Zeta Reticuli" as well as about "star," and so on. Still, our common nouns are there, too--and, as the linguists remind us, it is the presence and availability of common nouns and general terms that makes languages useful as mediums of communication for getting the everyday practical business of our lives done. We can communicate with each other, and get all sorts of practical business done, precisely because we can use general words like "dog" and "horse" that leave out a great many idiosyncratic features of each individual dog or horse. Still, despite what linguists say about the "poverty" of ordinary natural human languages, natural languages can be seen as extravagantly exuberant, redundant, and wasteful--and they have been seen as wastefully redundant by many theorists in the last few centuries. They find that it is in fact quite possible to simplify and rationalize language by eliminating most of the hundreds or thousands of words of natural languages for specific classes of objects, events, activities, or processes. What they consider the wastefully large vocabularies of natural languages could be easily simplified by replacing most natural words with logical designations describing every object, occurrence, or activity as the sum total of its component parts, its significant qualities, or its separate individual steps or sub-routines. Thus, we could easily dispense with a word like "mother" if we could express it as "female-parent" or "person-female-progenitor." Likewise, we would not need a separate word for "apple" if we could instead just say or write something like "red-round-fruit" or "plant-part-reproductive-red-round." Similarly, we could replace "I, me" by "this-person" or "person-speaking-here," and "dog" with "animal-quadruped-loyal-barking." Instead of the several thousands or tens of thousands of common familiar basic words of natural languages like English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Estonian, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili, Chinese, Japanese, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Hopi, Aztec, Navaho, and Quechua, we could now instead get by with a total vocabulary of just something like 30 to 80 one- or two-letter roots for simple basic elementary concepts like "material," "object," "person," "living," "quality," "social," etc., strung together into 3-, 4-, or 5-letter strings expressing logically clear compound meanings like "this-person-here" for "I, me" or "person-female-reproducing" for "mother." This was the dream of 17th century theorists like Dalgarno, Wilkins, and Leibniz, of 20th century linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf in his speculations about "oligosynthesis," and of occult-fringe science-fictional "crackpots" like Richard Shaver with his "Mantong Alphabet" and John Weilgart with *aUI*, the "Language of Space." Regards, T. Peter Garden City South, L.I., N.Y., U.S.A.