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Date: Sat, 23 Apr 2011 12:33:52 -0300
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Subject: Re: [lojban-beginners] Why is CAhA a tense/modal?
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On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 10:16 AM, MorphemeAddict <lytlesw@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Circularity is avoidable. That's the whole point of Anna Wierzbicka's
> Natural Semantic Metalanguage, which assumes a small number (~62) of 'words'
> that can't be defined in terms of simpler words.
>>
> Almost all dictionaries are unapologetic about circularity.

It's easy to fix this "problem" for any dictionary as follows:

(1) Take any word that appears in a definition but not as an entry and
classify it as "primitive".
(2) Take any word that appears in its own definition and classify it
as "primitive".
(3) Pick any remaining entry, classify it as "well-defined" and
classify all still unclassified words in its definition as
"primitive".
(4) Repeat step (3) until you run out of entries.

You end up with a pile of words classified as "primitive" and another
pile classified as "well-defined". You can try all possible picking
orders for step (3) if you wish to minimize the set of primitives for
the dictionary, since different picking orders will result in
different sets of primitives.

It would be interesting to see how many primitives result from this
process for a typical dictionary, and how the resulting list of
"primitives" compares with Wierzbicka's.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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