[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[jbovlaste] Re: crab
On 16.09.2010 23:01, Jonathan Jones wrote:
2) Fluent jbopre are expected to be able to understand any gismu, cmavo,
lujvo, etc. that they see without the need to consult a dictionary.
That's what philosophical languages set out to do, isn't it? Kind of
take a thesaurus approach to things and divide things ever more finely
until you have reached the level of precision you need, with the result
that anybody can "understand any [new word] that they see without the
need to consult a dictionary".
I don't think it's ever worked, and in any case, would be culturally
specific since the way of dividing up the universe into semantic
categories and subcategories is inherently culturally specific.
Also, I think that if you go this way, you either have to be unusably
verbose (since you essentially have to quote the entire dictionary
definition), or unusably arbitrary -- see, for example,
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Briefscript/SWwords.html#unsatisfactory
, where compound words' meanings are derivable from those of their
components, but sometimes very tenuously, such that you can only see the
derivation when you know what the compound means in the first place. In
which case you're essentially learning is as a semi-opaque new lexical
item and might as well have gone with a completely-opaque one in the
first place; the memory load will be very little higher.
See also http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Briefscript/itollis.html for
another way where "[compounding] in such a way that the resulting
compounds are self-evident at a glance" is typically wishful thinking.
(Lojban has the advantage of self-segregating morphology here, but the
essentially arbitrary = unguessable meaning of lujvo compared to their
component gismu and cmavo still stands IMO.)
I'm skeptical whether anyone can do better at this goal simply due to
the nature of the beast, so I don't think it's a worthy goal to strive for.
3) Specifically regarding creatures: Nearly every creature with a name
has a *descriptive* common name, and all Linnean names of things are
descriptive, in the Latin language.
All of them? A nontrivial number of things are simply the Latin and/or
Greek name for the thing, no? Such as _Vulpes vulpes_ (the Red Fox)
which simply means "Fox fox", and is not descriptive in the least -- at
least not in the "Redfurry Bushytailed" sense that you were possibly
thinking of. Similarly, _Cygnus olor_ (the Mute Swan) is simply "Swan
swan", though this time once in [Latin borrowed from] Greek and once in
Latin.
4) As such, I see no reason why a descriptive cmene should not be
preferable to a borrowed foreign cmene in *every* case.
--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu
mu'o mi'e .filip.