Subject: Re: [lojban] Oligosynthetic languages

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 09:52:31 +0300

T. Peter Park wrote:
> 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."

Isn't the similarity overestimated here? It is true that `mother'
means `female parent', no more and no less, although the concept
is not normally so expressed in languages. `I' can be and often is
replaced by expressions meaning `this side' or something similar.
Otoh, plant and animal species are not easy to reduce to this sort
of description. The world is full of non-red apples and non-apple
red fruit; there are wild dogs and perhaps tame jackals.

> Instead of the several thousands or tens of thousands of common
> familiar basic words of natural languages like English, [...],
> 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 [...].

Sounds good enough ... until one tries to express something more
complex than `mother' or `apple' in that way.

--Ivan