From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Mon Jul 31 23:51:46 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30214 invoked from network); 1 Aug 2000 06:51:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 1 Aug 2000 06:51:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO argo.bas.bg) (195.96.224.7) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 Aug 2000 06:51:44 -0000 Received: from banmatpc.math.bas.bg (root@banmatpc.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.2]) by argo.bas.bg (8.11.0.Beta1/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-6) with ESMTP id e716pQu20076 for ; Tue, 1 Aug 2000 09:51:26 +0300 Received: from iad.math.bas.bg (iad.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.88]) by banmatpc.math.bas.bg (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id JAA19537 for ; Tue, 1 Aug 2000 09:51:25 +0300 Message-ID: <398673AF.649F@math.bas.bg> Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 09:52:31 +0300 Reply-To: iad@math.bas.bg Organization: Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Win95; I; 16bit) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: The Lojban List Subject: Re: [lojban] Oligosynthetic languages References: <39865E6C.1AC1@erols.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski 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