Isaac Ben Harush | Greetings and questions about vocabulary

• Autor: Isaac Ben Harush (“isaac_benharush”)
• Tema: Greetings and questions about vocabulary
• Data: 2005-03-18 14:44
• Mesaje: 915 (presedente, seguente)

Hello, I'm Isaac. I recently discovered this project and am very
interested in it for its simplicity and beauty.

I do have a couple of issues that are nagging me.

(1) I don't know much about languages, but as far as I understand, a
creole is characterized by a very simple grammer, a skeleton of the
more developed languages' grammer. This is fine for the grammer, as
simplicity and logic eases learning. But I believe that the
vocabulary should be as vast and detailed as possible, because the
words are the entities that carry all the shades of meanings in
human thought. That's why I fail to understand the use of the same
words for different meanings, however related, in LFN. Just a few
examples:

un - one; a, an
fio - boy; son
fia - girl; daughter
pardon - forgive; pardon
falsa - wrong; false
porta - carry; wear
basa - low; shallow; basic(?)
el - he; she; it. (Why can't there be individual and general
pronouns, like in Ido, so you can choose the level of granularity?)

etc...

I don't believe that adding words would increase complexity. It
would only help to be more exact. I believe (but again, I am not a
linguist) that we remember words as blocks, or "snapshots" of
meanings. More words are only for the better.

(2) For the same reason, I prefer the approach of new words as
opposed to constructing words from affixes. We do not "calculate"
the words when we speak, we just use these "black boxes" of meanings
as is. After you learn that "kandelingo" in Esperanto means "candle-
holder", it becomes a black box. It doesn't matter anymore that it
originally derived from "kandel", "-ing", and "-o". You
stop "calculating" the word as you say it. So the affixes didn't
really matter after all. I believe that the number of affixes should
be the absolute minimum required. Building words on-the-fly is not
natural for us and doesn't give a specific shade of meaning. An
extreme example: Previously, when you wanted to say "hospital" in
Esperanto, you would have to construct the word, since "hospitalo"
didn't exist yet. One possibility is "mal-san-ul-ej-o", literally "a
place of not-healthy people". But does it mean "hospital"? Any place
with sick people can qualify. If you argue that it can be agreed
that this word should mean "hospital" as we know it, then I say
again, what use were the affixes in the first place? Just teach
people that "malsanulejo" is "hospital". A black box.

OK, enough of my ramblings :-) I'd be happy to hear the opinions of
the group.

Greetings, Isaac.