Kevin Smith | Re: Greetings and questions about vocabulary

• Autor: Kevin Smith (“kevinbsmith”)
• Tema: Re: Greetings and questions about vocabulary
• Data: 2005-03-18 15:47
• Mesaje: 916 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

--- In LinguaFrancaNova@yahoogroups.com, "Isaac Ben Harush" wrote:
>
> Hello, I'm Isaac. I recently discovered this project and am very
> interested in it for its simplicity and beauty.

Hello, and welcome.

> I believe that the vocabulary should be as vast and
> detailed as possible,

I respect your opinion, but hold the opposite view. I prefer
simplicity in all aspects of a language, and feel that LFN already has
a far larger vocabulary than necessary. Obviously, when I write LFN, I
can choose to use a subset of the vocabulary. But as a reader of LFN
material, the large vocabulary imposes a burden on me.

If thousands of words are available, then thousands of words will be
used, and I will constantly be running to the dictionary to try to
understand the text. For me, this defeats the purpose of a neutral
second language like LFN.

> fio - boy; son
> fia - girl; daughter
> porta - carry; wear
> basa - low; shallow; basic(?)

In these cases, I actually agree with you. Unless the vocabulary is
stripped to an absolute minimum (about 800 words), it would be better
to avoid the ambiguity.

> un - one; a, an
> pardon - forgive; pardon
> falsa - wrong; false

But in these cases, the meanings seem similar enough that I prefer a
single LFN word to handle them.

> el - he; she; it. (Why can't there be individual and general
> pronouns, like in Ido, so you can choose the level of granularity?)

I prefer to have as few pronouns as possible.

> (2) For the same reason, I prefer the approach of new words as
> opposed to constructing words from affixes.

And for the same reason (the "dictionary problem" I described above),
I prefer to construct words from affixes whenever possible. The more
words I have to memorize to be fluent in a language, the less likely
it is that I will become fluent.

I think a lot of this comes from my bias that one of the best uses of
LFN would be to publish material so it would be readable by as many
people as possible, including those who are not fluent in LFN, but who
speak a Romance language. In this case, being able to understand a
word the very first time you see it is quite important.

> 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.

I agree that affix word generation can be done badly. One of my
favorite examples is from glosa, where "superstition" is mali-kredi,
or literally "bad belief". I disagree that building words on the fly
is difficult or unnatural. I frequently find myself wanting to coin
new English words as I speak, and when I was a fluent glosa speaker, I
often (and easily) coined affixed words.

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

Thanks for your input. I know I am WAY over on the pro-simplicity side
of the spectrum...far more than Jorj or most of the other LFN folks.
I'm curious to hear their reactions to your ideas.

Thanks,

Kevin