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18 word language

de k1attack, 2010-marto-06

Mesaĝoj: 147

Lingvo: English

JOW (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-13 15:13:38

trojo:One thing on that topic I was thinking about today was words for body parts, e.g. leg, arm, head, etc. Such words are tremendously productive, e.g. "head" can refer to literal head, a leadership position, or the top of some physical object.
I think this is a really important insight. I've tried to do that with Neo Patwa. I think one problem with many philosophical languages is that they start from the idea of logic rather than the human experience. Real languages essentially begin from a human perspective. So all languages have words for "eye" or "head," because it is a universal human experience. Etymologically, many abstract words can be traced back either to body parts or to simple tools or landscape features. Just the way that in English€ we can use "leaf" to mean a piece of paper.

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-13 16:25:27

JOW:Real languages essentially begin from a human perspective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language

Interestingly, despite the highly disputed and questionable methods of deriving the table towards the bottom, it seems that many "human" things (like "water" and "smell/nose") seem to be very similar in many language families.

For all we know, however, those proto-languages which the proto-human table derives from could be utter bollocks, but it is still very interesting given what you said (and if it is all wrong in the end, then it is still interesting psychologically as something has biased the researcher's work - maybe a hidden language belonging to the brain?) ridulo.gif

Greyshades (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-13 20:55:07

Language of my brain... it's in 1's and 0's lango.gif

ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-14 11:34:17

01001111011010000010000100100000010011010111100
10010000001100001011100000110111101101100011011
11011001110110100101100101011100110010000100100
00001000001011011000110110001101111011101110010
00000110110101111001001000000111010001101111001
00000011000010110010001100100011100100110010101
11001101110011001000000111100101101111011101010
01000000110100101101110001000000111100101101111
01110101011100100010000001101110011000010111010
00110100101110110011001010010000001101100011000
01011011100110011101110101011000010110011101100
10100100001

Hee hee okulumo.gif

jan aleksan (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-14 13:18:47

001110100010110101010000

k1attack (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-14 16:48:19

Computers just use two words: "0" and "1"!

jan aleksan (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-14 17:30:03

k1attack:Computers just use two words: "0" and "1"!
1

Greyshades (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-14 17:53:07

On another forum I saw people talking in a one word language, kinda like Puna.

The word was "mu". Something like cows >_>

k1attack (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-14 17:56:52

Greyshades:On another forum I saw people talking in a one word language, kinda like Puna.

The word was "mu". Something like cows >_>
Answer my question on my post on Vuyamu.

JOW (Montri la profilon) 2010-marto-15 03:37:06

ceigered:
JOW:Real languages essentially begin from a human perspective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language

Interestingly, despite the highly disputed and questionable methods of deriving the table towards the bottom, it seems that many "human" things (like "water" and "smell/nose") seem to be very similar in many language families.
It is very interesting. The difficult issue there, I think, is whether the words resemble each other because of a common ancestry, or if it's a structural issue. I suspect that in many cases, it is a structural thing, though sound symbolism. It's very natural that many languages will have a word for "drum" that has a "t" sound in it, like tom-tom. After all, that's what a drum sounds like (at least expressed in human terms). So ideas like water may have something similar going on, though obviously much more subtle. The word for "suck" has an "s" sound in many language, but it doesn't have necessarily to do with a common ancestry.

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