Re: VL-TRANS: a favorite saying
Saul Epstein 
Thu, 16 Oct 1997 11:54:56 -0500

From: Rob Zook <rzook*informix,com>
Date: Thursday, October 16, 1997 9:25 AM


>Note: instead of a VL topic we have a whole vulcan-linguistics
>mailing list which Randall setup a while back - let us use it.
>So reply to vulcan-linguistics*shikahr,com,inter,net, please.


Hear, hear. I've been meaning to say something about that, now that
languange has become of interest again...

    [snip]

>Something else which came to mind while thinking about this: If we
>come up with a morphology scheme it would make generating words much
>easier. Then we can select existing words in a one or more languages
>and use a mutating algorithm to create whole lists of Vulcan words.

I agree about the need for morphological elaboration. But do you mean to
derive Vulcan words from words in Terran languages? Such "mutation" is more
along the lines of a cypher than a morphology. I'm not putting down to
technique, of course, provided the cypher is opaque enough.

>Or alternatively, I created a program a long time ago to generate
>words with a certain morphology. If you have a morphology I can
>modify the program with than and we can just start with a list of
>words and assign them meanings.

That could prove useful...

>At this point we really do not have
>suffient numbers of words to do much translating. We need at least
>the base 500-1000 words used by most english speakers and any other
>words which Vulcans might commonly use.

Yes. I have filed away somewhere a list of things for which nearly all
Terran languages have words -- a sort of universal core vocabulary. It
includes things like body parts for people, animals and plants; kinship
terms; numbers. I can post that to start with.

>Marketa, did you or your father ever create on an explicit morphology?

The text we have includes an infix system for tense/aspect and a suffix
system for case, as well as the intensive reduplication, all of which are
morphological. But we need, among other things, rules for compounds, and for
the secondary derivation of parts of speech from each other. By the way, I
like your extension of the deixis to time: it will help resolve ambiguities
in the tense/aspect system.

>Also, what does your father think of sharing out parts of the project
>to people on this list?

Obviously, I'm curious about that too. ;-,

--
from Saul Epstein
liberty <at> uit <dot> net
www <dot> johnco <dot> cc <dot> ks <dot> us <slash> <tilde> sepstein
"Surak ow'pha:per the's'hi the's'cha'; the's'pha:dzhar the's'hi surakecha'."
                                     -- K'dvarin Ursw~l'at