Re: VL-TRANS: a favorite saying Rob Zook Thu, 16 Oct 1997 13:06:43 -0500 At 11:54 AM 10/16/97 -0500, you wrote: >From: Rob Zook >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? Yes. >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. Well, not exactly what I meant. The idea I had in mind was to take two or more words in a Terran language merge them with an algorithm which would alternatively extract/discard letters from the Terran words to form a new word. Next a second algorithm would convert the new word so it conforms to whatever morphological scheme Vulcan has. The benefit of this is we don't have to play to noise to meaning matching game. We generate the new word already with a meaning. >>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. That would be a great start if you can find it. I used to have a similar list I photocopied from a really big old dictionary. Unfortunately I have not been able to find it for quite a few years. >>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. Well, I'm glad I did not miss any kind of implied system. I went over the Zvelebil text, but could not make out any. That's a serious lack in a language, unless Vulcan is some kind of semi-timeless language like... umm, I think Apache. I'm thinking of the Native-American language which Whorf found so fascinating. >>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. ;-, I know, I realize Prof. Zvelebil is a busy man and all that, but I want to speak Vulcan now :-) One thing that I feel pretty strongly about, and which is noted a couple of times in the Zvelebil text - we must strive to not introduce and "indentity of" article. It introduces a serious logical flaw in any utterance involving it. There's absolutely no need for that article in a language. I would much rather see some kind of formalization of Set Theory in the language. Also note how pedantically logical Spock acts sometimes. Given that while, he does try to out Vulcan the Vulcans, I still think that gives us grounds to theorize that after the Reformation of Thought there would have to be a corresponding Reformation of _Language_ to make it more logically consistent. Rob Z. -------------------------------------------------------- If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. -- Henry David Thoreau