Re: VL-TRANS: a favorite saying
Saul Epstein 
Tue, 21 Oct 1997 10:43:51 -0500

At 03:16 PM 10/20/97 -0500, Rob wrote:

>Well, I found some interesting things hunting around the net. I found
>a list of 1600 standard words from the Universal Language Dictionary,
>and really cool lojban source file: a list of 1200 words in Arabic, 
>Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian and Spanish.

Great.

>So now all we need to do is to establish some phonomes, establish some
>morphological rules of word formation, by which I mean establish what
>kind of consonent vowel arraingement one finds in vulcan words. In
>Hawaiian for example words have this kind of morphological rule CVCVCVCV
>where each syllable usually has only one consonent and one vowel. In
>Lojban the rule is exclusively CCVCV or CVCCV.
>
>Many natural languages unlike Hawaiian have many such rules. So a 
>question to start us off - how many such rules should Vulcan have?

Many. I suspect that's the only way we'll accommodate the words that already
exist. Even so some bending will inevitably have to occur. What I mean is,
some of the words in the current lexicon will have to change. Every language
has "exceptions" which are really situations when multiple rules apply
simultaneously. But you can only have so many of those before the rules
disappear.

>Alternatively maybe we should simply catalogue the various examples in
>the Zvelebil Corpus and use them as the working set of rules.

That's the method I would prefer. We'll have to eye the resulting data in
such a way that the dominant tendencies stand out and determine what rules
would explain them. Then we can handle the exceptions as either:
applications of multiple rules; historical anomalies (to preserve really
important words); impossibilities that will have to be modified.

>One key note I think important, for effective communication we should
>have no points of ambiguity. It would not seem logical that the Vulcans
>after the reformation would embrace c'thia as a way of being and yet
>keep speaking a language with ambiguities.

You are eliminating the possibility of literary art from post-Reformation
Vulcan culture. I think Vulcans would have a longstanding tradition of an
"inambiguous voice" for describing things which can be so described, and
that such a grammatical feature would have obtained additional importance
after Surak. But I cannot agree that all the other voices would have been
silenced.

--
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