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I wish it were (more) acceptable to use made up words, like medicine does. Once you know the base morphemes in greek/latin, it's really easy to decode medical j
by kortex 6y ago
I wish it were (more) acceptable to use made up words, like medicine does. Once you know the base morphemes in greek/latin, it's really easy to decode medical jargon. You'd need to augment the list with a bunch of technical terms of course.
It would be cool to have a tiny vocab (a la Toki Pona) of say 256 single-syllable morphemes of 1-2 consonants and 1-2 vowels.
SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstance -> Haplefaesthamon
Of course this is probably appealing to conlangers and language nerds, and horrifying to everyone else.
- Baeocystin 6y agoMy father was a linguist. He one time suggested that I program in Lojban, as the logical aspect of it would be much easier to understand than the symbol-soup he perceived in what I was using. He meant well.
- grey-area 6y agoMaybe the long name is a clue this monstrosity simply shouldn't exist? The problem is not the number of letters used, but the number of ideas attached to one identifier.
- bitwize 6y ago> It would be cool to have a tiny vocab (a la Toki Pona) of say 256 single-syllable morphemes of 1-2 consonants and 1-2 vowels. I'm sure the Urbit people will be by to explain that this is being worked on for Hoon, and email me now and I'll get you set up with a planet.
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoActually making compound words works in many natural languages by itself. It's just obscured in English due to its nature as a near-creole: it has lots of loan-words all over the place, so it's less obvious how you can mix-and-match. (And it's less obvious how the loan words themselves might have been mixed and matched in the first place) In Greek, Latin, French it's much easier to make compound words already. Dutch does it a bit too, and German is quite famous for it. People actually make up words on the spot, and other people can easily infer the meaning. I learned this the hard way while training a natural language "AI". People just do it in their day-to-day use of those languages. In any case, I don't think you need to make up new morphemes for English, it has too many already from all the languages it's been borrowing from. Drawing from the extant pool would be quite adequate for me!