4 ms·
The “only 120 words” is an intriguing idea (and illustrates just how far one can come with periphrasis alone), but if this were an actually actively spoken lang
by ribit 3y ago
The “only 120 words” is an intriguing idea (and illustrates just how far one can come with periphrasis alone), but if this were an actually actively spoken language the lexicon would likely quickly expand, first to include conventionalized composita, which will probably soon grammaticalize as new roots. I’m also not sure whether most of the existing grammatical markers would survive long, in particular “li” seems redundant and would likely be optimized away in just a few generations. Similarly, the grammar would likely become more complex and gain complex clauses and some grammatical markers for event structure (e.g. time specification) - these are all
important things which right now are not ergonomic to use.
At any rate, very smart exercise in linguistic minimalism. I wonder whether even smaller languages are viable using data driven design (e.g. via mining large language corpora for particularly well connected lexical meanings to identify most useful concepts for periphrasis)
- nojs 3y agoI mean you can speak in binary with only two “words”, so the 120 word claim alone doesn’t mean much.
- ribit 3y agoIt’s a bit more complicated than this. Of course you can represent any information with any kind of coding schema but here the truck to find a schema that’s also reasonably efficient. As so often, this is about compression. In the context of human language, the problem is finding the smallest set of lexical concepts such that you can express a wide range of meanings with minimal combinations. A lexical principal component analysis if you want. But yes, quite a lot of things about languages have been subject to unhealthy sensationalism, like the story with “over 50 words for snow in Eskimo” or “Piranhas unable to count”. Linguistics is not that easy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- _nalply 3y agoYou also could talk with only one word (unary system), but this misses the mark completely. I experimented to design a variant of Toki Pona with only two-syllable words, but then I realized that's why it's a linguist who designed Toki Pona. One of the points: the phonemes in a language are not evenly distributed, and even the combinations thereof are not. For example, /ne/ might be twice as frequent than /pa/. I as a programmer started with something like an uniform distribution, and immediately realized that it felt awkward. It's like the secret sauce: choose the right 120 words and their pronunciation wisely!
- hoseja 3y ago0101000001110010011000010110100101110011011001010010000001110100011010000110010100100000010011110110110101101110011010010111001101110011011010010110000101101000