Wednesday, July 6, 2011
To Loglan or not to Loglan
Should Ceqli "nouns" be verbs, as in Loglan? Should jin mean "is a person," or can it act more like English, and as a verb have the meaning of "to man the helm"? I'm inclined to think I should stick with the Loglan idea, and use the equivalent of an -um to derive words that don't have a clear derivation path. That occurred to me with 'fum,' which I was going to use to mean smoke as a noun and a verb as in English, but if fum means 'is smoke,' then I can use 'fumspir' (smoke-breathe) as I think Loglan does for smoke in that sense — "Janzo fumspir to kana." and something like smoke-treat for smoking fish. Make sense? I can imagine I'd actually need an -um word very rarely.
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I agree with following the Loglan model, or some other consistent model. But I've found that it can be quite difficult to define and control things well enough that words are always defined in the optimal way and just naturally adopt the best alternative meanings when used in different grammatical roles. One of the reworks of Qakwan I'm doing right now is abandoning the idea that if I know a word as a noun -- "qimsei" -- that I automatically know what it means as a verb, "qimsau", or an adjective, "qimsoi", as well as abandoning the idea that it doesn't matter which grammatical role one considers as the 'natural' role for the derivation rules will always yield the right results. So I'm moving to using a set of suffixes that make it abundantly clear which grammatical role conversion is being applied, along with any additional semantic information. My hope is that words can then be coined by others without fear of them going down grammatical dead ends.
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