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> One way of implementing Thinkit's binarity is to treat the predicate
> as a state of affairs and then have binary relations between this
> state of affairs and each participant. Go GIVE would be:
>
> X1 = a giving
> X2 is giver of X1
> X3 is recipient of X1
> X4 is gift of X1
>
> The downside of this is that you need a much larger vocabulary -- one
> word per argument-relation ('giver', 'recipient', 'gift') rather than
> one word per underlying predicate ('give').
One thing I've often wondered about many conlangs: why is this (a
large vocabulary) considered a downside at all? Haven't decades of
cognitive science and actual experiments with vocabulary-limited
languages, all of which have been miserable failures, proven beyond
any doubt that human brains are hard-wired to easily handle huge
vocabularies? The experiments are really quite simple: sit voluteers
in front of screens, throw pieces of language at them, and measure
their response times. The results are always the same: big
vocabulary--no sweat; complicated grammar--um, what was that again?
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@hidden.email> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC