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Lee Daniel Crocker:
> > 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?
You raise two issues: the balance between grammar and vocabulary,
and the pros and cons of a big vocab. The latter is easier to deal
with: a small vocab makes the language easier to master, while a
large vocab makes it possible to encode a greater number of
concepts (with relative brevity). Personally, I prefer the big vocab,
what with English being one of my principal inspirations. But others
like the idea of a 'pocket sized' language.
As for grammar versus vocab, vocab does impose burdens on memory
-- learning and retrieval. And it is a blunt instrument when
compared to grammar; many more things can be said with a phrase
than with a single word. I try to add words that abbreviate frequent
but complicated grammatical patterns, but there's no way that
vocab could replace those patterns altogether.
--And.