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ChristianKl comments on Linguistic mechanisms for less wrong cognition - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yeah, but if I understand correctly ChristianKI's language has special provision for things like "my boss's boss" and "my beloved's beloved" but not for "my boss's husband" and "my beloved's friends". You pick a particular relationship and then you have efficient ways of describing complicated paths through the graph it defines, but there isn't special machinery for combining multiple relationships.
I haven't presented here a way to combine multiple relationships but the language certainly should have mechanisms to handle them. I'm not sure whether it makes sense to have all in one long word or not, but when it comes to language design, it's worth thinking about how those cases get handled.
When it comes to kinship relationships it's worth noting that not every language has a word for "brother". Pitjantjatjara for example has a no word for brother but one "younger sibling".
A language that allows both of those concepts to be expressed is more culturally neutral and doesn't force the speaker into categorising his relationships in the way our culture does.
Yup. But again there are tradeoffs: it could be that complete neutrality ends up making a less useful language than any of several different non-neutral options. (E.g., because you definitely want some words for siblings, but you don't want too many because there are other things to do with the possible-word-space they would occupy, and then every way of having not-too-many ends up not being "culturally neutral" because it inevitably favours some categorizations over others.)
Possible word space is vast. None of the words I used even compete with words in the English language or are easily confused for English words.
Possible word space within a given language is not so vast, and shouldn't be filled too tightly.
Do you think it's just incompetence that has led to existing languages not using every possible short combination of sounds to make words?
Incompetence would assume that the existing languages are designed to be the way they are.
English has 12 vowels (not counting diphthongs) and 24 consonants. Does that mean that English needs 296 different words with two sounds? No, but maybe 100?
Then everything is alright isn't it? The Oxford dictionary contains 100 two letters words. No, it isn't. It contains words such as
aawhich isBasaltic lava forming very rough, jagged masses with a light frothy texture. Often contrasted with pahoehoe.and a lot of other junk likekiwhich isa plant of the lily family.It has been suggested that this kind of lava was named by the first Hawaiian who tried to walk across it barefoot :-)
In any case, this is a foreign borrowed word.
Quite a lot of English is haphazardly borrowed together. But my main point was that a lot of the list of two letter words in the Oxford dictionary doesn't look like "real English words".