The works of Anna Wierzbicka on semantic primitives may be of interest (although they are mainly contained in expensive academic books and gated journal articles). She found a core of about 20 such primitives, although in later work she expanded them substantially. These are primitives discovered (by her methods) from the study of human languages, rather than constructed on a logical basis.
Sounds like a good addition to my reading list, although I just looked at her books on Amazon and the prices on most of them are outrageous (I couldn’t sell a book for $28, let alone $280). But with luck it might be possible to dig up a list of the basic primitives, with commentary, on the internet somewhere.
On this recomendation I read her latest book Imprisoned in English. I think it would make a lot of sense to write the core dictionary of a new language in what Anna Wierzbicka calls mini-english.
That definition for example has Ekman’s anger described as:
it can be like this:
someone thinks like this about someone else:
“this someone is doing some things now
this is bad
I want something to happen, it can’t happen if this someone does things like this
this someone knows this
because of this, I want to do something (bad) to this someone”
when this someone thinks like this, this someone feels something bad because of this,
like people often do when they think like this
The german word Wut get’s described as:
it can be like this:
someone thinks like this:
“something bad is happening here now
I don’t want this
I want to do something to something because of this now, I can’t not do something
Anna then shows how the words aren’t completely interchangable even when the German Wut is the nearest word to the English anger. This mini-english has also the benefit of being automatically translateable into a variety of languages.
The works of Anna Wierzbicka on semantic primitives may be of interest (although they are mainly contained in expensive academic books and gated journal articles). She found a core of about 20 such primitives, although in later work she expanded them substantially. These are primitives discovered (by her methods) from the study of human languages, rather than constructed on a logical basis.
Sounds like a good addition to my reading list, although I just looked at her books on Amazon and the prices on most of them are outrageous (I couldn’t sell a book for $28, let alone $280). But with luck it might be possible to dig up a list of the basic primitives, with commentary, on the internet somewhere.
On this recomendation I read her latest book Imprisoned in English. I think it would make a lot of sense to write the core dictionary of a new language in what Anna Wierzbicka calls mini-english.
That definition for example has Ekman’s anger described as:
The german word Wut get’s described as:
Anna then shows how the words aren’t completely interchangable even when the German
Wutis the nearest word to the Englishanger. This mini-english has also the benefit of being automatically translateable into a variety of languages.