The choices of roots for PreBabel

Day five --

Question -- from "vreizhig" -- Such a concept is only "important" to those who believe that spirits and heaven exist, and that concepts such as "pre-existence" are anything other than meaningless nonsense.

you're clearly assigning spiritualist worldviews a supremacist position in your language, a privileged position above non-spiritual worldviews.

It's much the same for most of the other roots at the top of the list. Root #2, the vertical line, is assigned a completely nonsensical definition that apparently equates ordinary walls with energetic painter-ghosts. Many of these roots use the word "energy" in their definitions, but none of them use it in anything remotely resembling the scientific sense - they reek of the New Age use of "energy" as a synonym for "magic."

Answer -- Although many of you disagree with me, you are all talking about issues, and they are very important and good issues.

My goal is to construct a universal language. It will be very stupid of me of promoting any kind of world view (such as the New Age) or a culture-biased position. I did hear about the name of New Age but not knowing what it is about. A language must be having the capacity of describing all worldviews, whatever that is, including the non-sense. Indeed, the non-sense might be the most difficult concept to describe with a language. Repeat, a language must be able to describe all kinds of non-sense, the pre-existence or what not. If you see any non-sense roots in the PB set, then that PB can work.

For the cultural-bias issue, as the PB root word set is derived from Chinese traditional word system, it is truly very hard for me to avoid the critique of been culturally biased. Although I cannot deny the origin of the PB root set is from Chinese system, I tried very hard to distance PB from Chinese system with two decisions. 1. PB words are one dimensional (linear), same as English words, not two dimensional as Chinese words which are in a square. 2. In Chinese system, many meanings of Chinese words are inferred with the help of phonetics. I did think about introducing 300 sound modules (sound roots) for the PB system. If I did that, the encoding of other language becomes easier as I would have one more tool (dimension) to work with. Yet, it would be too much Chinese in PB. So, I gave that up and keep PB as a mute language at this moment. Almost all languages use phonetics to encode some foreign words, such Kung-Fu, Hong Kong, Beijing, etc.. By keeping mute, PB lost one arm, and this is the big price that PreBabel paid for trying stay being non-culturally-biased.

Question -- from "vreizhig" -- Yeah... so that justifies using "horse's head," "tiger head," "deer head," and "ghost head," instead of having a root for "head" and then combining it with "horse," "tiger," etc. (I searched your list, and apparently you don't have a plain root for "horse" - you've got a root for its head, but not for the animal itself.) You're nowhere near the "minimum complexity," and any five-year-old child can see that.

Answer -- Excellent observation. Yet, you might not be able to disagree with me (because you cannot as it is a historical fact) that China launched the simplified system in 1958 because of the chaotic nature of the traditional Chinese word system, and this was their stated statement. However, there was a set of Kangsi radicals (214) which describes the system of the traditional set. Obviously, that Kangsi radical set did not convince all those Chinese linguists in the 1950s that the traditional is in fact an axiomatized system. The Kangsi set was published about 400 years ago by the Emperor Kangsi, and its content was known 2,000 years ago. In the Kangsi set, there is no bird's head, horse head, ..., but is bird, horse, tiger, etc., exactly the same as your saying.

Mathematics was and still is considered the most absolute knowledge among disciplines. Yet, only very recent, about 50 years ago, the Fuzzy Topology arose, and the fuzzy logic became very important only 20 years ago. Although we still do not have a true AI (artificial intelligence), it is fuzzy logic which allows the development of many semi-AI(s) which are all over the places in our auto-control systems which give us our modern enjoyments. The Fuzzy Topology is a very deep new mathematics, and we are unable to talk about the detail of it. However, we can get some ideas from some simple examples.

Which one is more fuzzy, the horse head or the horse? Of course, you can have your opinion on this. I am showing you mine. The horse head is more fuzzy than horse. Without using the mathematics terms, fuzzy means that it has more room to wonder. A horse is going to be a horse, and it can be ridden on, can do works, can be in race, etc.. Yet, a horse head can wonder a lot more. By simply adding a root, a horse head can become a horse and thus can do that all job a horse can do. Yet, a horse cannot do many things that a horse head can do, such as, a horse head over man can be the word "playful", a tiger head over man be "pretend", etc. ...

In fact, the "major" difference between the PB set and the Kangsi set is about this fuzziness. With Kangsi set, many words with horse head (not horse), bird head, tiger head, deer head, etc. cannot be dissected with the Kangsi radicals. With the Kangsi set, no one can discover that the traditional Chinese word system is an axiomatized system. With the PB set, there is no chance for anyone to miss that. Just that simple.

Signature -- PreBabel is the true universal language, it is available at http://www.prebabel.info