| Regarding #1 Something similar was done, but it was explicitly recognised that the purpose of lojban was not to generate "the semantic primes of language." Such as exercise is regarded by some linguists as meaningless, and by others as too difficult. Instead, concepts were listed, and from them a "covering set" was extracted. Similarly tenses, both spatial and temporal. After the concepts were agreed, it was expressed in each of the (then) six major world languages. The words thus obtained were put through a weighting algorith,=m to try to find a "word" that had components of each, and that became the lojban word for that concept. You can see the etymology and vocabulary here:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Lojban/gismu There are documents about the process and how it was set about, but I'd have to hunt. Regarding #2 There is a predicate "nenri" (cognate "inner") which means "x1 is inside x2". Thus "There are dogs in the kitchen"
can be rendered as lo gerku cu nenmi le jupku'a
Less precise: lo gerku cu zvati le jupku'a
"zvati" means "at" rather than "in"There is a web page that will gloss grammatically correct lojban here: http://www.lojban.org/jboski/index.php I'm working on a tool to help create grammatically correct lojban interactively. Hope that helps. |
I should point out that I'm fairly familiar with the general range of opinion in the linguistics community (as an undergrad I did dual math / linguistics, which made me at that time quite the rara avis, though it's more common now apparently).
Generally I don't give much credence to the idea of semantic primes (at all, not just in some pragmatic sense) but for stuff like spatial relationships + tenses (+ aspect, mood, etc.) it'd seem not an impossible undertaking (do enough reading in linguistic typology and you start seeing enough "repeats" to think such an enumeration might be possible).
After going through a bit of the grammar and the vocab list on wiktionary it seems like you'd have constant problems with synecdoche, which'd bother me (but perhaps only me, and it's not as though natural languages aren't riddled with similar problems).
I've walked away from this with a much stronger sense of the sense in which lojban is attempting to be a logical language, thanks for your time.
It's heartening to see substantial effort put into engineering language; good luck with your efforts.