--- Andrew Nowicki <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Ygyde has 90 arbitrary noun morphemes. Most of
> the remaining morphemes and other predefined
> words are related to the 90 noun morphemes, so
> they are easier to memorize. Furthermore, many
> of the predefined words are not needed for basic
> communication. The total number of essential
> predefined Ygyde words including the morphemes
> is about 400.

I have to call bullshit on this.  Looking at Ygyde as
you define it on your website, each of the 90 2-letter
morphemes has 8 meanings; they are nouns, adjectives,
colors, prepositions, numbers, time expressions, and
coordinates in the geocoding system.  Whether a
morpheme has a noun or adjective meaning depends on
its position in a word and the head morpheme of the
word.  To explain:

y-je-jy-fo: (noun) masculine sonic fiber
o-jy-fo-je: (noun) sonic fiber machine

In the first word (which means "guitar"), "je" is
defined as "masculine," while in the second ("piano"),
it is defined as "machine."  This is because the words
have different patterns.  For 7-letter words, we have
the patterns:

y - adj - adj - noun
o - adj - noun - noun

The pattern is different for 5-letter words:

y - adj - noun
o - noun - noun

Now , one of the problems with this is that we don't
actually know what a word means until it is completed;
for instance, "ygyde" (simple language) is only
different from "ygydede" (simple foreign language)
only when we hear another vowel instead of a
consonant.  In practical Ygyde, you'd be constantly
parsing words, and I think this would make
communication very difficult.

The other main issue is Andrew's claim that there are
only about 400 memory units.  If Ygyde was really
designed as Wikipedia describes oligosynthetic
languages, there would only be 720, but the
"predefined" compound words show the other side of the
problem -- basically, they're not nearly long enough.

For instance, take "ojyfoje," which is defined as
meaning "piano."  This tells us that it is a "sonic
fiber machine."  However, "piano" comes from
"gravicembalo col piano e forte," "harpsichord with
soft and loud."  To get an actual oligosynthetic word,
we'd have to do a lot of compounding:

1.  Music is "yjykono," which describes music as
"sonic artistic work."  This is about specific enough
as a definition.  However, the word for musical
instrument, "yjykosi," is cheating; it is a tool for
music, and should include the actual word "music":
"ysi u yjykono."

2.  A piano is a keyboard.  "board" is easy, "okywe,"
"rigid solid sheet."  "Key" is a bit harder; I would
expect a word for "lever," but we don't have one.  So
to improvise, I would have to use "igi ina izo u yje,"
up and down + machine.  So "keyboard" is "igi u izo u
yje u okywe."  This lets us create a word for musical
keyboard instrument -- "igi ina izo u yje u okywe u
ysi u yjykono."

3.  Loud is "azajyli," and soft is "akajyli."  So
"soft and loud" would be "akajyli ina azajyli," giving
us at last a definition for piano:

akajyli ina azajyli u igi ina izo u yje u okywe u ysi
u yjykono

I belabor this point because "ojyfoje" is not a
definition for "piano," but rather an idiomatic word
that means "piano" for no reason other than that you
say it does.  My word is really long, because it
follows the purported principle of Ygyde, that words
ought to define their objects.  (Admittedly, if you
had a reasonable word for "lever," it would have been
a smaller problem, but you don't - even though you say
Ygyde is a language for science!)  My point is, of
course, that if you followed the oligosynthetic
principle in an auxlang, you'd give belabored
definitions every time you used a word.

Ygyde doesn't actually do this.  What it does instead
is to reduce complex concepts like that really long
word I gave to simple suggestive definitions, like
"ojyfoje," which must be learnt by heart.  Now, we've
known for over a hundred years that communication
requires a vocabulary of a few thousand words; every
attempt to get around it in a language (except for
languages that are meant to be limited in the range of
expression, like Toki Pona) has met reality and had to
add a few thousand more words.  (See the explosion of
Esperanto vocabulary, or the reluctant shift from
Glosa 1000 to Glosa 6000.)

What makes Ygyde really bad, IMO, is that these 90
indistinct roots each require rote memorization 8
times separately and then in several dozen words, most
of which look almost the same.  I imagine that
actually learning Ygyde would be a significant
challenge, because the word forms are so uniform that
there's nothing to make "music" stand out from "piano"
or "national anthem" or anything else.  At least words
like "piano" and "music" and "physics" have been
around in natural languages for years, which provides
a kind of empirical proof that these words are
relatively memorizable separately.

I've devoted all this time to deconstructing Ygyde
words because you are making claims that just don't
measure up to reality.  It's fine that your hobby is
coming up with these idiomatic words for Ygyde, but
your claims about the language are simply unjustified
by the reality.

 - Wayne