Re: [glosalist] Sound "U" in Glosa

At 12:46 AM 7/13/05, Konstantin pa grafo:

pardon, Robin, what linguas are you speaking in? especially i’m speaking about conlangs.

Robin Fairbridge Gaskell wrote:

Think so, I once had a Greek and a Latin dictionary handy to check such questions.

  Pretty sure I checked out ~mu~, and I seem to recall there was  even a Latin "mu".

Hello Friends, Sorry all for making assumptions. I hark back to the early days of Glosa when I used to visit Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby when they were in a caravan not far from where I lived in Christchurch, Dorset. Ron was working on the whiteboard amd deriving vocabulary when I first met him … around the 1985 mark. Glosa being designed then as the international language for science, it was founded on the Classical languages from which science derived its nomenclature: Greek and Latin. The theory was that you could have a Greek-based word and a Latin-based word in Glosa to allow for variety, and to avoid unpleasant repetition. It didn’t quite work out that way: there were too many Greek synonyms in the “Glosa 6000” dictionary; the dictionary was only a word-translation list, and so, lacked some fine-tuning of the lexicon; and some people demanded only one word per lexical item – to reduce both the learning load and the strain on memory. When deriving vocab., Ron had a stack of national language dictionaries fanned out on his desk to check the commonality of the words he chose from the Greek and Latin dictionaries. After arriving back in Australia, I used the Classical dictionaries to check the expanded dictionary items when the GID (Glosa Internet Dictionary) was created on the Net. For instance, ~uti~ covered “use” (to use; the use), but I could find no trace of a Glosa word to cover the concept of “employ” (to employ; employment), so I set about deriving a lexeme. By looking into the Latin dictionary I came across something that allowed me to choose ~util~.

Many years ago, somebody else questioned the use of ~mu~; I recall  checking it out, and finding the Latin word from which it was derived.

I trust that this explanation does not put me as far underwater in the  deep end as you had first thought me to be.

Saluta,

Robin Gaskell