Alo Wilko,

Nice idea (what is the URL of your wiki?). This is a good e= xample of the serious use of artificial languages I would like to see mor= e of.

The wiki belongs to all members of this glosa list. You can find it = at http://glosalist.pbwiki.com/ .

My first impression of Glosa is tha= t we can say a lot using only a 1000 Glosa words. That seems to imply t= hat Glosa words are strongly semantically overloaded (one word can be use= d in various ways, has multiple meanings). So I am curious, what makes yo= u think Glosa would fit the bill?

Language is an exercise in combinatorics= . In any language, there is a finite vocabulary by which an infinite number= of concepts can be expressed even when the words are not semantically over= loaded.

Most words act as “syntactic sugar”, which means they are a semant= ic shortcut to a concept from base primitives. It is easier to say “elephan= t” then “Giant gray mammal with long snout type animal”.

A small vocabular= y doesn’t necessarily mean semantic overloading because a large vocabulary = is not fundamentally necessary. Take a look at http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/ns= m/index.php for more information on the semantic primitives as understood t= o date.

Glosa is not semantically overloaded in the sense that a word has

multiple meanings (usually). Generally, words in Glosa are meant to refer t= o an umbrella concept. ie, Rather then have a word for each of “love”, “lik= e”, “infatuated with”, “fond” etc.. Glosa uses one concept word, “amo”, whi= ch refers to the general concept for all of these. If you want to get more = specific, you may, by using more words as in the elephant example above.

O= f course “amo” is an exception to the one word one concept tendency in Glos= a because it also means “sand”.

Why do I think that Glosa will fit the bil= l for a testbed language for the Natural Semantic Metalanguage?

I don’t ye= t. This is what I’m investigating right now. If I imagine what kind of lang= uage would be ideal for NSM as a neutral playground for explications, the l= anguage I see would be very glosa-like. But so far I see, there are several= unresolved issues from an NSM point of view in the Glosa vocabulary, parti= cularly that of the sixty three primes.

Glosa was not designed from the st= art with the NSM in mind, but the mindsets of the creators were pretty clos= e. They were looking for simplicity in concepts and communication. Glosa wa= s designed to be easy to learn and thus picked up quickly.

I think a sub-s= et of Glosa could be put together for the purposes of NSM research with onl= y a handful of changes to the vocabulary. This could be a small branch from= the Glosa language designed specifically for the purposes of NSM research.=

Regards, Bill Branch