Today I will be talking about compound words and how they are formed with eidea.
Let’s recall: meta-eidea are just a definition to call a group of very similar eidea among people the same. In addition you may have seen me writing about an interlinked group of meta-eidea. This can mean they copy compound words, but this does not have to be the case necessarily.
Let me make this more concrete with an example.
[cart]
For most people this will be a single eidos and it will look something like the image I used. For some people its will take more and could form something like: [two][wheel][transport][vehicle]
I could also give you an example which shows the opposite.
[peanut butter]
Noticed me not writing [peanut][butter]? For some people it might really be something like [peanut][paste], but for most people it is in fact one single eidos.
Ok, but how do you tell when something is a single eidos, or a group of eidea? Well, you can not really tell, because it differs among people(1). That’s where meta-eidea roughly come in.
I will predict where to put the boundaries. Sometimes you will see me write a compound word as a single meta-eidos, sometimes you will see me write one word as a group of meta-eidea; English does not always follow what really happens in my mind but then again it might work different in your own mind too.
This also is makes making languages such a difficult task, It has to work for everybody, or at least give them enough pointers to reproduce the intended meaning.
There are a few cases where the break is very obvious. Witness this example.
Note: From now on I will group meta-eidea with a distinct role (objects) with round brackets.
(Pete and John) threw (me) (a yellow ball).
Adjectives
First notice [yellow][ball]. Yellow is an adjective, and in almost every case an adjective is a separate eidos. Exceptions are: ‘fast ball’, big bang, often derived adjectives.
Conjunction
(Pete and John) is one object but it may be very obvious Pete but also John are separate eidea. Also for conjunctions we can say for almost every case it is made up out of separate eidea. There are on the other hand a few obvious exceptions: ‘lean and mean’, ‘bed and breakfast’, something you can see as one thing.
Before closing I’d like to state a final thing. Foregoing I spoke about ‘interlinked eidea’, by this I mean that A links to B but B also links to A. In fact, there are different ways eidea can be linked and this makes room for precedence.
For instance:
apple pie versus pie apple
(a pie filled with apples) (an apple designated for use in pie)
In English sequence tells us the precedence, but when you want to draw this on paper you need to know how it is linked. I will tell you more on this subject in a later stadium.
That will be all for today. 'Next week' I will be discussing one of my most ockward theories, it will be mind bobbeling but very enlighting I dare to say.
Have a nice day!
Ferry Timmers
Footnotes:
(1) I once ran an experiment where people could choose from a single word or a compound when seeing various pictures. The results varied, even among people who speak the same language.
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