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Fri 16 Feb, 2018 08:45 pm
Imagine you live in a world with only 20 words. You can use these 20 words as much as you want, but you cannot use any other words at all. Then try to write 2 paragraphs using only those 20 words.
@NanaIn805,
NanaIn805 wrote:You can use these 20 words as much as you want, but you cannot use any other words at all.
If the world has only 20 words, this is nonsense. Have you really thought about this?
And, of course it could be done. "Worlds" don't have words which a parts of languages. Intelligent creatures do. If they have a language which can be written down they can produce as many paragraphs as they need to.
And since a "paragraph" is defined as a "a distinct section of a piece of writing, usually dealing with a single theme and indicated by a new line, indentation, or numbering", I can write two non-identical paragraphs in English using four words:
The cat sat.
The dog sat.
This is the same assignment that would be given to any person traveling to a country where you don't speak the language. Important words might include:
water, food, shelter, money, bathroom, man, woman, help, want, see, travel, emergency, money, etc.
@NanaIn805,
The really interesting thing is to determine whether writing/literature would be 'invented' in a world with only 20 words...
@najmelliw,
najmelliw wrote:The really interesting thing is to determine whether writing/literature would be 'invented' in a world with only 20 words...
How would you deal with numbers, I wonder? There is an artificial (invented) language called Toki Pona which has 100 words (or 118 or 126, depending on where you look). It can be learned in 30 hours, allegedly, and its creator, Sonja Lang, says it can express almost any idea. Economy of form is accomplished by reducing symbolic thought to its most basic elements, merging related concepts, and having single words perform multiple functions of speech.
http://lolcathost.org/t/toki-pona-lessons.pdf
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