History: Wierzbicka

Source of version: 2 (current)

[http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/arts_fac/staff/wierzbicka.html|Anna Wierzbicka] a.k.a. ''Anna Weet(a)bix''. (.i la nitcion ba'e se spaji .i mi djuno ledu'u la .uitbiks. xajmi cmene la viej.bitskas kei ki'u lenu mi tirna vo'e necu'u lei se ctuca be la viej.bitskas. .i ku'i na'ebomi jmina le tcita .i xu mi casnu la'edi'u vecu'u le jbomriste ? -- mi'e nitcion) *I don't know, but I can't think how else I would know that it's "Weetbix", because I and my fellow British frivolists say "Weetabix". --((And)) ---- It's a bit surprising someone created this page, because I'm not aware of her work being discussed much on Lojban list. At any rate, she prolifically publishes regarding her theory that all semantics can be reduced to a very small and definite inventory of primitives. From a purely linguistics point of view, her work is outstandingly bad, but from a ((conlang)) and particularly a ((loglang)) or ((engelang)) point of view it is of much more interest than most work in linguistics. [[--((And))] Furthermore, her contention is that semantics can be so reduced using a metalanguage that looks like a real language --- __Natural__ Semantic Metalanguage. Hence her students (at Australian National University in Canberra) merrily amusing themselves and others with expressions like "I do something bad. I feel something bad because of this. Someone thinks it is something good that I feel something bad because of this." In my own professional opinion :-) her early work is outstandingly good (particularly the dictionary of Speech Act verbs); but the more she's tried to make the metalanguage more natural (the primitives have gone up from 12 to around 80; and there's never been a well-defined syntax to go along with it), the messier it becomes. -- nitcion ---- Wierzbicka and NSM has been mentioned on the mailing list -- almost always by ((Nick Nicholas)): *http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9407/msg00043.html *http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9407/msg00045.html *http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9407/msg00054.html *http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9712/msg00167.html