espo ipod feed, more on learning espo, on colour names

http://web.mac.com/sylvanzaft/Esploranto/Esperanto-Lecionoj/Entries/2008/3/5_Elements_of_Esperanto_11._The_-i_ending..html

D: first what I DO like.
- The verbs for know (a fact), to be acquainted with, and to opine are useful.
But then, we have those in English too. Most people won't admit that their opinions are not fact.
...
now the rest
- There are THREE words for magazine. That is as bad as English!
(gazeto, magazine, revuo)
- Roots are not used methodically.
E.g. book is libro. One would think that a library would be book-place, or libr-ul-o.
Nope. It's biblioteko. Why wouldn't we use libro, librulo, librulisto?
This puts a strain on the learner memorizing basic vocabulary.
- Luxurious is luksa. Sometimes, Big "Z" (Zamenhof) applies a Volapuk-like approach to shortening words. Sometimes they get longer (see historio). No rhyme or reason.
-Voice and voiceless pairs get swapped for no apparent reason.
Dropping a consonant creates more false friends/cognates!

Jacket is jako, not j^ako. It sounds like G not J. Why?!
State is s^tato, not stato. It sounds SH not S. Why?
Drink is trinkas. And so on.

D: unlike Decimese, which has strict rules for voiced/voiceless consonant pairs, depending on whether the letter is at the word start or not, there is no methodology to shifting phonemes with Espo.

If the point of a European-derived vocabulary is ease of learning and word recognition, then these phoneme shifts are downright pernicious.

I get the impression he was more visual than auditory in his thoughts.
Words try to look similar on the page, but this often distorts the sound considerably from an original European word.

http://www.esperanto-panorama.net/vortaro/eoen.htm
D: see if you cannot find a few bewildering words from an expansive Espo word list.

Akilo Achilles
akiltendeno Achilles' tendon

D: reference to obscure mythical figures and assuming an organ-feeling link is opaque to cultural outsiders.
Koro -heart, kora-cordial.
So a user is to just know that hearty/ish/esque is supposed to mean a certain social behavior.

All the bones in limbs could have been described by 6 iterations, right to fingertips.

Language learners want to be able to start communicating with as little rote learning of vocabulary as possible. English is rather good at this, as it is rich in "metonyms" - coverterms like "house" or "clothes", usable as stand-ins for more specialised terms like "palace" or "sou'wester" as well as in self-explanatory compound words like "treehouse" or "nightclothes".

D: from Ranto.
Metonyms are something that a taxonomic philosophical language can do well.
Thing - living thing... animal... mammal... ape... human!
One could always then compound as required from an array of descriptor words.
think(ing) ape.
Oh look - homo ... sapiens!

http://www.geocities.com/midimagic@sbcglobal.net/pricol.htm
D: well-thought out site.
After all, there is no need to adhere to English colour-naming conventions.
Nice observation, that there are effectively THREE sets of primary colours.

OR we could have less colours.
After all, if our photoreceptors see red, green and blue, then just having three makes some sense.
Purple could be red-blue. And so on.

Apparently we can detect 10 million colours, when compared side by side.
I suspect women can see more, since the 2 X chromosomes allow 2 forms of one colour.
Hmm, does that mean they could have a set of each of the 3 photoreceptors?
A Decimese math basis, with magntitudes of 10 expressing increasing nuance would work.

http://www.medianet.pl/~andrew/ygyde/ygyde.htm
D: interesting take on colour.

D: I was thinking a more math-y basis.
I.e. 1 to 7. Possible half/quarters would suffice for daily colours.
Visible light would be um, energy tier 4?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
Radio-Microwave-IR - visible ...
Infrared means below red.
Note the plus/minus 3 from visible light implicit in the system. That could be used.