Re: Case

>From: Irina Rempt-Drijfhout <ira@...>
>Subject:      Re: Case
>
>On Sun, 11 Jul 1999, Gerald Koenig wrote:
>
>> Finally, a conlang expression shorter than English.
>
>May I refer you to the full text of Grandpa and the Dragon:
>
>  http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/valdyas/taal/dragon.html
Well I took a mini tour of the land of valdyas and I am blown away by
the integrity and beauty of it. I started a sylable count on the dragon
tale and wearied of it, then I just counted two stanzas of the 4
invocations, which remind me of the song lyrics of english which are so
difficult to equal for succinctness in a conlang. I came up with 63
sylables for valdyas and 59 for english; hardly a valid sample, but
still it's the best I've seen for a conlang. With the vector tense
system I have been able to shave sylables here and there by using
monosylabic tense and modal words that contract; but NGL as a whole
seems not so compact as valdyas or english. Personally I believe there
is only maybe 5-15% improvement possible in a tense system over the
English sylable counts, while still conveying the same information. It
gets down to one morpheme one infon.


Jerry

>
>
>   Irina
>
>            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
>                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
>       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
>    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)
>