Re: FINAL QUESTION: your natlangs. Sorry this is the last of the survey...

Sally Caves asked "...whether your interest in inventing languages has some
congruence with your learning or having learned another natural language..."

Yes.  Back in the 1960's, I was in military intelligence.  The U.S. Army
taught me the Czech language, to use me to spy on Czechoslovakia, but I
really worked for the National Security Agency (NSA).

In 1962, some mathematician at NSA "proved" that a "zero-entropy" language
would be theoretically possible.  In other words, if you had such a
language, then, no matter how you jumbled up a sentence's symbols, the
result would be some other sentence that made sense.

There's no such thing as an unbreakable code, but such a language would have
the effect of making even the simplest of codes "unbreakable" because any
would-be code-breaker would never get any result that he could discard as
nonsensical (and hence he would never be able to rule out any possible
notion of how the messages were being encoded).

Needless to say, that idea created quite a commotion in NSA -- especially
among the spies who were linguists -- and probably at least a third of us
linguists (including me) began toying with that idea.

The idea was really pretty silly, because, if you succeeded in creating such
a language, any tiny error that might be made in typing or reading (or
saying or hearing) a sentence could turn it into a completely different (but
still perfectly sensible) sentence.

But knowing that an idea is silly is no reason not to pursue it -- after
all, the basics of chemistry were discovered by alchemists trying to turn
base metals into gold -- so I spent many years trying to discover how a
zero-entropy language might look and act.  And I learned an awful lot about
the nature of language in the process.

A few months ago, I finally decided that I understood language as well as I
was ever going to, and that I should therefore attempt to create a conlang
embodying that understanding.  I am making good progress on this conlang,
and should be ready to unveil it in a month or two.

It is not a zero-entropy language, but it comes about as close to that goal
as any speakable language is likely to ever come.

-- Tommie