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Re: On the design of an ideal language

From:Jackson Moore <jacksonmoore@...>
Date:Thursday, May 4, 2006, 4:24
On May 3, 2006, at 12:21 PM, Jim Henry wrote:

> I am inclined to balance part of speech > and semantic category marking against > noise resistance and aim for an optimal > mix of their good qualities, rather than > maximizing one at the expense of the > other.
Fair enough...on second thought, limit cases are an eccentric breed - their value is that they break down in informative ways, so anybody who wanted something they could use at the end of the day would probably avoid them. I am planning an essentially impractical limit- case language that incorporates the full range of grammatical meaning found in natural languages with as much phonological consistency and specialization as possible, but whose lexical meaning is entirely evacuated - thus, "the dog bit a man" and "the bear licked a boy" will be phonologically identical, and unambiguously denote no more than "before now, a specific animate/animal agent performed and completed a discrete action upon a non-specific animate/human/male patient" et cetera. Quite dysfunctional, maybe good for charades...except that I'm not designing the language for fluent speakers, but for non-fluent listeners, the idea being that grammatical paradigms and the relations between them will be as acoustically salient as possible - will be 'transduced' to sound with minimum interference. The only thing that will distinguish it from any conlang with generic roots is that in this case any given portion of phonological space will be monopolized by a single grammatical device (that and the fact that the 'channel' will be an orchestra, not a mouth, making the language purely textual/non-extemporaneous). Of course, limit-case languages could be practical at one remove - languages which are minimum or null in some respect can function as modules which are convoluted with other languages that are well- defined in that respect...so for instance, a null lexicon language could be imported as an affix system to supplement or substitute for the one in effect in given language, or could be supplemented with lexical meaning using any dimension that isn't already utilized - tone, stress, manual signs, eyebrow movements, whatever. Such convolution would probably lead to very inefficient languages, but would also allow for a very facile blending of desirable design features. Jackson