Re: On the design of an ideal language

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