Re: On the design of an ideal language

On 5/3/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
> Jim Henry, On 03/05/2006 17:21:
> > On 5/2/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
> [...]
> >> > I would advocate relying on just the contrast in at least two
> >> > distinctive features, and applying it just to consonants.
> >
> > So, how and why apply it only to consonants?
> > Do you mean that /pi/ and /po/ should
> > not be considered sufficiently distinct because
> > both of the differing distinctive features (height
> > and backness) are in the vowel, while /pi/ and
> > /mi/ would be distinct enough (manner of articulation
> > and voicing)?  ...............
> What I meant was that you'd have /p/ and /m/,
>but not /b/. But /i/ and /e/ would both be fine,
>even though they differ only in height, not
>in roundness or backness. This is because the
> acoustic differences between vowels are less
>vulnerable to noise.
That makes a fair bit of sense.  It has the advantage
that, having developed a phoneme inventory
with a high degree of inherent redundancy,
you can then make up words by hand without
having to check them against all other words,
as my other schemes require.  But it seems that
it would result in in a less variegated language
due to its smaller phoneme inventory.  My
systems allow a language to use /p/, /b/, /f/, /v/,
and /m/ and still (by ensuring no two of them
ever occur in the same slot in otherwise identical
words) have a high degree of noise resistance.


> >> > My conlanging experience is that such 'string substitution' devices are
> >> > less effective than alternatives.
> >
> > Alternatives such as...?  Fusional marking
> > of the most common categories?
>
> Fusion, yes, but also:
>
> 1. Suppose you have free word order, allowing both "big number" and "number
> big". These should both be abbreviable to "many", And both "very big number"
> and "number very big" should be abbreviable to "very many", say. So here the
> abbreviation is not a simple matter of string substitution.
Yes, this makes sense.  I'm working on an improvement
to my frequency analysis script that will look for
patterns or templates -- it won't just count instances
of exact phrases like "word1 word2 word3" but also
"word1 * word3" (those words with any word between
them).  Word order isn't free enough in phase 1
to be worth writing a scipt to add up the counts of
"word1 word2" with those of "word2 word1" though.

> 2. I try to make as much use as possible of zero marking and phonologically empty words.
I should probably do more of that; making the
absolutive case nouns and intransitive
verbs zero-marked would save a fair number of
syllables over phase 1.  And in a transitive
sentence maybe one has to mark the verb
transitive, or mark its first argument ergative,
but need not do both...?

> 3. In grammatical environments where only a limited subset of vocables can
> occur, phonological forms can be locally recycled to assign shorter
> allomorphs to the words that can occur in that environment. For example the
> environment "to the power of __" allows only a number to fill the gap, so
> numbers could have one-segment allomorphs in that environment. Or suppose
> that "very __" can only be followed by an adjective. In that case, "very
> manly", "very educational" could be shortened to "very man", "very
> education", stripping off the redundant adjectival morphemes.
This seems like a cool idea in general, though
I'm not sure it would fit well with the design of my
engelang.

> 4. At least one incarnation of Rick Morneau's conlang (of perpetually changing
> name) had a scheme in which stems are composed of two morphemes, an initial
> morpheme (IM) and a final morpheme (FM) [this is all a reconstruction from
> vague memory]. Once IM34+FM73 has occurred in the discourse, IM34 when not
> followed by a FM is equivalent to IM34+FM73.
>This is a neat idea, and I would have appropriated it for Livagian, ........
That is rather spiffy.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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