Re: On the design of an ideal language

[re-sent rejected posting:]

> Jim Henry, On 01/05/2006 23:52:
>> On 5/1/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
>>> Jim Henry, On 01/05/2006 21:52:
>>
>>> > Actually, I suspect that even in the least-noisy real-world
>>> > conditions you would still need a lot more redundancy
>>> > than Sai seems to allow for (he appears to throw out a
>>> > ballpark figure of 1% of unused space).
>>
>>> This sounds like an additional principle, a Principle of Redundancy,
>>> which might be split into two, a Principle of Noise Resistance, and a
>>> Principle of Lacuna Resistance, the latter having to do with how much
>>> can be unambiguously recovered from a fragmentary text. For me, I
>>> confine the operations of the Principle of Noise Resistance strictly
>>> to the level of phonetic realization, and eschew the Principle of
>>> Lacuna Resistance altogether.
>>
>> Can you elaborate on how your conlang(s) manage
>> noise resistance at the level of phonetic realization?
>
> Simply by making sure that the phonetic realizations of contrasting
> phonemes or phonological strings are sufficiently distinct acoustically
> in the mouth of an averagely lazy speaker. I base this on personal
> judgement here, not on facts about phonetics.
> For example, in my strategy I might have /i/ and /E/ but no /e/. In your
> strategy, you might have all three, but have a rule that /e/ blocks /i/
> and /E/, and /i/ and /E/ block /e/. Potentially the two strategies end
> up with comparable levels of redundancy.
>
>>>> My engelang is
>>> > designed so that no two morphemes differ by
>>> > less than two phonemes.  I may back off from this extreme
>>> > redundancy in a later revision -- for instance, perhaps
>>> > no two morphemes *in the same distributional category*
>>> > will differ by less than two distinctive features.  But in any
>>> > case some criterion for a minimum degree of redundancy
>>> > will figure in any future phase of this engelang.
>>
>>> On the matter of redundancy in your conlang, not only does it strike
>>> me as odd to seek redundancy at the phonological rather than phonetic
>>> level, but it also seems strange to treat all phonemes alike. It
>>> seems moderately reasonable that, say, a word BA should block MA, but
>>> very strange that BA should block BI.
>>
>> Yes, it would probably be better to express this criterion in terms
>> of distinctive features rather than whole phonemes.  But I'm
>> tring out the two-phonemes-different criterion in phase 1
>> and probably phase 2.
>>
>> Another possibility is that all phonemes in the phoneme
>> inventory should differ by at least two distinctive features.
>> But this reduces the phoneme inventory to such an extent
>> that, if combined with redundancy at a higher level as well,
>> it reduces the number of monosyllabic words available to a
>> tiny handful.  If used *instead* of higher-level redundancy
>> it's less restrictive, but still a bit problematic.
>
> I would advocate relying on just the contrast in at least two
> distinctive features, and applying it just to consonants.
>
>>> >> 7. Principle of Semantic Conservation
>>> >> "There should be no such thing as a "nonsense" or "incorrect"
>>> phrase."
>>> >
>>> > Paul Bennett has already said plenty about the problems
>>> > with this.
>>>
>>> Paul misunderstood. See my reply to him.
>>
>> Did you reply to Paul on the list with the same subject line?
>> I haven't seen any reply by you to Paul on the list.
>
> Apparently it went just to him. I have re-sent to the list.
>
>>> >> 8. Principle of Concision.
>>> >> The language should be as concise as possible *on average*. As a
>>> >> benchmark, it should be able to achieve the average concision of the
>>> >> concisest natlang, without compromising the Principle of Desired
>>> >
>>> > This seems to suggest a high phonological density -- a large
>>> > phoneme inventory and phonotactics that allow a large number
>>> > of possible syllables.
>>>
>>> Yes, but also a design that allows things to be said in the smallest
>>> possible number of syllables.
>>
>> A la Ithkuil, perhaps -- with some of the most frequenly used
>> inflectional categories marked by mutation rather than agglutination,
>> or fusional rather than separable inflections?
>
> Yes. And trying to maximize the use of zero marking in contexts where it
> is unambiguously recoverable. And generally making sure that high
> frequency meanings can be expressed concisely, regardless of their
> semantic complexity.
>
> (I should confess that, rather gallingly, the recent introduction of a
> beautiful new syntax in Livagian has resulted in average syllable length
> per word increasing drastically -- maybe up to 100% -- due to the
> greater need for inflections. So I would not claim that Livagian has
> succeeded in being conspicuously concise. But I would hubristically
> claim that it is probably fairly concise in comparison to any other
> human-speakable conlang that can unambiguously encode any proposition
> while still allowing maximally free word order.)
>
>> I suspect that my current engelang may evolve in that direction
>> from its isolating grammar in phase 1.  The most common
>> two-word phrases being replaced by new monosyllabic
>> words in the next phase, the isolated grammatical particles
>> would "fuse" with the words they occur most frequently
>> in connection with (though still having a stand-alone form
>> for use with less common words).
>
> My conlanging experience is that such 'string substitution' devices are
> less effective than alternatives.
>
> --And.