Re: On the design of an ideal language

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?

>> 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.


> >> 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.


> >> 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?

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).

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