Re: On the design of an ideal language

Jim Henry, On 04/05/2006 15:58:
> On 5/3/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
[...]
>> 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.
Fair point.

>> 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.
I have just remembered also the conlang Lin, designed for maximal concision,
which uses a similar idea: words are monosemous within a semantic field but
polysemous across semantic fields -- 'polymonosemy', one might call it. There
are particles or similar devices that switch the text between semantic fields.
A word has the sense corresponding to the currently switched-on semantic field.
(That, at least, is my understanding of Lin's scheme.)

--And.

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