Re: On the design of an ideal language

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 about /pi/ and /be/?  (voicing
> of the consonant and height of the vowel) or
> /bi/ and /bo:~/ (differing by height, backness,
> roundness, length and nasality)?
>
> It's possible that this principle would lead you
> to ensure that words are highly distinct
> vis-a-vis their consonants, while the vowels
> are phonemic schwa that's realized as this
> or that phonetic vowel depending on the surrounding
> consonants.  That seems wasteful, though.
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.

>> >>> >> 8. Principle of Concision.
>> >>> >> The language should be as concise as possible *on average*. As a
>
>> >> 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.
>
> 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.

2. I try to make as much use as possible of zero marking and phonologically empty words.

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.

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, were it not that other principles of
Livagian's design demand that the phonological shape of stems should be
unconstrained.

--And.

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