Re: Difficult language ideas

On 9/21/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> > Language-wise, I mean syntactic ambiguity. I'm not trying to eliminate
> > even that, but only to make it unlikely that a given sentence can be
> > parsed in more than one way. The 'Time flies like an arrow' sort of
> > example is mostly what I want to avoid. As for semantics, I also want
> > to make it easy (with as little circumlocution as possible) to clarify
> > meaning.
>
> FWIW that example's not ambiguous when spoken, due to stress patterns.
> Is that sufficient for your purposes? It would also fit your desire
> for minor changes (eg stress) to create major semantic shifts.
Only if you're trying to make it sufficient. At least, that's the case
for me. It works better with plurals, because if there were such
beasts as time flies, I wouldn't say they like 'an arrow' but rather
'arrows'; in that case my stress would be the same whether 'time' is
modifier or noun, though it would be different if it is the verb. To
emphasize, I would exaggerate stress, or pause after either 'time' or
'flies', and that would only happen if I realized that there could be
a misunderstanding beforehand. But not recording certain spoken
features in the written language is one way I had thought of to make
the writing more ambiguous.