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Re: Difficult language ideas

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 19, 2006, 22:51
On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 05:32:04PM -0400, Leigh Richards wrote:
[...]
> On 9/19/06, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote: > >As for small changes having large impact on the meaning, maybe > >introduce a lot of idioms and idiosyncrasies which requires a lot of > >cultural background to correctly infer the meaning of? > > Hmm. That gives me an idea. It isn't a language likely to develop many > idioms, but it could very well have taken idioms from various > languages throughout the years and turned them to its own purposes. I > like that.
OK. But based on what you wrote, it seems that the speakers of your language are out to deliberately obfuscate their speech (or at least raise the barrier to learning as much as they can). I think the idioms idea is still applicable: they can take advantage of experiences or knowledge privy to the "in-crowd", even if they don't have a rich cultural heritage as such---e.g., if they are being persecuted, there may be stories or rumors passed between them, with a mutual understanding on the "actual" significance of the events (as interpreted by one of their own), such that instead of describing something explicitly, they refer to said events in some way that seems meaningless or even completely the opposite to the outsider. You could even turn the names of such events into verbs or adjectives, or something else (this is actually attested in natlangs). An outsider would recognize the reference to the event, but have no idea what it might denote when used in that way. [...]
> >What are some of the ideas you have? It'll be fun to discuss them. > > I'm still in the brainstorming phase, and my ideas have been pretty > general so far. > > As far as phonology, there will be sounds unused and/or non-phonemic > in the normal languages, maybe some complex rules for sandhi, possibly > overlapping to an extent. I haven't thought it out, but there's > something about Aymara's vowel elision that wants me to work it in in > a non-intuitive way.
Complex sandhi can significantly obfuscate a language to non-native speakers. Even better if the result of the sandhi looks superficially the same as another completely unrelated utterance. E.g., off the top of my head, ze + bafa + vor -> zi bofa mor, but 'zi', 'bofa', and 'mor' are themselves actual words with meanings completely unrelated to the first phrase (when they are intended, the sandhi turns them into something else, like 'ze mofa bor'). [...]
> There will probably be deliberate obfuscations too. They don't want > people to know what they're saying unless they already know the > language. Idioms translated literally from other languages will work > well here. Perhaps certain things that always depend on previous > context, and others that can never do so.
Context is a powerful tool for obfuscation, when used correctly. :-) The use of idioms and such can be understood as the sharing of a large amount of static context. Additional obfuscation can come about by also taking advantage of dynamic context. Yet another example off the top of my head: say there are two adjectives, mara and tyona, that mean exactly the same thing, except that mara implies a congenial tone and tyona implies a hostile tone, and this implication causes another word in subsequent conversation, say huftan, to mean opposite things. Or, the use of one or the other constrains the set of adjectives that can be used in subsequent discourse, so that if I described something as 'mara', then I have to use 'huftan' later instead of 'para', which goes with 'tyona'. If I used the wrong word, I'd still be understood, but would immediately stick out like a sore thumb ("Aha! He swapped his adjectives: foreigner!"). Think of it as cross-clausal harmony, if you will.
> On a similar note, the writing system will be deliberately ambiguous, > and take a lot of context to even begin to understand.
[...] Maybe even use implied context to determine what a text means: say the mapping from language to writing is not 1-to-1, so that, given a piece of text, it can be read in several ways, and by itself you have no way of determining which version was intended, unless you knew something about the speakers that most foreigners don't know. A simple natlang example is irony: without knowing that something was meant ironically, it could be completely misinterpreted. Now make this an integral part of your writing, and it becomes extremely difficult to interpret to non-natives. T -- Latin's a dead language, as dead as can be; it killed off all the Romans, and now it's killing me! -- Schoolboy