Re: Difficult language ideas

Hi Leigh,

Welcome to the list!

What difficult language design goals you've set yourself!  But
luckily, many list members have shared some potentially great ideas
for you to mull over.  I have no great ideas for you here, but would
like to follow up a part of your conversation with H S Teoh:

[Teoh]
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?

[Leigh Richards]
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.

[Teoh]
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.

-------------
[Yahya]
This rings a bell.  My wife and I have, over the course of decades
and quite unintentionally, evolved a private language, based entirely
on the fact that both of us are wont to burst into a phrase from a
song that relates to something that just happened or was just said.

Examples:
1.  Today, we were drinking coffee at the kitchen table, when my wife
picked up the phone to make a call.  I sang "Ghost Busters"; which she
quite naturally and correctly understood to mean "Who ya gunna call?"

2.  She was carrying the vaporiser to be emptied, and spilt a little of
the water.  My saying "Tom Jones" here meant "It's not unusual".  Of
course, on returning home in the car, saying "Tom Jones" means
"[I see] The Green Green Grass of Home".

Other song associations include:
 - "Barbra Streisand" (People ...!);
 - "Beatles" (Help!, or It's Been a Hard day's Night, or (referring to
a particular acquaintance) The Fool on the Hill, or ...)
 - "Stevie Wonder" (Ebony & Ivory)
 - "John Lennon" (Imagine)
 - "The Fonz" (Happy Days)
 - "Vera Lynn" (The White Cliffs of Dover)
 - "[Frank] Sinatra" (I Did it My Way)
 - "Nancy Sinatra" (These Boots are Made for Walking, ie I'm leaving)
 - "[Engelbert] Humperdinck" (Please release me, let me go)
 - "Elvis" (Are You Lonesome Tonight?, or (Don't Step on My) [Blue]
Suede Shoes, or Crying in the Chapel (particularly for the line:
"I searched and I searched but I couldn't find" ), or ...)

But almost anything from shared culture can give rise to some
associations useful for generating unlikely synonyms. Eg, there
are also movie associations:
 - "The Terminator" (I'll Be Back)
 - "[Clint] Eastwood" (Are you feeling lucky?)

and ad associations:
 - "Nike" (Just do it!)
 - "Toyota" (Oh what a feeling)

And although it may not be PC, we still sometimes refer to anorexic
models as "Biafrans".

The songs and singers might be well-known, but if we wanted to be
more private, we could easily choose to have them represent some
of their least-, rather than their best-, known songs.

Many English poets of the 19th Century obscured their meanings
all the time, so much so that their poems became codes that only
the educated could crack, and thus served to maintain class
distinctions.  Even the name of the most commonplace object (or
body part!) would be replaced by some abstruse classical allusion.

Regards,
Yahya

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