At 7:15 pm +0100 20/4/02, And Rosta wrote:
>Ray:
[snip]
>> Yes, but the two goals of (i) brevity (using the Roman script) and (ii)
>> IAL-hood were those of Reginald Dutton when he designed and developed
>> Speedwords. It was as a result of dissatisfaction with his solution that
>> work on BrSc began. There clearly has to be compromise and trade off
>> between the two goals - that's the challenge.
>
>Key things to maximize brevity:
>
>(1) Maximize the combinatorial symbols.
> -- but here for IAL reasons you're choosing c. 26 letters
>(2) Minimize combinatorial restrictions on basic symbols.
>(3) Maximize homonymy.
>(4) Make relative length reflect relative frequency.
(4) is something that Dutton consciously attempted to do. He used
frequency list drawn up by Professor Ernest Horn of Iowa University.
[snip]
>
>The crucial issue is whether the element that distinguishes the polysemes/
>homonyms from one another must be marked. The Lin A/N/V distinction is
>not marked; it is recovered from grammatical context.
It's partly marked by cements also. If two words are bound by an internal
cement, the first must be a qualifier (adjective/adverb) and the second
must be a noun or verb. If they are bound by an external cement we have
either N+V or V+N according to position.
But the difference between a word with same spelling but different meaning
according to whether it's used as a noun or verb seems to me analogous to
the English {sow}
a) noun /s{w/ = 'female pig'
b) verb /s@w/ = 'to scatter seed', 'to plant by scattering seeds'
We'd normally consider these as two separate words, surely?
>The 1/2/3 distinction
>is marked, by cements, tho I have a vague memory of Skrintha writing
>about toggles that would set everything to 1 until toggled to 2 or 3,
>and so on.
The toggles are explained in one of the set of notes I mailed. The toggles
produce words which are pronounced differently.
>In partial contrast the BrSc distinguishers +front and +back
>would always be marked.
True.
Ray.
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