Re: More thoughts on BrSc orthography & phonology

Ray:
> Comments please.
I find the ideas very engaging, but they also confuse my sense of
what BrSc's goals and priorities are. For instance, the scheme
seems to be getting too baroque for IAL-hood; but at the same time,
any real achievements in brevity are going to require what from
a natlangoid perspective looks like baroqueness. As another
example, the goals of elegant and creative use of the roman
miniscules and of having c. 2000 compoundable roots don't seem to
fall out either from the brevity goal or the IAL goal. Of all the
ideas you're playing around with, I find the brevity one the most
interesting, but as you say, this goal is tempered by others, but
in a way I don't fully grasp.

> I've wondered about 'polysemy' before even coming across Lin, but never in
> my wildest imaginings had I considered enneasemy!  What I had considered
> was using tone, in the manner of Chinese, to distinguish different words
> which would otherwise be pronounced alike; but attractive tho it is (to
> me), I have dismissed it as inappopriate for an IAL.
I would advise serious consideration of Lin-like polysemy. Let me
try to give a concrete (albeit hypothetical example). Suppose every
noun were preceded by a determiner and every verb by an auxiliary.
That would then mean any phonological form assigned to a noun
could also be assigned to a verb. I take advantage of this sort
of scheme in Livagian: since dyadic and triadic predicates (there
are no predicates of higher adicity) must be preceded by an
'auxiliary', while monadic predicates don't, and since auxiliaries
show the adicity of the following predicate, it follows that
there is basically a situation whereby every word form
is trisemous -- it can be a triadic predicate, a dyadic predicate,
or something else. Since no ambiguity results, there is no downside
to this.

> But, using the idea of vowel harmony, I am proposing a 'disemy' (two
> meanings), e.g. {pt} would mean one thing with front vowels and another
> with back vowels.
This does not really seem like disemy to me; if it were disemy, the
dictionary would contain an entry for {pt} that would list two
meanings. But why should the dictionary not simply list separately
pt+fron and pt+back?

---And.

Replies