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Re: Logical?

From:Kala Tunu <kalatunu@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 12, 2002, 5:18
OBConlang:
checking Langmaker today--a great site by now!--i read the Viko grammar
http://www.geocities.com/vixcafe/viko.html
his inventor describes it as "tropicalism" and refers to Toki Pona
http://www.tokipona.org/intro.asp.
i find "tropicalism" (vaguely reminiscent to Gilberto Gil) is a great definition
fitting my conlang as well (wishing i could build the same kind of nice-looking
webpage).

And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:
>>>
As you concede, natural languages may have phonologies that make word boundaries easier to determine (by means of stress placement, final obstruent devoicing, phonologically unique suffixes, etc.), and so drastically reduce the amount of ambiguity that causes communication problems. But afaik (& I may be wrong) no natlang has completely self-segregating words. <<< sure, i would expect confusion to arise with strict CV-patterned langs most of whose CV combinations stand as potential, valid, independent words. some minimalistic conlangs like Viko would be confusing were it not for the words to be of various shapes, and sometimes deliciously long like "kokipapo" meaning "man" > posoyo kokipapo "sea man" = sailor. reversely i can't remember being confused with german or indonesian. i guess that's why Lojban makes clustering word patterns like CVCCV or features "pause" as John Cowan wrote it (i can' check though, because i'm not willing to BUY a conlang grammar!). it looks a good strategy when you want to absorb plenty of loanwords because i find it easier to add another consonant into a CVCV loanword than taking one out of a CVCCV. Re. natlangs, don't you think that in a way chinese words are kind of selfsegregating? although i (maybe wrongly) think that tones and grammatical boundaries would not be obvious for students from the little chinese i've tried. the strict CV philosophical conlang Ibubo basically works like Tunu, artificially alternating vowels and consonants to tell words and grammatical boundaries: utopia rule! hehe :-)
>>>
In the case of Livagian, it is trivially easy to determine roughly where word boundaries are, but more complex rules are need to determine exactly where they are <<< this sounds interesting but don't understand it. any example? Mathias http://takatunu.free.fr/tunugram.htm

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John Cowan <jcowan@...>