Re: Maybe a naive question...

On Sat, 12 Oct 2002 22:24:38 +0200, Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>Well, normally you should do the other way round, but that's not a deadly sin
>either :))) . Since a language is first a spoken reality (its written form is
>only a representation of it), you should first work on the spoken language, and
>then on the written form.
Well, since the written language I devised is soly for writing (a
scripture language, if you like) then I did the easy thing first.
And now for the complicated one... *lol*
The world I am creating also needs a spoken language.

>So the thing would be ambiguous. And so what? Ambiguity is a component of all
>languages, they all have it and even use it (puns exist in all languages in the
>world). So the problem is not that big. If your language doesn't seem to have a
>good way to segregate words in connected speech, unless you're making a logical
>language it's not a problem. As I said, the very notion of "word" is not well
>defined for speech anyway.
You seem to be very right about this. :-)
The notion that came to me about this was: How can I as a conlanger
develop the same practical phonetic decisions to convey meaning as
efficiently as millions of people have done it for several hundred
years in case of a natural language. I agree that redundancy and
ambuguity are true features of a language. It would be a pity to
throw them away!

>I still invite you to read the essay I talked about above. It explains in
>better words what I have clumsily tried to explain here.
>
>Christophe.
>
I have read the essay - a great one! And also the other articles on the
site. You gave me lots to read... thank you! :-)))

Thanks for your eye-opening explanations, cheers,
Harald

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