Re: Maybe a naive question...

En réponse à Harald Stoiber <hstoiber@...>:

>
> 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.
Well, actually quite easily. At least for me, the phonetics of a language are
the easiest thing to design.  As for efficiency, if you really look at the
amount of ambiguity any sentence has if we put it out of context, you'll
realise that it is not as efficient as you might think. Like the author of the
essays of "Language Miniatures" (the site I directed you to) often says, it's
impressive how much of context is necessary to handle communication between
people, and how much of it is passed silently without people even realising it!

 I agree that redundancy and
> ambuguity are true features of a language. It would be a pity to
> throw them away!
>
I perfectly agree!

> >
> I have read the essay - a great one! And also the other articles on
> the
> site. You gave me lots to read... thank you! :-)))
>
You're welcome. I just found this site while looking for things about clicks
for the thread that came about them, and it's a real goldmine! IMHO we should
add it in the list of the must-reads for conlangers (who is taking care of the
FAQ already?).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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