Re: Hypersimple & Dreadfully Unnatural Grammars

On Tue, Mar 16, 1999 at 02:47:17PM -0500, Edward Heil wrote:
> Ever since I read about Allnoun (http://world.std.com/~tob/allnoun.htm),
> I've wanted to try to mutate it into something more naturalistic,
> especially something without those parentheses.  This is what I came up
> with last weekend:
...
> You can't go more than five levels deep in the language as I've figured
> it out at this point.

I have to state in advance that I do not know anything about allnoun,
but apparently sentences are (something like) nested parenthetical
word clusters. So the only problem you have in order to eliminate
parentheses is to indicate whether you are going up or down one
step. Thus you may easily make your vowel chain a closed loop of a
minimum of 3 vowels, e. g. "a -> e -> i -> a". A structure like

"(b (c (d (f (g) h) j) k) l)"

would thus become something like

"b_a c_e d_i f_a g_e h_a j_i k_e l_a",

where I attach _Vowel to denote the part of the vowel chain that is in
effect for this part of the statement. If you have the more tricky situation
of having to go up several levels of parentheses, e. g.

"(b (c (d (f (g)))) h)"

we would have to introduce some marker to denote the skipped level, so that
we would have something like

"b_a c_e d_i f_a g_e x_a x_i x_e h_a",

where I used "x" for that marker and you could easily find additional
elements that can replace a string of "x"-s. The generalization to
five- (or, indeed: N-) part chains of vowels is trivial, and you
easily see that you now have aleph_0 (cardinal number of a countable
infinite set) levels at your disposal. :)

--

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