Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

--- Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:
> In a message dated 1/7/2004 8:33:02 PM Eastern
> Standard Time,
> elemtilas@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
> >Howdoyouknowhowtodividethissentence?
>
> That's easy, because there are 26 letters in the
> alphabet and hence (for
> example) 17,576 possible 3-letter sequences.  With
> such a large number of possible
> sequences, most of them will not be actual words, so
> finding word boundaries
> is easy.  With only 7 notes, as in solresol, there
> are only 343 different
> 3-note sequences.  It is likely (though I haven't
> checked) that a very high
> proportion of them will form actual solresol words,
> so division of a long sequence
> into words will be ambiguous.
One solution is to introduce an 8th note that has no
function other than as a word seperator.  We've done
the same thing in English by introducing the character
" " that has that function.  But it would have to be a
blank space, or a silent period.  We could just as
easily use '=' to seperate words.
If=we=did=that=finding=the=ends=of=words=would=still=be=easy.