Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

--- Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:
> In a message dated 1/8/2004 6:41:57 PM Eastern
> Standard Time,
> elemtilas@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
> >Well, you've lost me!
>
> It seems I muffed that explanation badly.
>
> Let me try again:
>
> Suppose I see an English sentence printed
> without spaces between words.  Why
> is it easy for me to resolve it correctly into
> words?  Because if I
> mis-segment the sequence of letters, I get
> things that aren't English words.
Quite. And if we were as familiar with SOlresol -
or any other conlang - we would be able to do the
same thing.

It would be
> hard to construct many reasonable English
> sentences that would be ambiguous
> in this way, but one example would be
> "Hithere."  That could be either "Hi
> there" or "Hit here".  However, such things are
> rare, because most sequences of
> letters do not constitute English words.
And context is helpful in sorting out which
interpretation to follow.

> Usually, I cannot possibly go wrong in
> segmenting, because there's only one way to do
> it that results in a string of
> legitimate English words.  E.g, consider
> "Iwishihadanelephant."  There is
> only one way to split that into English words:
> "I wish I had an elephant."  There
> is no ambiguity.
>
> However, because there are only 7 notes in
> solresol, it is likely that almost
> every reasonably short sequence of notes
> actually is a solresol word (i.e.,
> has actually been assigned a meaning in
> solresol).  That is,  given the
> sequence of notes "1632337", it is very likely
> that both "163 2337" and "16 323 37"
> (and other segmentations) do consist of actual
> solresol words.  In order to
> decide which is correct, I would then have to
> consider the meanings of the words
> and decide which of the possible sentences was
> sensible.  In English, I don't
> have to go that far.  Generally, only one
> segmentation of a series of letters
> results in a series of real English words.
Like I say, I don't know that much about
Solresol. If so many possibilities exist, that
sounds like a design flaw.

Padraic.


=====
la cieurgeourea provoer mal trasfu ast meiyoer ke 'l andrext ben trasfu.


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