Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, January 8, 2004, 2:11 |
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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.
(If you use only a small proportion of possible sequences as actual words,
things are easier, but to "waste" so many of the short sequences would require
you to make some very long words.)
If you propose a musical language with 26 notes instead of 7, then the
problem is considerably reduced -- but other problems are introduced. I'm not sure
I could distinguish that many notes when listening to someone play a musical
conlang.
Doug
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