Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

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. 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.  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.

>Of course, I'm not sure why Solresol is
>restricted to three note words either.
It isn't.  I didn't mean to imply that it was.  I just used 3-note sequences
as an example.

Doug

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