Re: Parallel Languages

>===== Original Message From Constructed Languages List
<CONLANG@...> =====
>Jim wrote:
><<
>The short version:  What you're describing is balderdash, but
>suggests a fascinating idea.
[ Thanks Jim. :)]


>What I was initially thinking when I read Duke's first e-mail is this.
>Imagine a language you spoke fluently, but which someone else
>did not.  However, what they could do is produce 100% grammatical
>(but perhaps not *sensical*) sentences.  The result is a kind of game,
>or brainstorming method.  By someone putting together totally
>random yet grammatical sentences, it might suggest things to the
>interpreter that they hadn't thought of before.  How?  Well, the
>human brain is powerful, and is constantly looking for patterns
>everywhere.  So if you're stuck while writing a story, or creating
>a language, you could have someone generate such sentences, and
>maybe ideas would come to you.
David, I think you've come close to the purpose Valentin, the creator of the
language, had in mind when he thought the idea up. He was hoping to gather a
group of Mua proficient speakers on line to function as a sort of think tank.
When faced with a problem, professional or personal, a member of this group
could put it to the Mua group. Then the issue could be disscussed in Mua and
thereby provide all kinds of different angles.


>Anyway, what I'm imagining Duke was talking is something like
>the following:
>
>Step 1: Speaker A wishes to convey, "Yesterday, I went to the
>store to pick up some eggs."  A picks out the phonological forms
>necessary to convey this, and produces the utterance.
>
>Step 2: Hearer B hears the phonological utterance exactly, and it
>renders the unambiguous sentence, "Bloodily, she mixed up a
>confrontation to agree with every paradox."
>
>Step 3: Hearer B thinks, "What an odd thing to say...", and replies.
>Back to Step 1.
>
>This obviously doesn't work with English words, but I'm guessing
>it *might* work (though clumsily) in a conlang.
Yes remarks translated from Mua can be strange but usually not as far off as
your "bloody paradox" and as you say earlier, the human brain is a powerful
thing. Speaker A would insist on interpreting speaker B's remarks in the light
of what she herself was talking about. It can seem to be very metaphorical.


>Looking at the little information I found on the Mua site, though,
>it looks like what was going on was different.  Rather, what it
>seems like is that there were some primitives with basic meanings
>(that were all metaphoric [e.g., "aggression" and "male" go together]),
>so that you get a word that's something like "male-fire-big-machine".
>What does that mean?  To an astronomer, maybe a rocket.  To a
>pundit, an opposing political party.  To a baseball player, an automatic
>pitching machine.  Whatever.  Thus, if you have these specifically
>defined words whose meanings differ between groups, the effect
>would (hopefully) be grammatical communication that's probably
>semantically anomalous, and therefore interesting.

Yes. This is what happens. Sometimes the corealations between 'sets' can be
pretty far a part. In the examples that you give in the paragraph above, I
would say these people have wildly divergent sets. But eventually, as you use
the language more, you look at a Mua phrase and see layer upon layer of
meaning. That means that its more likely to understand somebody's idea no
matter how far away from your set from their's is.

>Is that the idea?  Anyway, what was on the site didn't look very...
>umm...  I think I'd need to see it explained more thoroughly with
>a lot more examples.
Valentin used that website as bait. He was hoping to make it look fun and
interest people in learning the language. He would teach it once he got
someone he thought was actually interested. No, Mua was certainly not an
Artlang and there's a lot of work involved. You have to do all the translation
for your own set and its challenging.


>-David
-Duke
>*******************************************************************
>"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
>"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
>
>-Jim Morrison
>
>http://dedalvs.free.fr/
The Keenans
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