Re: Parallel Languages

Jim wrote:
<<
The short version:  What you're describing is balderdash, but
suggests a fascinating idea.
 >>

I agree, but not with the idea you had.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-David
*******************************************************************
"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/