Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

Gary makes the good point, and I obviously agree with
his direction toward conceptual symbolism. But the
simply efficiency of using sounds to make sentences,
as opposed to characters, must be understood. Of
course everything is a tradeoff. What may work for the
task of spanning languages, may wind up being useless
for the basic need to use it regularly. The task of
ordering fried chicken is generally done with the same
tool that will also consume it - the tendency is
toward dual-use and efficiency. ;)

The visual language project Ive been tinkering with
(mostly offline) sort of revealed to me a truth that
should it or something like it ever take off (become
widely used) then a phonetic derivitive would
naturally result - as long as the process was
interactive and evolving, the words would default to
their most efficient terms accross languages.

"Picto"langs or conceptual symbolic languages, despite
their inefficiency (you need a pencil and paper - not
just a larynx) will tend to default to an alphabet, as
the language becomes unified.  Of course, this might
only be the case if additional incentives are put in
place to encourage the use of the common language, but
the tednency is natural.

Lastly, I dont see conlangs as being waste of time -
they simply arent serious pursuits for creating an
international auxlang.  Conlangs are a pastime, (like
phonetics is a rather blech! "science") for those
talented in the skills of mouth, who find sounds and
their arrangements interesting to tinker with.  That
said, I cant claim to know that pictolangs are any
more serious - at least not until they can be proven
more efficient to use.

-Steven Cooney
www.symbolwiki.org/index.php?title=User:KuniShiro







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