Re: CHAT: what fruit bat?

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 12:54:54PM +1100, Tristan Alexander McLeay wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Jan 2002 kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET wrote:
>
> > No pyramids in Tsort afaik, the pyramids are in Djelibeybi ...
>
> Are you saying that Terry is wrong? I was quoting from a book written by
> him.
What I wrote is based on the novels rather than the commentaries which I
haven't read. I haven't quite read all the novels yet, but afaik none of
them give Tsort more than a passing mention. Although when Djelibeybi
vanishes in Pyramids, due to some kind of dimensional rotation, the armies
of Tsort and Ephebe are brought face to face in  a tense stand-off.

> so some of the
> pyramids originally built in Djelibeybi might've moved into Tsort as it
> grew larger.
If you mean that they were built on territory formerly part of Dj. which
later became Tsort, then yes, that's quite possible, although I got the
impression that the vast majority were built along the course of the Djel.

> > Oh, and he should get the prize for the most minimalist of conlangs, should
> > he not? Ook? Eek!
>
> SQUEAK! SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK SQUEAK! ;P
Well, we could get very philosophical here, about the nature of language and
communication and so on. Since _SQUEAK_ has only one token there is no
possibility of contrast and thus no information can be transmitted in the
normal sense. [Lemma - there is no doubt a school of thought that would
contrast SQUEAK! and !SQUEAK (not_squeak)]. To my mind, SQUEAK! is the
equivalent of _om_ or the Taoists' "uncarved block". That is it contains
the totality of the universe, everything that has been, is, will be,
might have been, possibly could be etc etc, in every conceivable and
inconceivable universe. Since SQUEAK! thus says it all, it's the Last Word,
the ultimate conversation stopper. Since it conveys everything, it cannot
semantically reference anything in particular.

With Ook and Eek however, even ignoring possible suprasegmental varients
like Ook?, Ook!, Eek! and so on, or the possibility of compounds like
Ook-ook?, we have a basic binary contrast upon which any degree of
complexity can potentially be built once a set of protocols have been
agreed. In principle the entire corpus of Pratchett, Dickens, Shakespeare
and Didactylos could be coded into Ook-eek and recovered with no loss of
information.

Keith

>
> Tristan

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