Re: cell phone friendly conlang

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:31:15 -0500, Vincent Pistelli <pva003@...> wrote:

>With the rise of cell phones, I believe that there should be a cell
>phone friendly language. To make it cell phone friendly the only phonemes
>would be the first letter on each key.
No need for that, you could use predictive text, even if you want to assign
letters to digits per the usual arrangement.

I've noticed before the nice coincidence that the vowel and liquid letters
_a e i l o r u_ are one each on the buttons 2 through 8.  (And, if you've
just finished spelling the first phone of a syllable and it's not /s/, these
are probably the seven most likely continuations in English; which means
that back when telephone exchanges were actually spellings of the
neighbourhood they were for, there was a much better spread than there
might've been.)

This would suggest to me, as a first approximation, a scheme like this.
Syllable structure is C(C)V.  There are two states: expecting a C and
expecting a V.  If you're expecting a V, 23456789 spell _aeiloruy_ where _y_
is either another V or a glide (and maybe you like w better).  If you're
expecting a C, they spell your favourite choice of eight Cs.  In either
case, for the next letter, expect a C if you just got one of _aeiou(y)_ and
a V otherwise.

Alex

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