CHAT: Parallelism

Has anyone given any thought as to how to construct a parallel language?

Spoken and written language tend to be fairly serial, that is they can only
express one thing at a time. Other things can be hinted at, through
metaphor, connotation, etc., but only one can be explicit. How would it be
possible to construct a language which could be used to explicitly speak
(write, gesture) about two (or more) things simultaneously?

The ideas that I had seemed a little lame... For example one could have two
languages, one in which each word consisted only of vowels, the other in
which each word consisted only of consonants. The latter would be
syllabified, and you could stick any vowel into each syllable. Then, when
speaking, the vowels would say one thing and the consonants another.

A similar way would be to have one language which used certain sounds,
probably front articulations, and another which used back articulations.
They would have to be arranged so that the two did not interfere with each
other. Then you use the two simultaneously. A little difficult, probably...

Looking at the problem in a slightly less practical way, consider this: Look
at language as a means of dealing with abstracted concepts. Without the
constraint of it needing to be written or spoken, how could you design and
distribute these concepts to allow their use in a parallel fashion? (That is
a very open-ended question, I know...) Consider it, for example, as a
language used only for thinking. It removes many of the constraints, but
raises the design standards to a great degree.

Any ideas?

Dan Neilson
nulnulnul@hotmail.com


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