Re: CHAT: Parallelism

At 02:20 AM 6/13/99 -0600, Ed Heil wrote:
>David Brin's dolphins speak a language called Trinary, which
>supposedly carries three strands of meaning at once.  He always
>"translates" it as three-line poems.  But he hasn't constructed the
>language.
>
>Somewhere out there on the web is a very good mock scholarly
>description of an alien "quantum" language, where each of the words
>has up to four or five different meanings, and it's not clear which of
>the meanings is intended (the sentence has to be grammatical on all
>levels, I believe) until the end of a sentence, when a "defining" tone
>is given which says which of the meanings each of the preceding
>morphemes had.
>
>The "unused" meanings are supposedly used to convey innuendo and
>overtones, and some are tabooed when used in certain combinations.
>
>I don't think that the author very thoroughly invented this language,
>though, but it's certainly a possible design.
>
Thanks for the comments.  The page is available at

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711/bogomol.html

-- Terry Donnelly