Re: CHAT: Parallelism

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.

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Dr.X wrote:

> 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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