Re: brz reloaded!

Hallo!

R A Brown wrote:

> Hello all!
>
> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
> >
> > Ray and I have recently (and are still) discussing a briefscript/
> > loglang hybrid
>
> On the 25th Sep Jörg wrote:
> "But I think I'll spend some thought on the
> loglang-cum-briefscript-cum-philosophical language based on your brz
> phonology."
>
> I see the 'philosophical' bit has been dropped    :)
>
> The trouble with 'philosophical' languages is that they get into a
> time-lock. The 17th examples of people like Wilkins and Dalgarno embody
> ideas that now seem quaint or just plain erroneous. Okamoto's Babm is
> based on his "discovery of the truth" when he was 40; it embodies his
> own philosophy & will doubtless be seen in centuries to come as stuck
> in the 20th century (Babm can BTW serve as a briefscript).
I am very aware of the problems that infest philosophical language,
and I'd never seriously propose a philosophical language as an IAL
or anything else.  Though ot would be fun to play with one.  I once
had the idea of inventing a *fictional* philosophical language that
I could, for example, contribute to Ill Bethisad; that language
would have failed, but in the world where it is spoken, librarians
may still use it to classify books the same way they use DDC *here*.

> I guess as brz was the result of looking at someone's ideas for a
> 'near-optimal Loglan' we ought to keep with the loglang idea.
>
> that goes under the provisional name `brz' (ask
> > Ray why that name, he suggested it).
>
> It harks back to BrSc, the name given once to my briefscript project on
> the Conlang list & one or two other lists. For a brief time it got
> transmogrified to _brx_; brz is a slight modification of the latter.
I see.

> >Here's a brief sketch of my ideas about it.
> >
> > Phonology
> > ---------
> >
> > This is all Ray's ideas, with my only modifications concerning
> > the orthography.
>  >
> > The language has 16 phonemes, written with the following letters:
>
> I don't so. Surely the language has, at most, only 8 consonant
> _phonemes_ (the status of the 'zero' consonant will be one of those
> jolly things that phonologists can argue about   ;)
Depends on your definition of "phoneme".  There are definitely
seven or eight (depending on whether one counts the zero onset)
consonant *phones*; however, I understand "phonemes" to be the
basic building blocks of the morphemes, and of those there are 16.

> Surely, what we have is a set of eight letters for each of these
> phonemes before a front vowel and a complementary set before back vowels?
>
> Also, you seem to be assuming a "no vowel phoneme" analysis of the
> language (it certainly has 4 _phonetic_ vowels). Personally, I think the
> 4 vowels have phonemic status - they are just not written (a feature not
> unknown in Semitic writing).
Again, depends on the definition and analysis.

> [snip]
>
> >
> > Bits Letter Pronunciation
> >
> > 0000 j      zero followed by a front vowel
>
> Yes, as 0000 must be followed by a front vowel, |j| is much better than
> my |'|
>
> > 0001 g      [k]  followed by a back vowel
>
> I note my use of traditional voiced & voiceless obstruent symbols have
> been switched over. Any particular reason?
Yes.  Voiceless consonants sound "sharper" than their voiced
counterparts (in languages where coda consonants transmogrify into
tones, voiceless consonants give high tone, and voiced consonants
yield low tone), so I found it more appropriate to assign the
"voiceless" letters to the front and the "voiced" letters to the
back vowels.

> > 0010 l      [l]  followed by a front vowel
> > 0011 z      [s]  followed by a back vowel
> > 0100 ñ      [n]  followed by a front vowel
>
> Not very keen on |ñ|. I can see why it has been chosen for /n/ before a
> front vowel. But altho the Spaniards count |ñ| as a separate letter, to
> many non-Spanish speakers, and certainly to anglophones, it is regarded
> as |n| with a diacritic. I really do not want to extend the Roman
> alphabet with diacritics.
I really do not want to introduced capital letters with different
values than their lower-case counterparts.  We should not tread
the Path of the Warrior.

> > 0101 d      [t]  followed by a back vowel
> > 0110 µ      [m]  followed by a front vowel
>
> I note my use of |m| and |µ| are swapped around. Any reason?
I use |n| for [n] followed by a back vowel, so I use |m| for [m]
followed by a back viwel, too.  And |µ| has the association of
a palatalized /m/ to me, though I don't know why.  Perhaps
because its name is often prnounced [mju:] in English in an
attempt to say [my:] (wherein the /m/ is followed by a front vowel).

> > 0111 b      [p]  followed by a back vowel
> > 1000 p      [p]  followed by a front vowel
> > 1001 m      [m]  followed by a back vowel
> > 1010 t      [t]  followed by a front vowel
> > 1011 n      [n]  followed by a back vowel
> > 1100 s      [s]  followed by a front vowel
> > 1101 r      [l]  followed by a back vowel
> > 1110 k      [k]  followed by a front vowel
> > 1111 h      zero followed by a back vowel
> >
> > When looking closer at this chart, you will notice some regularities.
> I hope so  :)
>
> [snip]
>
> > Morphology
> > ----------
> >
> > Morphology of brz is self-segregating, if I made no mistake,
> > at both the morpheme level and the word level.
>
> Probably need to define what 'word' means in brz.
True.  Perhaps it is best to abolish the distinction between
"morpheme level" and "word level" altogether and simply have
a stream of morphemes.

> >The length
> > of a morpheme is indicated by the number of consecutive 1s
> > at the begin of the morpheme, plus one.  (This is the same
> > rule as in Plan B.)  So, the morpheme length can be told
> > by the first phoneme:
> >
> > [chart snup]
> >
> > If the first phoneme of the morpheme is /h/, the sequence of
> > consecutive 1s extends to the next phoneme.  For example, a
> > morpheme beginning with /ht/ is six phonemes long.  This way,
> > you can have infinitely many morphemes.
>
> This certainly tidies up the mistakes in Jeff's Plan B paper.
Yes.

> > A word consists of one root followed by any number of suffixes.
> > There are no prefixes.  I don't know yet if compounding is
> > allowed, but if yes, a special morpheme is inserted between
> > the roots to indicate that the second root belongs to the
> > same word.  Otherwise, a root marks the begin of a new word.
> >
> > Roots are morphemes with at least five phonemes, i.e.,
>
> This surely is going against the concept of a _briefscript_.
True.  I'd indeed put the cutoff lower.  How many grammatical
affixes do we need?  Can we get along with 72?  If yes, anything
with three or more phonemes can be a lexeme.

But for a briefscript, I'd start with more phonemes anyway.
16 phonemes aren't many.  So the briefscript goal goes out of the
window as well, and because I don't really get what all that
loglang fuss is about, brz is a ... what at all is it?

Indeed, my interest in brz has pretty much collapsed in afterthought.
There really isn't much useful I can put it to.  The original design
goals, namely loglang, briefscript and philosophical language, are
all outcrops of the same meme complex according to which natural
human languages are flawed in one way or another, and ought to be
improved.  I think that's bummer.  Human languages are the way they
are because that's the way humans process languages, and loglangs,
briefscripts and philosophical languages run against that and are
thus impractical.  Brz was a nice idea to play with, but I don't
think I can mould it into a conlang that appeals to me.  It is
theoretically elegant, but utterly unnatural (thus running against
my preference for naturalistic languages) and (to me) outright ugly.

> > morphemes beginning with /h/.  Thus, all words begin with
> > a back vowel.
>
> No - I don't like this root-suffix business as presented. I liked Jeff's
> terminology (if I have understood it) where all morphemes are _affixes_.
> There is no root-suffix division. Jeff's terminology suggests to me an
> _incorporating_ morphology which, by cutting down on 'white space',
> could well aid written brevity.
>
> My own gripe is that having talked in terms of "affixes", he then goes
> onto to specify 4 single letter 'affixes' are suffixes which specify the
> precedence of the word to which they are suffixed. The precedence rules
> are needed because in the end Plan B turns out to be just a neat way of
> relexifying English in such a way that it can be readily parsed by a
> computer.    :=(
Yes.

> >
> > Syntax
> > ------
> >
> > The syntax of the language is strictly head-initial, left-branching.
> > A predicate precedes its arguments.  (More to be determined later.)
>
> I would agree that whatever syntax is chosen, it is applied strictly. if
> it is to be a loglang, then
... its syntax ought to be strict.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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