Re: brz reloaded!

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
[Morpheme length determined by leading bits set to 1]
>>I assume by inhuman Patrick means it is not a feature that is ever
>>likely to appear in human natlangs. But that per_se does not rule it out
>>for a loglang, as I understand it (and certainly not for an engelang).
>
>
> Yes.  It is clarly an unnatural feature, but who asks for naturalism
> in a loglang?  Loglangs are _per se_ unnatural.
...so that they could test the WS hypothesis. Yep - loglangs that have
made concessions to natlang usages IMO weaken their credentials as a
loglang. The most obvious example is Voksigid which has gone a long way
in the 'naturalist' direction; indeed, John Cowan said it could not be
classified as a loglang "because it doesn't encode logic: the predicates
are just zero-valence verbs (and in practice they have perfectly
ordinary distinctions between core and peripheral cases).  There's no
machinery for logical conjunctions or quantified variables."

He is correct IMO. Nor, of course, by insisting that all its lexical
morphemes are verbs, does it behave like a natlang. Perhaps that is one
of the reasons the Voksigid group, which met for several months during
1991, never completed the language: it is neither fish nor fowl.

[snip]
>>>Ah, a 'zero vowel', or may _virama_ ?
>>
>>Yes, I have thought further. Fairly obviously 00 must signify the 'zero
>>vowel'. Then, it seems to me, one would have 01 = /u/, 10 = /i/ and 11 =
>>/a/.
>
> Nice.
Possibly - I still have reservations about consonants only.

[snip]
>>The two axes, back-front & high-low, have gone. Does [k] fit in with a
>>syllabary? Have I now got an abugida?
>
>
> Sort of, I'd say.  But then, such terms do not apply easily, because
> unlike in natlangs, the spoken form is a representation of the written
> form here, not the other way 'round.
Not really. The letters were chosen because of the sounds they
represented. The spoken form is a realization of the _bit pattern_, not
of the letters.

[snip]
>>>>So we take a vowel system i,a,u; if two consecutive
>>>>consonants don't give us one of these, it's a word boundary.
>>
>>Morpheme boundary, I think, is what we want.
>
> So we are essentially at my old self-segregation scheme where each
> morpheme begins and ends with a consonant, with no morpheme-internal
> consonant clusters?
'Twould seem so, if we go down this path.

[snip]
>>>There's also the question how the 'zero consonant' is pronounced when
>>>final in such a string.
>>
>>Yep - I still haven't had any bright ideas about that.
>
> Perhaps as a velar nasal?  If /m/ pairs with /p/ and /n/ pairs with
> /t/, it is only logical to have /N/ pairing with /k/.
Then we have a phoneme that may be realized initially as [?], [j] or [w]
and is realized finally as [N]. Or are you suggesting [N] for all
positions? If the latter, then we would have 3 of the four sonorants as
nasals. That would put strong pressure of the sonorant correspond to /s/
being a nasal. Instead of /s/ ~ /l/, we should perhaps then have /c/ ~
/J/. But I am not sure that I like a language where the only consonant
phonemes are: /p/. /t/, /c/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /J/, /N/.

[snip]
>>Also even in brz one can still begin with _any_ consonant letter; it is
>>just that the initial letter constrains the length of the phoneme.
>
> Of the morpheme, of course.
Of course.

[snip]
>>>Meantime, I really need to discipline myself and get in with giving
>>>Piashi a proper vocabulary!
>
> Piashi is definitely something worth working out to more detail.
Thanks. That's a language which seems to be turning out somewhat
differently from what I had expected.

--
Ray
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