Re: Phonologically redundant vocabulary

On 4/13/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Jim Henry writes:
> > On 4/13/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> > > Jim Henry writes:
> >...
> > > > http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/redundancy.htm
> >
> > > Nice stuff. :-)
> > >
> > > At the time of the thread, I was also thinking of a engelang with a
> > > self-regregating morphology plus redundant word building.  These
> > > are nice tools for implementing a beast like that.
> >
> > Cool.  I'm sure our languages will
>
> ??
Oops.... I started to say something like "I'm sure our languages
will be interestingly different in spite of having this one
design principle in common", but didn't finish.

[on higher redundancy requirements for longer words:]
> For simplification of the complexity of the problem, how about using a
> two-level algorithm: first compute a set of syllables with redundancy,
> and then use these syllables as the alphabet for making a word with
> redundancy on the syllables.  You then get a two-level redundancy
> phonology: each pair of syllables is different in the minimum amount
> of redundancy you choose, and each word is redundant wrt. syllables
> used.
>
> E.g. a very simple example:
>
> Step 1:
>   Slot 1: ptk
>   Slot 2: aiu
>   =>
>   pa
>   ti
>   ku
>
> Step 2:
>   Slot 1: pa ti ku
>   Slot 2: pa ti ku
>   =>
>   pati
>   tiku
>   kupa
>
> Of cause, this is not yet self-segregating, but you could change the
> slots to achieve that.
Yes, this is good... It reminds me of an early version of this engelang
that I had almost forgotten about.  I think in that one I had a simple
phonology that generated 36 redundant syllables; 24 of them were
monosyllabic words, 6 were dedicated for use as the first syllable
of disyllabic words, and 6 more as the second syllable of disyllabic
words.  (That still didn't leave room for more than 60 words in the
whole language -- more parsimonious than even Toki Pona --
but in retrospect I reckon the same system could allow arbitrarily
long words if you use any number of syllables from the initial set
followed by one syllable from the final set, or vice versa.  Or maybe
the particular syllable chosen from the initial set tells you how many
syllables to expect to follow?)

I think it was something like:

general syllable shape C(S)V(N)

monosyllabic words: CV, CSVN
initial syllables: CSV
final syllables: CVN

I may well go back and try more permutations of
this scheme, now that I have better scripts.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm