Re: CHAT: Hello

 --- Heather Fleming ha tera a:
> > > I'm also helping my friend and co-author develop her conlang for
> > > her conspecies, whose language is completely pitch-based (they
> > > have incredible hearing and their vocal tracts can produce up to
> > > I think 6 tones at a time. Their planet is kind of isolationist
> > > because although their civilization and technology are very
> > > advanced, their culture is completely oral so they have no
> > > written form, and no one offworld can learn to understand or
> > > produce it because they lack the physical capacity, and it's
> > > bloody hard for them to get the hang of phonetic
> > > languages).
And also:

> The unfortunate thing about Solayan is that there's no way to
> represent it other than in translation, lacking a written form or a
> means of transcription. Though I guess one could do something with
> pitches in Hertz or something, so a word made up of, say, four
> pitches would look like [467-80.5-5832-4370]. But I think that would
> even top that "featural code" orthography in terms of sheer ugliness.
> :)
>
> Heather
Surely there must be some way to devise a written form alphabet -
whether in a variant of musical notation, showing the stacked pitches,
or some other way of creating characters to indicate the various
combinations of pitches.  How many distinct pitch contrasts are there?
It does sound like a tough task, though.

Estel

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