Re: English syllable structure (was, for some reason: Re: Llirine: How to creat a language)

 --- Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...> wrote: > Dear
CZS,
> Why don't you post some of your own Constructed
> language? We'd all love to
> see some examples.
> Mike
You mean the constructed language was constructed by
single person or a group. But I can't do it, I have
said I best language must constructed by linguists
from all languages. I only give the theory, and not
sure is it right or wrong. And I put it on:
http://www.geocities.com/intelligent888/ARTICAL.doc
If you can't find it I just put it here see if work.
Su Cheng Zhong


                         Law and Function of All
Languages
                                                 Su
Cheng Zhong


Abstract
     The fatal drawback of English is that by the
increasing of the numerous words, no body can learn a
certain fraction of them during lifetime. The second
problem of English is the thinking speed is not among
the fast one of the world. This article is going to
solve these issues by introduce the ¡®Language Law¡¯.
Once the reform take place, every English speaker¡¯s
vocabulary will increase several times without further
learning, and the thinking speed will be going up too.


Language Law

The question is, why in English the meat of pig we
give a new word call ¡®pork¡¯, yet the meat of donkey
has no such right, we simply call it donkey meat? To
explain this question we must investigate every single
oral action, or as J.R.FIRTH said: ¡®one articulation
type¡¯. We know that the word ¡®pork¡¯ has less mouth
actions than ¡®pig meat¡¯. In fact, the real reason to
create a word ¡®pork¡¯ (or, as it¡¯s a French word we
may say to adopt the word ¡®pork¡¯,) is to reduce the
times of action of mouth. It just like that we change
mathematics as ¡®math¡¯ and gymnastics as ¡®gym¡¯ now.
For the donkey meat, the explanation is that as it is
rarely used, we keep the original form, in order to
save more forms for other use, and save memory. It is
not that we don¡¯t want a word that can substitute
donkey meat but we are lazy.
  There is another question left, I have said ¡®save
memory¡¯ what is the meaning?   Let¡¯s study the two
terms again, when we meet a term as ¡®donkey meat¡¯,
using the old knowledge we know what it is. But for
the ¡®pork¡¯ we have to learn a new spelling form, a
new sound and link it with the meaning of ¡®pig
meat¡¯. If there is only one term like that, it would
be no problem, but if we found in English there are
several hundred thousands word formed like that, the
measurement of learning would be quite important. So
the reason of above question is that we give the
frequent used meanings a new word in order to reduce
the oral actions but at the same time, we must also
increase our remembrances. Suppose a butcher says the
word ¡®pork¡¯ instead ¡®pig meat¡¯, hundred times a
day, these remembrance increasing is worthwhile. But
for a rarely used term as ¡®donkey meat¡¯, it¡¯s no
reason to create a new word and increase our
remembrance.
   It¡¯s a balance between actions of mouth and
remembrance. If we found a new way to solve the
problem that we can reduce the oral actions while
without increase the remembrance would you like to
choice it?
  Let¡¯s have a look such a fact: from computer we
know that although the ¡®Morse code¡¯ have only two
symbols as 0&1, yet it also could represent all the
universe. What if a person can only utter two sounds
A&B, can he represent the world by these two sounds?
Of course he can, the only different is the
representing speed could be very slow. English has
about 400 different sounds (one articulation type),
suppose, in the world there are only 400 different
things need to be represented, the English people
could use each sound to represent one thing, while the
two sounds speaker, some times have to give nine oral
actions for one thing, as the two to power nine is
greater than 400. When English person say: ¡®I¡¯,
correspondently, the two sound speaker perhaps must
say abbabbaaa. If an English person has five oral
actions in one second, the two sounds speaker must
keep up with 45actions. Further more, you may find, to
remember the word abbabbaaa is a job, much harder than
word I. From this example we know that a language has
more different sounds, not only save actions, easy to
remember but exchanging ideas faster. So, with more
different sounds, we can solve the oral
actions¡ªremembrance problem. Suppose English has not
400 but 2000 different sounds that enable the language
use a simple action ¡®pi¡¯ substitute pig, use a
simple action ¡®mi¡¯ substitute meat, so when we say
¡®pimi¡¯ we know what it is without increase the
actions of mouth and remembrance.
    Another benefit of language with more different
sounds is that since the thinking process some wise
like speaking in mind, so a faster spoken language
means faster thinking speed. If we think about the
span of lifetime, We may get the result that one who
speak a language that have more different sounds will
thinking more ideas during life time than those
speaking a language with less different sounds.
    Not only this, the fatal difference is from the
quantity of words. Currently, English has between one
to two millions of words (include scientific words),
suppose a baby, from first day of life, can remember
10 words daily, and never forget them in it¡¯s rest
life, when he is eighty years old, how many words does
he get? 365¡Á80¡Á10=292000, far less than required. In
fact no one can achieve even 292000words in lifetime.
And how many words do we have? There were many
different answers, The Human Communication by Irving
Azzola, said: an educated English speaker at least
must handle seventy thousands of English words.
Another author J.H.Britton write in Language A Text
for Senior Students P9 said: Winston Churchill had
30000words and professor like Haldane can handle 50000
to 60000words. While, in Shakespeare¡¯s time, there
were only 30000 words in English. I believe that¡¯s
the reason of why after Shakespeare, no body can match
him in literature, for the later person need to
remember much more words and has less time to use or
think of them. The Encyclopaedia of Language and
Linguistics, edited by R.E.Asher p1997 said: the words
number of an educated person must between 50000 to
250000,according to this even Churchill and
Shakespeare were illiterate. The more serious problem
is as the human knowledge going up, the number of
English words is going up also. It means the knowledge
of a single person who speaks English will going
narrower to narrower. The only solution is to increase
the number of different sounds.
    How to increase sound number several times? Let¡¯s
study how the ancient Greece increased their sound
numbers based on Phoenician letters. The Phoenician
letters have no vowels, not because they didn¡¯t
pronounce it but they don¡¯t regard it as information
carrier, so in their language, Ma, Me, Mo was same
thing and we say they just got 22 different sounds.
When the Greece learnt the letters, they took a few of
them and add some new letters as vowels. The addition
not just add few sounds but increase the 22 consonant
few times, for they can split the M to Ma, Me, Mo, Mao
etc. Suddenly, the Greece had a language with a sound
number few times larger than Phoenician one. From
common sense we know that a language can detect more
information in the same oral action will be able to
get more privilege. We know, when sound¡¯s number
increase, their thinking speed will increase and the
vocabulary of single person will increase also. This
answered the question that why the ancient Greece
people have such creativities that some body even
believe, all the western culture is but explain what
the ancient Greek thinkers said.
   From this example we know, if we want increase the
sound¡¯s number, the best way is to find out a new
member of sound unit, a totally different idea must be
introduced. ELL page 4233 ¡°The results of a series of
spectrogram-reading experiments conducted in 1978-79
by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
suggest that the acoustic signal contains far richer
phonetic information than previously believed.¡± From
our every day life, we know, when we sing a song, a
single sound Ma could be pronounced dozens ways
according how many scales you take. If we use such
elements carry information, all the above benefit we
can get. Not only the culture will leap, the
vocabulary of each single person who speaks English
will increase several times also. In fact, some
countries in the world have used the technology
already. We call them ¡®tone language¡¯ some languages
even have nine tones, just think about how many
different sounds they have? How fast their thinking
peed would be? In fact it¡¯s not true, most sounds in
tone languages were not employed. The real employed
sounds of tone languages are between one to two
thousands. Even thus, their thinking speed and
vocabulary of single person is larger than English
speaker already.
  For information age, thinking speed and a big
vocabulary are fatal.   ELL P4612£º¡°Codability is a
concept that has appealed to many experimental
psychologists working on short-term memory: the
quantity of material individuals are capable of
retaining accurately in short-term memory is limited,
and different encodings of the same information can
differ in how readily they can be ¡®squeezed in.¡¯ An
early demonstration of this was by S.Smith (cited in
Miller 1956), who trained subjects to recode a list of
binary digits (0s and 1s) into octal (the 0 to 7), so
000 is record as 1, 010 as 2, etc. Subjects so trained
were able to recall accurately much longer sequences
of binary digits than subjects who had not received
this training.
Such a result points to one important general function
of language in thought: recording material in a
compact form enables us to retain more of it in
short-term memory, and any thought processes that
depend on manipulation of such material should
benefit. The details of this idea have been worked out
more fully recently: ¡®working memory¡¯ is the
preferred term for manipulations of material on a
short-term basis, and it has been established that
immediate recall of verbal material is heavily
dependent on the operations of an ¡®articulatory
loop¡¯ in working memory, whose capacity is limited by
how much the subject can say in 1.5-2seconds. If the
material takes longer than 2 seconds to say (because
it contains many syllables or because the subject is
not an agile articulator) then it will not always be
accurately recalled (for a good review, see Baddeley
1986).
   This property of the human memory system has
curious implications for crosscultural intelligent
testing, Many tests of intelligence include as a
component a test of ¡®digit span¡¯ or some similar
measure of immediate recall of unrelated words. Digit
span (how many digits one can reliably recall
immediately after one has heard them) depends on how
fast they can be said. Compared with a monosyllabic
digits speaker, subjects who speak languages with
polysyllabic digits will be able to say fewer digits
in two seconds and thus remember fewer of them. If
this is not taken into account in comparing raw
intelligence test scores across language, the
polysyllabic speaker will seem less intelligent. This
effect was first demonstrated for Welsh and English by
Ellis and Hennelley in 1980, and confirmed in a study
of English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic by
Naveh-Benjamin and Ayres (1986). The results are quite
substantial, with English speakers (mean number of
syllables per digit 1.0, the digit 7 being excluded
from the Naveh-Bebjamin and Ayres study) having a mean
span of 7.21 digits, and Arabic speakers (mean number
of syllables per digit 2.25) having a mean span of
5.77. ¡°
The author is not sure wether it will effect the
thought, he just said: ¡°Wether this early bottleneck
in processing has any implications for more complex
thought processes is not clear: there are no reports
of speakers of a particular language being
particularly disadvantaged in calculation, and it
would be fanciful to suppose that the Arabs developed
algebra because they were having such difficulties
with arithmetic.¡± But in my opinion, it could be
different, just think about the first time A read
7digits, while B read 5digits, yet it not stoped.
After 10 seconds A may read 70, while B read 50, of
course A faster. And any thing when B read one times
maybe A read 1.5 times already and since life keep
going on this ratio always keep going. As for a single
branch of knowledge, it could depend on other things
such as necessary. If we investigate the history we
may find many historians tell us that there are two
mysteries in the histories they could not solve, the
first one is why the ancient Greece had such
creativity that no one does better than them
afterwards. The second one is that why after Yuan
dynasty the Chinese culture was falling down. I
believe, both the mysteries link with the actions of
mouth. First we know from above between Greece and
Phoenician, there was a sudden increasing of sound¡¯s
number, it made the ancient Greece more intelligent
than others. The same thing happened in China, as
Genghis Khan took over China, the Mongolian adopted
Chinese language as the official language, but they
could not pronounce one of the five tones of Chinese
language at that time. The people had to follow their
examples, it means about few hundred sounds lost.
According our discussion, the information exchanging
and thinking speed became slow, so the culture became
falling.  From this discussion, I believe whenever
acceleration took place the creative ability ratio
changed accordingly.
   For the information age, a more serious, or we may
say fatal issue is about how to put a big quantity of
words into a single person¡¯s mind. For as
ELL P4538 said: ¡°S.C.Gilfillan argued that technology
develops through gradual evolution and accretion of
details, and that the idea of a distinct invention is
conceptually ambiguous. Therefore, ¡®invention¡¯ is a
matter of language, not physical reality. ¡°
¡°Ogburn held that the accumulation of inventions
followed an exponential curve, because many new
inventions are mere combinations of preexisting
elements and the more such elements exist the greater
the number of new ones that can be achieved by adding
them together. But the individual human mind is
limited, and thus there is a limit to how many
technical ideas a person can remember.¡± ¡°As
anthropologist Leslie A. White puts it, like all other
aspects of culture, technology depends upon the human
capacity for symbolling. Language, he says,
transformed the nonprogressive, noncumulative tool
process of anthropoids into a cumulative and
progressive process in the human species.¡± P4536
said: ¡°A substantial fraction of all words used in
ordinary speech, and perhaps a majority of all nouns
in modern languages, are technological. That is, they
name elements of tools, machines, chemical processes,
agricultural techniques, transportation systems and
electronic communications network. More than a million
species of animals and plants have been named, but
George Basalla noted that three times as many
inventions have been patented in the United States
alone.¡± ¡°Even under more restricted definitions,
technological terminology constitutes a substantial
portion of lexicon, and the processes by which these
terms emerge present interesting challenges for
linguistics.¡±
 How to remember a huge quantity of words is a fatal
issue for English or we say bottleneck. That is the
topic, we discussed in the first paragraph. If all
English words are pronounced as single sounds, all we
need to remember is just few thousand words. The
following table may explain it. In fact the Chinese
vocabulary was created like this:
First of all, let¡¯s suppose pi=pig, ca=cattle,
she=sheep, hor=horse, don=donkey, de=deer, me=meat,
re=grease, hai=hair, you=young, ma=male, fe=female,
wi=wild, ca=castrate. The question is there are two ca
for cattle and castrate. The Chinese language has four
tones, so the ca could be pronounced in four different
ways and caca can be distinguished from caca. Then we
have this table:
        Pig=pi  Cattle=ca       Sheep=she       Horse=hor       Donkey=don
Deer=de
Meat=me pime    came    sheme   horme   donme   deme
Meat    Pork    beef    mutton                  venison
Grease=re       pire    care    shere   horre   donre   dere
Grease  Lard    tallow  suet
Hair=hai        pihai   cahai   shehai  horhai  donhai  dehai
Hair    Bristle ox hair wool
Young=you       youpi   youca   youshe  youhor  youdon  youde
Young   Piglet  calf    lamb    fawn
Male=ma mapi    maca    mashe   mahor   madon   made
Male    Boar    bull    ram     stallion        jack ass        stag
Female=fe       fepi    feca    feshe   fehor   fedon   fede
Female  Sow     cow     ewe     mare    jenny ass       doe
Wild=wi wipi    wica    wishe   wihor   widon
Wild    Boar    buffalo goat    mustang kiang
Castrate=ca     capi    caca    cashe   cahor   cadon
Castrate        Hog     bullock wether  geld

  Currently, the Chinese language most frequently used
characters are around 4000.  As each character has
just one sound, let¡¯s calculate how many two sounds
or two characters words they can create. Suppose each
character can combine all the 4000 characters the two
sounds words could be 4000¡Á4000=16000000. How many
three sounds words can be created, like
heifer=youfeca? It would be
4000¡Á4000¡Á4000=64000000000. And we know all those
words need not to remember, just combine them
together.

ELL¨D¨D¨D¨DThe Encyclopaedia of Language and
Linguistics, edited by R.E.Asher




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