Re: Wordless language (WAS: NonVerbal Conlang?)

And Rosta wrote:
> R A Brown, On 30/06/2006 11:37:
[snip]
>........So my conlang is probably not worth
> considering in any thread at all, unless the thread is about conlangs
> that have been laboured over for decades without yet being published.
I understand this only too well. My own briefscript project has been
labored over since the late 1950s! At last - Jan. 2205 - it has started
to get documented and its phonology has turned out not quite as I
expected. At the moment it's stalled on getting its lexicon together.

> And certainly Eldin is being terribly overoptimistic in thinking it
> reasonable to ask somebody other than me for their views on some
> technical aspect of Livagian...
	:-)

> The relay text Ray finds (and Google finds little else) is in a
> subsequently demolished version of Livagian.
I guess Google finds it because there is little else  ;)

> As for whether Livagian is, as Eldin implies, constituted entirely of
> particles, that's not a claim I've made, and the picture (as of June
> 2006) is as follows.
[interesting stuff snipped]

Thanks - 18 declensions - wow! From that description it seems clear to
me that Livagian cannot be considered 'wordless'.

[snip]

> I think a linguist doing fieldwork on 2006 Livagian would say that it
> has one part of speech and that it is inflected.
If it's inflected then it surely cannot be termed a 'particle', whatever
else it may be.

[snip]

> The orthography has changed since then, and white space interpuncts are
> not used, except, optionally, between sentences.
Right - natlangs have of course been written just like that.

> As for native speakers of Livagian, they are (I declare) conscious of
> morphophonological words, but not of syntactic words. IMO that picture
> is true of natlangs too: the word is a morphophonological entity, not a
> syntactic one.
That's Trask's definition (1), I guess; though he doesn't touch on the
phonological part of it. Anyway, thanks - it seems to clear to me that
Livagian ain't wordless. As I've said before, I just do not see how any
spoken language, or language that could be spoken, can possibly be wordless.

The only possibility of wordlessness might be in multidimensional form
of language. But the more I think about it, the more I become convinced
that the 'wordless language' is as mythical as the unicorn.

--
Ray
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
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