Re: A BrSc a?

Ray:
> At 2:16 am +0100 25/4/02, And Rosta wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> >With brevity as the overriding goal, the best option would
> >be the unwritten vowel one. Maybe something like this:
>
> But brevity is _not_ the overriding goal, otherwise I'd probably finish up
> with something very 'Linish'.
I meant 'preeminent', not 'overriding'.

> Lin, of course, does have the 'unwritten
> vowel' which, not surprisingly, is shwa.  Indeed, Dutton made much, tho not
> consistent, use of shwa for single-consonant words.  It was one of things I
> found unattractive about Speedwords.
>
> >aeiou = vowels
> >bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz = consonants
> >all syllables are CV
> >a sixth vowel is unwritten
> >a 22nd consonant (a glottal stop, say) is unwritten
>
> Dutton made us of an "unwritten: consonant to avoid two adjacent vowels; in
> his case he chose [j]
>
> >the unwritten vowel and unwritten consonant cannot occur
> >  adjacent to each other (this would tend to mean that
> >  there would be either no orthographic C-final words
> >  or no orthographic V-initial words)
> >
> >The result makes every combination of letters licit and
> >pronounceable. The phonotactics are an IAL-friendly CV
> >pattern.
>
> While the CV pattern may be IAL-friendly (and all incarnations of BrSc have
> had this pattern), I am not persuaded that all the consonants and the
> 'unwritten' vowel would be 'IAL-friendly' - What will you do with the usual
> 'rogues' {c}, {q} and {x}?  One person on this list has argued strongly in
> the past that the glottal stop is not "IAL-friendly".
That's a separate issue. To maximize brevity, you need to maximize the
number of primitive symbols, and maximize the number of permitted
combinations they occur in. That's my point. How you weigh those
principles against other principles not concerned with brevity is not
something I meant to comment on.

> >There are (22 * 6) -1 = 131 syllables.
>
> Yep - but if brevity were the overriding goal, then surely I'd follow
> Srikanth and use the upper case letters as well, which would give (43 *
> 11)-1 = 472 syllables.
Indeed so. Nonetheless, even if brevity is tempered by other considerations,
the principles I articulated remain valid.

> But the main drawbacks, as I see it, with such a scheme are:
> 1. I must include phonemes which are not "IAL-friendly"
Well then, either scrap the symbols that cannot represent an IAL-friendly
phoneme, or else make the symbols represent an IAL-friendly phoneme.
The other schemes you have been considering don't do any better in this
regard, I think.

> 2. There is no 'self-segregation' of morphemes in such a scheme.
There is no inherent incompatibility between this scheme and having
self-segregation of morphemes. I could come up with several ways
to have self-segregation, as, I'd have thought, could you.

> i.e. pushing brevity to its limits runs contrary to the other two goals of
> BrSc.
>
> That's the challenge of BrSc - to balance the three goals.  :)
I know.

What, to you, is IAL-friendliness? Something that is as easy as possible
for as many as possible? Or would having a 'unique selling point' count
too? (On the grounds that an IAL needs something to make people want
to learn it -- even if in actuality you don't intend for people to learn
it.) If so, then brevity would be a major selling point -- perhaps the
most significant possible selling point (perhaps along with nonambiguity),
so long as brevity is not bought at the price of excessive complexity.

--And.