Re: Pronouns & sexualit

----- Original Message ----
> From: Sai Emrys <saizai@...>
> ObCL: Have any of you tried intentionally manipulating frame usage in
> your conlangs?
>
> It would be interesting if there were a way to make it impossible to
> have people of differing worldviews blithely talk past each other like
> this, each thinking they were demolishing the other's position yet
> never actually acknowledging or addressing their real, core
> differences because they're so entrenched and assumed in natural
> languages.
>
> - Sai
I'm not entirely sure I understand your comments, probably due to my own lapses.
To provide a safe example so we can avoid NCNC flare-ups, let's say I believe
that scuba-diving is against the will of the FSM, while you don't believe in
the FSM. I understand this much: As long as you don't understand the premises
of the FSM and I don't understand how someone can base opinions on anything
other than the will of the FSM, we'll just talk round and round because we
don't have shared philosophical presuppositions.

To provide a perfectly safe (hopefully!) example, it reminds me of these jokes:

-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand trinary, those
who don't, and those who do but confuse it with binary.
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand Gray code,
those who don't, and those who do but confuse it with trinary or binary.

Is the point that each joke only works if the person understands the underlying
frame? In other words, in your putative system, this joke wouldn't work as a
joke because each sentence would be written in such a way that the frame
(binary, trinary, or Gray code) was established well before the humorous
reveal?

If so, such a writing system seems either blindingly simple or woefully
impossible, depending on how complicated the frame needed to be. For instance,
we could use Gothic script to render conservative opinions and Comic Sans to
render liberal ones, and so on, but doing so would require a small number of
frames, which would in turn lead to schisms within each frame, no?

Am I in the ballpark on this? :D

-- Paul

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