Re: synthesis index (was: Of of)

* Yahya Abdal-Aziz said on 2006-04-04 08:57:29 +0200
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2006 Peter Bleackley wrote:
> > A little background to this - at some point I'm thinking of translating a
> > lengthy text (most probably Tam Lin) into a isolating conlang. I will then
> > use a computer program to automatically fuse together the most commonly
> > occurring pairs of words, thus gradually increasing the synthesis index,
/../
>
> Well, I hadn't heard of the "synthesis index" before, so did a google
> for it which returned thousands of (mostly chemical) results, but very
> few to do with linguistics.  One of the few was Bickell & Nicholls,
> Typological Enclaves, at:
> http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp/download/enclaves@ALT5-2003BB-JN.pdf
Now this was a very, very interesting presentation! Ignore the
synthesis index stuff, it's about how language "trends" spread, and had
some examples of weird stuff that I hadn't seen before.

So, are our conlangs like the enclaves or like the area standard?


t.

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