Re: A gripping language, and a question about suprasegmental analysis (WAS: re: conlanging partners)

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:

> S>Hm. Palm press / lift seems likely to rely significantly on finger-join
> S>leverage. Would this cause noise?
>
> Noise as in interference?  With what?
>
It may be perceived as some sort of finger motion, or interfere with the
perception of actual finger motion (because both sides of the lever will
move - palm being one side, and fulcrum being the finger-join).

Let me give this a shot.  Suppose capital letters are state 1 motions and
> lowercase letters are state 2 motions.  Further suppose the end of the
> transition from state 1 to state 2 feels something like a |z|, and the end
> of the transition from state 2 to state 1 feels like a |Z|.  Then one could
> declare that all words in state 1, resp. 2, gain an initial epenthetic |Z|,
> resp. |z|, to mark the word boundary.
>
> This would work, if the phonetics allow it.  At this point I have the
> feeling pause for word boundary is likely to work fairly well, though.
> (Whether this is efficacious enough I suppose would be determined by the
> shape of a word.  Is there inflection?  &c.)
>
If I understand what you said (please show me at some point), that feels
unnecessarily cumbersome. But maybe not; I suspect I don't really understand
still. :p

In any case, pauses usually work well. Or one could even designate an
explicit boundary phoneme (e.g. pinky press, since it's not very finely
dexterous anyway).

Or take a middle way.  Or, as Sai points out, factor things even further; or
> swing the other way and group things even coarser (I don't know, pretend
> that explicit phonetic sequences are one phoneme?  Probably not sensible,
> but I wonder if it couldn't help the listener in certain ways.  Compare the
> fact that identifying exact pitches is hard, but discrimination of the
> interval between successive notes isn't so much).
>
I don't understand that last bit.

- Sai