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

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 2:37 PM, deinx nxtxr <deinx.nxtxr@...> wrote:
> This is sounding a bit like the guy on Auxlang that keeps rambling
> on about how English needs tone (allegedly because it would be more
> "efficient") and that it's possible for Chinese to use their
> phonemic tones to speak in a secret code using English.   While it's
> certainly possible for something like that to happen, I would expect
> that people may think something's wrong when the overall tonal
> qualities don't sound quite right.
Sounds like something I'd definitely enjoy (and have considered before
as part of the pkt lang-mod).

However I agree that, unless it's used sparingly or very cleverly,
it'd "sound off". But people wouldn't know *how* for the most part,
let alone be able to analyze it easily, and it would probably still be
perfectly sensible English so long as you don't mess too heavily with
the intonation that we use for pragmatics...

I don't understand what this has to do with our grip-language, though.

- Sai

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