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

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 11:48:41AM -0800, Sai Emrys wrote:
> 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.
I think the idea is that it would be difficult to keep inconspicuous. I mean,
holding hands is all well and good, but if said hands are moving or twitching
visibly, people are apt to think that you're not quite sane, or at least a
little bit nervous.

--
Arnt Richard Johansen                                http://arj.nvg.org/
On the Semantic Web, it's too hard to prove you're not a dog. --Bill de hÓra