Re: TECH: Auto-Segmenting Engelang (was REQUEST: Engelang?)

On Tue, 31 May 2005 01:58:42 -0700, Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:

>Have you read RAM's part of LSoaMTI that deals with this? His solution
>is basically one of phonotactics, IIRC.
>
> - Sai
Yes I have.  I'm not thinking along exactly the same lines as him, though,
because it seems like he's looking for an ideal "machine-translation
interlingua".  Furthermore, it seems he concentrates almost entirely on
written language, not spoken.  I want to do more with the spoken form of
the language, because it's primal.  So I plan to consider intonation,
prosody, stress, emphasis, etc.

It seems to me that natural languages try to be autosegmenting but
ultimately can't, because languages change over time.  I guess a conlang
doesn't have to change, though... :P

Some interesting questions with autosegmentation are:
- How much inflection can be used?
- How much inflection *should* be used?
- Are there any syntactic forms, etc. that are inherently better suited for
autosegmentation?
- Is the simplest and/or best way to just have an isolating language with
anaylitic constructions and transparent compounding?

- Rob