Re: signal and noise in phonologies and scripts

Anton Sherwood <bronto@...> wrote:

> This was my gripe about Janet Kagan's HELLSPARK.  The central character
> is from a trading culture, whose language deliberately uses all the
> phonemes of all known human languages, so that the traders can speak all
> languages without `accent' (phonological contamination).  The noise
> problem is never mentioned.
Something to write into Danny Wier's guestbook ;-)

It has been observed that in natlangs, there is about 50% redundancy
in the number of phonetic features (place and manner of articulation,
voicing, etc.) that are used to distinguish phonemes.  For example,
with six features one could distinguish up to 64 phonemes, but languages
which actually use six distinctive features usually only have about 30
phonemes or so.  The remaining combinations simply don't occur.
English, for example, has /b/, /p/ and /m/, but no /m_h/ (that's a
voiceless /m/).  And so do lots of other languages in the world.
This means that if a listener gets just one feature wrong, chances are
that he ends up with a non-phoneme which he can easily correct
from the context, and doesn't blunder into the other half of a minimal
pair.

> In related news, I've invented a script.
> I don't know how others go about that.  My approach was formal.  I
> wanted to build all the characters out of a small set of features, to
> ensure a family resemblance.
>
> I chose to use connected sets of 6 segments out of these 12:
>          __ __
>         |__|__|
>         |__|__|
Looks like a primitive electronic display device, or a holy or magical
symbol... neat idea to derive characters from such a template.

> This gives about three hundred figures (I've misplaced my notes).
>
>
> But I'm looking for an efficient mathematical way to soften the angles.
> I want to write a program to approximate a given piecewise-linear figure
> such as
>
>         |__|
>            |__|
>
> with analytic functions of
>
>          \______
>          /
>         /
>
> in the complex plane. [mathematical stuff snipped]
What does the last figure represent?

Jörg.
.

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