Re: Is there any derivatives of Heinlein's "gulf" language speedtalk?

On Sat, 9 Jul 2005 19:55:46 -0700, Joseph B. <darkmoonman@...> wrote:
>
> (someone wrote)
> > And on the other hand, even fictional languages are usually
> > imagined by their inventors to be actually used by some sort
> > of (fictional) people, so practicality matters in that trade as
> > well, in some way.
>
> Perhaps only if the fictional speakers are limited to being Homo sapiens
> sapiens. Heinlein's Speedtalk is limited to humans, but speedtalk needn't
> be. (see my prior paragraph).
I'd like to mention that Heinlein had his Speedtalk spoken only by certain
superhumans with special training, not by ordinary humans.

And while I'm on the subject of Speedtalk, only the *basic* vocabulary was
closed-class:

#     An economical language cannot be limited to a
# thousand words; although almost every idea can be
# expressed somehow in a short vocabulary, higher
# orders of abstraction are convenient. For technical
# words Speedtalk employed an *open expansion* of sixty
# of the thousand-odd phonetic letters.

(from _Assignment in Eternity_; emphasis mine)

Jeff