Re: Star Trek conlangs besides Klingon and Romulan

Kristian Jensen wrote:
> Depending on how fast these telepathic messages are transfered, I
> was thinking: what about having _some_ "morphemes" or "phonemes"
> transfered telepathically. If the transfer is instantaneous, then
> you can have a series of telepathic elements supplementing the
> phonology. This will probably have to operate on a suprasegmental
> level though. If the transfer is a bit slower, then you can have
> some grammatical elements transfered telepathically. Or maybe a
> combination of the two. Lets call all these telepathemes. One might
> even imagine that Betazoids who haven't reached puberty speak what
> would be considered baby language in that the language would be
> incomplete without these telepathemes. Thus, all human languages
> would be baby languages to these Betazoids in that they completely
> lack telepathemes.
Hmm, maybe.  I suspect that it would be a transference of morphemes,
rather than of phonemes.  Actually, since there's no restriction due to
phonology, their might be more morphemes in teh telepathic language,
hence less ambiguity, more clarity, than in the spoken language.  That
is, the telepathic language wouldn't have homophones, and might very
well make distinctions between different senses of a given word -
perhaps "over" the word.  That is, there might be two or three levels to
the telepathy, one level would contain morphemes identical to the spoken
language's, except that homophones are, perhaps, distinguished.  The
second level might contain extra information about the morphemes, and
the third level might contain gramatical info, disambiguating structural
ambiguity, such as the "old men and women" example, that level would
distinguish between "(old men) and women" and "old (men and women)".