Polysemy

I'm still pondering on the 'bizarre' scheme I floated on
Nov 8th for BrScB.  As I ponder triconsonant stems and
suffixes/ enclitics,I see problems with the system, 'nifty'
tho it may be for biconsonantal stems.

As you may know, at present I'm proposing using non-consonant
symbols as what Srikanth termed "cements" in his Lin.  One
purpose of the cements was to disambiguate homonyms; you may
recall that he endowed Lin with enneasemy (i.e. a written
word may have nine different meanings!) so the cements are
very necessary.

As BrScB (or BrScA or 'briefscipt' or whatever name its own
name will be) could, in theory (tho probably not in practice),
be a potential IAL, I daren't endow it with enneasemy even to
achieve compactness, which is another of BrSc's aims. (Srikanth,
you may recall, wanted to achieve maximum compactness)

At present BrScB has a modest disemy.

One finds, of course, polysemy of various degrees in natlangs;
but generally it's thought to be a "bad thing" in an IAL.
However, is disemy tolerable?  Ancient Egyptian has, e.g.:
_nb_ = 'all, every' and _nb_ = 'lord';
_sn_ = 'brother' and _sn_ = '(to) kiss' [verb]

Doubtless the vocalization of the apparent homonyms was
different (we just do not know what vocalization the
Egyptians gave).  Would it be tolerable if, say, we
had BrScB* _dm_ = 'lord, master' and _dm_ =  'house',
disambiguated by "cements" so that, e.g.
dm't  /'tEmEti/ = your master
dm-t  /'tOmOtu/ = your house

*This does _not_ mean that _dm_ will actually have either
of these meanings, not that _t_ will mean 'you, your' in the
final version of the language.

Is this modest degree of polysemy tolerable?

Ray
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