Re: your conlang, please? (Rich Aunt gets hold of the Lunatic Survey)

Hi,

On Thu, 1 Oct 1998, Sally Caves wrote:

>                  11) what your conlang is called,
Two conlangs: Lin, and Hambhukringki.

>                  12) what are its unique features, and
In broad outline, Lin is a compact lang, with a compression factor of
about >3.0 wrt English. Ex., "i5o m" means all of '(the) important
agreement is possible'. It has the feature of nonasemy, whereby each word
of the lang has at least 9 meanings (three PoS decked on three
generations). Disambiguations of these meanings at sentence-level is by
the use of 'bi-valent morphemes' or plain 'interfixes', ie., adfixes that
join two words.

As to Hambhukringki, it relies on certain symmetries in semantic space. It
generalizes usual actions and meanings into their symmetric supersets
along more than one axis (space/time/internal-space). At sentence-level
the symmetries are broken through the *interaction* of different words
(rather than modifying a single word depending on its clause-role), with
the result that there are no words that are completely
nouns/verbs/qualities, but words that carry part of these meanings: in
short, fractional PoS!

>                  13) whether you have a website.
yeah, i do! :)

(14)      What would happen if someone got hold of your conlang and
>         vast numbers began using it and speaking it and changing it?
>         Remember the "No Rich Aunt" scenario?  What if she made you
>         a village?
I think that it is unlikely that Lin would change, because it has zero
redundancy. Something like net-Lin is simply unthinkable! :) 'Move a
micron, and you move away a lightyear' is the watchword. To give u an
example:

* h1f a\l
  h-I(1,1)-f-DEFAULT-a-E(1,2)-l
  'happy thoughts foster progress'

but:

* h1f a+l
  h-I(1,1)-f-DEFAULT-a-E(2,1)-l
  'happy thoughts grant permission'

As to my other conlang, H'kringki, I don't know, at least as far as
Earthpeople are concerned. It would be so unintuitive, that they might try
to bend it towards known paradigms, or then again they might not!!

Regards,
skrintha