Re: Macrospeak and Microspeak

From: "Jake X" <alwaysawake247@...>

> After lurking for a few days (in other words not proposing a conlang of my
> own), I want to make a proposal. Please note that this is only an
exercize.
> I want to see how well I can pack information into a sentence. So the
first
> of my exercize twin-langs I will call Microspeak (title not important,
maybe
> I'll change them but it's just an exercize....). I have not worked
anything
> out yet, but here's an idea for Microspeak:
>
> She (unmarried girl named Sarah) walks (habitually, without fail) to
school
> (high school).
>
> That project will be to come up with a simple system to cram all that
> information into few words. But I don't expect it to be very learnable.
I'm doing that myself with Tech! We were also discussing an excellent
conlang project from a former member of our list, a language called Lin,
which is designed to "compress" as much information into as few syllables as
possible. It's written in some syllabry based on ASCII or something. Check
the archives for Raymond Brown's recent (as in this month) posts on Lin.

What I'm doing is trying to create a "compressed" language that could pass
for a natlang, so I'm using actual human languages to come up with a
language for a highly-advanced elven race. (Tech is to be somewhat of a
satirical language as well.) I posted a sentence earlier meaning "the coffee
is bitter today", and the first word I remember was |z'mah| meaning "she/it
was bitter". (Tech is written in a as-of-yet uninvented Semitic script I'll
probably base on Syriac and Arabic).

A great model I found for a complex verb structure where all sorts of
grammatical data are crammed into one word is Georgian and its three sister
languages in the Kartvelian or South Caucasian language family. The verb
root can be surrounded by up to ten prefixes and suffixes. Georgian verbs
don't have tenses, they have "screeves", a complex system of tenses,
aspects, voices and what not. The term "screeve" had to be taken from the
Georgian language itself. An extreme example is |dagvalevinebdito| which
translates to "'you would give it to us to drink', he said".

You wanna see for yourself? Go here:
http://www.armazi.demon.co.uk/georgian/grammar.html. Notice that Georgian
"compresses" words phonetically in a way by dropping vowels, and you can get
as many as six initial consonants in a row!

~Danny~

Reply