Re: brz, or Plan B revisited (LONG)

HallO!

R A Brown wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
> >
> > R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> >>Thanks. I was looking again at Jeff's paper last evening. I wonder, in
> >>fact, how the advocates of Loglan and Lojban view his paper. Would they
> >>consider his ideas as outlines for an near-optimal loglang, I wonder.
> >
> >
> > I'd rather guess that they are too entrenched in their "done deals"
> > of loglangs.  After all, Loglan still exists side by side with
> > Lojban.
>
> Yes, I know. That's not really what I meant. The thing is that both
> Loglan & Lojban (one one or two other loglangs, I believe) have a syntax
> based on Clausal Form Logic. Jeff's Plan B does not. In fact it seems to
> have little to do with formal logic and a good deal more to do with
> bit-stream representation and computer parsability.
>
> Does Plan B actually fall into the category of what we normally
> understand by a 'loglang'.
I'd say, not.  Jeff might have intended that, but failed.  His language
is apparently merely a relex of English with an elaborate self-
segregating morphology.  But it is no more a loglang in the Loglan/
Lojban sense than English is.

> [snip]
> >>
> >>(a) appeals to me very much as this is precisely what I have tried to
> >>achieve in the various incarnations of briefscript, BrSc, BrScA, BrScB,
> >>~bax etc - self-segregating morphemes. For that very reason, I am
> >>looking at this closely.
> >
> >
> > There are many ways to achieve self-segregation.
>
> I know - I've spent some 50 years thinking of solutions  :)
>
> > Jeff's solution
> > is elegant and original, but far from the only one.
>
> Nor am I convinced it would be very usable in a 'human-friendly' spoken
> language.
No.  It is way too opaque and creates the impression that the
association
between initial phoneme and morpheme length is arbitrary.

> >A simple
> > self-segregation system I once came up with has morphemes of the
> > following structures:
> >
> > C
> > CVC
> > CVCVC
> > CVCVCVC
> >
> > etc., i.e. alternating consonants and vowels beginning and ending
> > with a consonant.  In this system, all morpheme boundaries are
> > marked by consonant clusters, and every consonant cluster marks
> > a morpheme boundary.  For example, _blaraktalmin_ can only be
> > segmented as b-larak-tal-min.
>
> In Piashi _blaraktalmin_ can only be segmented as b-lar-ak-tal-min  :)
What are Piashi's self-segregation rules?  (I cannot look them up
on your web site because of fatal JavaScript errors.)

> >If every word has to begin with
> > two consonants in a row (i.e., with a C morpheme), word-level
> > self-segregation is also achieved.
>
> Yes, there are, as you say, several methods.
>
> [snip]
>
> >>What Jeff seems to me to have done is to provide a way whereby one may
> >>analyze an English sentence as a binary tree and then generate an
> >>continuous stream of characters (alphabetic, bits or whatever) which
> >>both maintains the same word order as English and unambiguously
> >>represents that tree. Ingenious - but a wee bit anglocentric, methinks.
> >
> >
> > Yes.  Anglocentric is the right word.
> >
> >
> >>But maybe if I consider postfix or prefix order......
> >
> >
> > Go for it!
>
> Tempting - as tho i don't have enough to do already! - but I wonder what
> the purpose of the lang should be....
To have fun designing it ;-)

Greetings,

Jörg.

Reply