Re: OT: PL/I was Re: Please welcome . . .

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:47:56AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
> An interesting idea.  I did try, about 3 or 4 years
> ago, to design an RPN (Reverse Polish Notation)
> conlang inspired by the Forth programming language.
There is an alien conlang that operates on this principle, although
its name escapes me.  Interesting cultural notes about politicians
pushing a word and then forgetting about it until the end of their
speech when it changes the whole meaning of what they were saying, etc.
Comments about humans generally being unable to speak the language in
real time because we can't keep a deep enough mental stack.

I have also played with this concept; in some of my proto-conlangs
RPN was a sort of stealth feature of the grammar, lying underneath it all
but not included in the descriptions, which just couched things in normal
grammarspeak about postpositions, SOV, etc.

I even tried to create "RPNglish" once, but there are too many English
words that are ambiguous as to part of speech, and getting the
wrong part of speech in an RPN language can really screw up your
stack. :)

-Mark

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