> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of John Crowe
> Efficiency (use less space/time to convey the same amount of info)
in
> conlangs is one of my newer interests, and I don't know much
> about this
> idea. What is the formal name for this? What are the results of
formal
> studies/works in this area? All of the ideas in this post are
> just from my
> own thought; I have read few things by other authors about this.
>
> As far as I know, only a few conlangs strive to be
> 'efficient'. A few of the
> following are from Richard Kennaway's much linked to but
> outdated list,
> which is still useful because it has descriptions on the
> list, making it
> possible to search for specific things in conlangs.
> ...
> Even after setting aside human read/parseability, it still
> seems hard to
> draw the line. Theoretically, if a language has maximum
> efficiency, then
> there must be no such thing as an incomplete utterance or an
> ungrammatical
> statement, i.e. every possible utterance (or combination of
> symbols) within
> the rules means something. Then again, if a language has
ungrammatical
> utterances, then we can make it a 'rule' that all of the previously
> ungrammatical utterances are not part of the language, that
> they are akin to
> using phonemes or symbols other than those specified.
I have a project I start a long time ago that plays with these ideas.
It has a huge phonology and I've been working on different ideas where
I can take different phonetic aspects and assign them each a function.
For example there are a series of tone contours that are used to mark
noun case, and verbal tenses. I'm considering maybe beginning all
verbs with say stops, and maybe nouns could all start with fricatives.
Then I could maybe categorize them somhow with a certain class having
aspirated consonants, while another may be all palatized. Just ideas
I'm playing with. It's not something I'd ever expect anyone to be
able to actually learn and use.