Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
> Concision was Lin's sole aim.
Indeed it was.

>One of its original techniques was
> systematic largescale homonymy without ambiguity -- which allows the
> same short forms to encode many different meanings.
Yes, each short form has enneasemy, i.e. nine different meanings. These
are disambiguated by a system of what the author calls 'internal and
external cements,' that is the meanings are disambiguated by the way the
short forms are put together. There are, indeed, even a small set of
short forms that have 10 different meanings. Somewhere I have details of
version 4.3 of Lin.

Version 5.0.3 of Lin is online, but two of the links appear to be
broken; see
http://www.iiap.res.in/personnel/srik/Lin.html
-------------------------------------------

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
[snip]
 > Ray Brown, in his Briefscript project, goes a radically different
 > road - one can say that he sets off in the opposite direction
 > in order to reach the same goal: he uses so *few* phonemes that
 > he can use the Latin alphabet as a syllabary.

More strictly it is so I can use the Latin alphabet - in earlier
versions of the Briefscript project it was not a syllabary, tho it is in
its current incarnation.

But the use of the Latin alphabet & the restriction in the number of
phonemes are conditioned in that from the start the project has had the
aims that Dutton explicitly stated for his Speedwords, namely that the
language be:
- an alphabetic shorthand (i.e. it uses the symbols of the modern
Latin/Roman alphabet)
- usable as an IAL international auxlang).

There has been some discussion regarding what an IAL should or should
be, but I do not wish to get into that discussion. Also I have long made
it clear that I shall be be promoting Piashi (or whatever form the
Briefscript project assumes, if I ever complete it!) as an IAL. But it
does seem to me that an IAL should preferably not have too large an
inventory of phonemes.

Hence both the restriction to the Roman alphabet and the relative
paucity of phonemes are due to the project's stated aims. My language
cannot ever hope to achieve the concision of Lin. If my prime aim was
maximum concision I would have to do things differently.

 > His language
 > may not be highly concise in spoken form, but in the written
 > form, it becomes quite concise because any letter combination
 > is pronounceable and may have a meaning, while in natlangs,
 > most letter combinations (e.g. "xbrlynpha" in English) are
 > meaningless noise.

This needs some qualification. The 'consonant symbols' denote a
consonant followed by an _unstressed vowel_. The 'vowel symbols'
(including |w| and |y|) denote stressed vowels/diphthongs. The above
string is pronounceable with stress on the final /a/. But it will not be
very meaningful as it contains no lexical morphemes      :)

--
Ray
==================================
ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]