Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 04:09:26 -0400, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

(Tables below, use monospaced font)

>On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:06:21 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:
>
>>A language with zero redundancy would be highly brittle, such that any
>>amount of noise would make an utterance mean something different, equally
>>grammatical and meaningful -- is that really "efficient" in any meaningful
>>sense?
>
>I don't think that would be necessarily "brittle" however. Don't forget
good ol'
>Context. Sure, if changing [ts`] to [ts\] resulted in a change of "three"
>to "seven", misunderstandings would be commonplace. But if the change in
>meaning were from "we caught three mice in the basement yesterday"
>to "Jupiter plus marshmallows is occasionally a fantastic cattle-prod" ...
not so
>much.
>
>Granted, there's little dout that a morphophonology that consistently behaved
>like this would have to be ridiculously complex and probably too hard to be
>humanly lernable ... but that's just the other end of the spectrum.
>Compromising a bit, "three" to "aquamarine" would be alreddy much less
>confusing, and "three mice" to "running along" even better, and probably still
>rather accomplishable. (CF: Chinese & monosyllables.)
Exactly what I was thinking. For one of my philosophical conlangs, I plan to
use a "shift" scheme (has this been thought of before?). These reduces the
probability of confusion while still keeping a taxonomical (?) lexicon. An
example will do. Suppose numbers are of the form CV, the C list being
ptksfmn, and the V list aeiou, then:

 P T K S F M N
A1
E  2
I     3
O       4
U         5

PA = 1
TE = 2
KI = 3
SO = 4
FU = 5

And perhaps PE = clothing or TA = animal...