Re: Efficiency/Spatial Compactness

Jörg Rhiemeier, On 19/07/2007 21:41:
> Jim Henry proposed this last year (April 18, 2006):
>
> http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0604C&L=CONLANG&P=R3801
> (original post)
>
> http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/conlang13/intro.htm
> (on his website)
>
> The basic idea, as far as I understand it, is to build a language,
> translate texts into it, measure the token frequencies of the
> morphemes, and then relex is using the shortest morphs for the
> most frequent morphemes.
Does anybody know if/where one can find something similar for English? E.g. what a
huffman encoding of English is like. Such an encoding would be based on
orthgraphical word forms, not on meanings, but it would at least give us a
sense of roughly what the lexicon of a huffmaned language would look like.

>> Yes, every string of symbols would be meaningful, but it wouldn't
>> necessarily be a complete sentence.
>>
>> Note that 'ungrammatical statement' is ambiguous. If it means 'string
>> of symbols without meaning', then your maximally efficient lang would
>> indeed lack ungrammatical statements. If it means 'pairing of form and
>> meaning that is inconsistent with the form--meaning correspondence rules',
>> then of course there would be ungrammatical statements aplenty.
>
> Well, you can hardly have a language without grammar; so you won't
> get a free monoid over your alphabet in which every possible string
> is meaningful.
What is a 'free monoid'?

Almost any string of roman letters (especially if j, v, w are omitted) is an
orthographic representation of the phonology of a well-formed sentence or
sentence fragment in Livagian, i.e. is meaningful. And earlier incarnations of
Livagian phonology were formulated in terms of 'syllabemes' -- minimal
combinatorially unrestricted units -- so that every string of syllabemes would
be well-formed.

--And.