Re: Creating a metaconlang; anyone want to join?

On Dec 1, 2007 2:06 PM, John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:
> I had not considered body language (and indeed, I would like this to remain
> writable),
Check out David Peterson's "Sign Language IPA".

> * Phoneme splits. Say the host language is English - one could then split
> eg. /tS/ into 18 different consonants based on alveolar vs retroflex vs
> alveolo-palatal; tenuis vs aspirated vs ejectiv; and plain vs labialized.
Indeed you could!

> * Syntax changes. The fact that the "carrier" here is a single mantra and
> not the complete host language givs quite a bit of leeway that might not be
> otherwise available.
Depends; what sort of language & mantra? Is this one of those
quote-unquote "free variation of word order" deals?

> * Synonym variation, probably including arcaic and/or dialectal allomorphy.
> In order to be compatible with phoneme splits, this would probably have to
> specify wide semantic categories, while the latter would then further
> specify them down...
Again possible. However, this one would be somewhat more difficult to
keep language-agnostically meta; you would need some kind of
high-level theory about how one does these splits and which means
what, and I don't know of anything that could handle it.

(I would however be quite interested if you come up with one!)

> Alas, before I get the host language to an usable state (and I might need
> the conreligion too...) this isn't going to progress much.
*laugh* Endemic problem, eh?

But at least a couple of your proposed ideas could probably be taken
chunkwise. One of the nice features of my proposal is that it's highly
modular; you could implement one part of it mostly independent from
having to do the rest, and have it still be usable.

Your phoneme split point seems to me the most viable for such
treatment, and English is ripe for exploitation in this manner, given
how many things we don't mark at all. It would be somewhat hit-or-miss
whether a given word happened to have a phoneme that could be
segmented appropriately, but that could just lead to strategic word
choice by the participants... (e.g. picking something with 'r' in it
so as to be able to leverage a retroflex vs trilled vs etc etc etc
distinction)

- Sai