There are 14 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
From: R A Brown
1.2. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
1.3. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
From: Logan Kearsley
1.4. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
From: Jim Henry
1.5. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
From: R A Brown
1.6. Oligosynthesis (was:: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregatin
From: R A Brown
1.7. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
From: Jim Henry
1.8. Re: Oligosynthesis (was:: Possibly the simplest possible self-segreg
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
2a. Elomi and Ilomi
From: Anthony Miles
2b. Re: Elomi and Ilomi
From: Larry Sulky
3a. Re: NATLANG: Isolating Languages Question
From: Anthony Miles
4a. Re: Reduncancy
From: David Peterson
4b. Reduncancy
From: Peter Bleackley
4c. Re: Reduncancy
From: Jim Henry
Messages
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1.1. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 1:03 pm ((PDT))
Darn it - this thread would come in a week when I was
particularly busy! ;)
Now, hopefully, I can catch up. IME describing something as
"possibly the simplest possible" is simply asking to be
proved wrong. 'Simplicity' strikes me as one of those terms
like 'ease of learning' that get bandied about in certain
conlang contexts (usually IME among auxlangers) and about
which no one agrees ;)
On 09/09/2010 16:49, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Words are made up of any number of CV syllables where C
> is a glottal stop, a single consonant, or any one of a
> number of permitted consonant clusters (as yet
> unspecified). The first syllable may have a null
> consonant, i.e. V only.
>
> The first vowel of a word is any vowel other than 'a'.
> All of the remaining vowels of the word are the vowel
> 'a'. For example:
>
> diva, ropa, upasana, purampada, toskala, osa'atanda ...
>
> The accent falls on the non-a syllable.
I assume, then, that all these words are monomorphemic.
Self-segregating morphology means that _morphemes_ are self
segregating (I noticed several emails talked about 'words'
and I found some confusing in this respect - sure, in a
self-segregating morphology set-up we will probably also
want to know where compound words end; but that is another
matter). Conlangs with CV patterns that use vowels to mark
morpheme boundaries have been around for some time. Way back
in 2001 John Cowan described an interesting system for his
_xuxi_, see:
http://archives.conlang.info/cae/qeiljhin/dhueqeindhein.html
Admittedly his is a bit less simple than the one Gary
outlines above as it depends upon rules of vowel harmony and
disharmony. But I find it intriguing.
Another scheme that has CV syllables only and uses vowels to
mark morpheme boundaries is my "Scheme C" on:
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Exp/Appendix2.html
This, arguably, is even simpler than Gary's scheme in that
the language has only two vowels to worry about - not five:
one front vowel and one back vowel :)
But, as I see it, the one possible drawback of these schemes
that depend on a change of vowel is that monosyllabic
morphemes are not possible.
--------------------------------------------------------
On 09/09/2010 22:50, Maxime Papillon wrote:
> I can think of a number of self-segregating morphology
> that I find simpler, but then how can we tell except with
> "it feels simpler to me"?
Exactly!!
> We could ask who can write the
> shortest segregating computer program for his morphology,
> but then we're talking about computers, not about human
> speakers.
Indeed we would be. If the language is for human
communication then IMO it's humans we should be concerned
with. If we achieve a system whereby self-segregation is
evident to humans than any computer programmer worth his/her
salt should be able to write a program so the machine can do
the same.
> The word "simple" doesn't seem adapted to the field of
> linguistic.
Try telling that to auxlangers ;)
------------------------------
On 10/09/2010 16:53, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
[snip]
>> I can't imagine a simpler system than that.
>
> How about what I use in X-3? All morphemes are exactly
> one phoneme long. Of course, the language is
> oligosynthetic ...
..and in my 'Experimental Conlang' each morpheme is exactly
one syllable long and all the syllables are CV :)
That surely has to be simpler!
Of course, as the language also has to oligosynthetic as it
has only 64 morphemes. (I'm rapidly going off the idea of
experimental oligosynthetic language and may revert to my
original idea of an experimental loglang).
-----------------------------------
On 10/09/2010 17:11, Gary Shannon wrote:
[snip]
> Huffman coding achieves self-segregation by using "prefix
> free" coding, which is just another way of saying that
> certain sequences of characters are classified as
> prefixes only (i.e., word-initial) and imply that more is
> to follow. In fact, they are classified by exactly how
Huffman coding was used by Jeff Prothero in his 'Plan B' to
denote the length of morphemes; he was concerned with
bit-patterns (Plan B is IMO computer-centric not
anthropocentric). Jacques Guy in his 'Plan C' parody pointed
out that for a human it in effect means the initial sound
determines the length of the morpheme. I outline such a
system in "Scheme A" on:
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Exp/Appendix2.html
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"Ein Kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt,
wird immer Eingriffe in die Sprache thun."
[J.G. Hamann, 1760]
"A mind that thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language".
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.2. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 1:48 pm ((PDT))
Hallo!
On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:06:01 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
> Darn it - this thread would come in a week when I was
> particularly busy! ;)
>
> Now, hopefully, I can catch up. IME describing something as
> "possibly the simplest possible" is simply asking to be
> proved wrong. 'Simplicity' strikes me as one of those terms
> like 'ease of learning' that get bandied about in certain
> conlang contexts (usually IME among auxlangers) and about
> which no one agrees ;)
Indeed. One should always be careful with such superlatives
- it is more like advertising than a useful description.
> [...]
>
> But, as I see it, the one possible drawback of these schemes
> that depend on a change of vowel is that monosyllabic
> morphemes are not possible.
Indeed. And that makes them awkward. While I can live with a
language where each *lexical* morpheme is at least 2 syllables
long, *grammatical* morphemes ought to be as short as possible,
and anything above one syllable is too much. In Old Albic, I
have lots of grammatical morphemes (and even a few verb roots!)
that are just one *phoneme* long (and most lexical roots are
one syllable).
> On 10/09/2010 16:53, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> [snip]
> >> I can't imagine a simpler system than that.
> >
> > How about what I use in X-3? All morphemes are exactly
> > one phoneme long. Of course, the language is
> > oligosynthetic ...
>
> ..and in my 'Experimental Conlang' each morpheme is exactly
> one syllable long and all the syllables are CV :)
>
> That surely has to be simpler!
Indeed.
> Of course, as the language also has to oligosynthetic as it
> has only 64 morphemes. (I'm rapidly going off the idea of
> experimental oligosynthetic language and may revert to my
> original idea of an experimental loglang).
The I Ging was a too restrictive set of meanings, I guess?
I still feel that oligosynthetic languages do not really work,
and that is part of the reason why my work with X-3/Quetech
is utterly stuck (another part of the reason is that I have
enough other projects with higher priority: Old Albic, a web
magazine dealing with sustainable living, writing songs for a
band I am going to try to found next year, and yet others).
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.3. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" chronosur...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 2:25 pm ((PDT))
>> We could ask who can write the
>> shortest segregating computer program for his morphology,
>> but then we're talking about computers, not about human
>> speakers.
>
> Indeed we would be. If the language is for human communication then IMO it's
> humans we should be concerned with. If we achieve a system whereby
> self-segregation is evident to humans than any computer programmer worth
> his/her salt should be able to write a program so the machine can do the
> same.
Er... I wouldn't be quite that bold. Human brains are *really* good at
pattern matching (hence we can get along without self-segregating
natural languages). There's lots of stuff that's blatantly obvious to
people but incredibly difficult to program computers to recognize. I
don't know what it would be like, but I can definitely imagine a
self-segregation scheme that would be highly compatible with human
brains, but for that very reason extremely difficult to formalize for
a computer.
-l.
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.4. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 3:55 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosur...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> We could ask who can write the
>>> shortest segregating computer program for his morphology,
>>> but then we're talking about computers, not about human
>>> speakers.
>> Indeed we would be. If the language is for human communication then IMO it's
>> humans we should be concerned with. If we achieve a system whereby
>> self-segregation is evident to humans than any computer programmer worth
> Er... I wouldn't be quite that bold. Human brains are *really* good at
> pattern matching (hence we can get along without self-segregating
> natural languages). There's lots of stuff that's blatantly obvious to
> people but incredibly difficult to program computers to recognize. I
> don't know what it would be like, but I can definitely imagine a
> self-segregation scheme that would be highly compatible with human
> brains, but for that very reason extremely difficult to formalize for
> a computer.
And the reverse is probably true as well. There are probably an very
large but finite number of possible self-segregating morphology
schemes at any given level of algorithmic complexity. I think someone
upthead probably mentioned one of the class at the simplest or
second-simplest level[1] -- all morphemes begin with exactly one "k"
and continue with zero or more instances of various other graphemes.
Schemes of this class are probably *too* simple to be useful -- in
them, other important qualities are sacrificed to simplicity. The
next-simplest class, I reckon, would include those where there is a
set of multiple graphemes of which one instance marks the beginning of
a morpheme, which then contains zero or more instances of graphemes
not iun that set. But within that set of SSM schemes, all of which
are equally easy to code a parser for,[2] I suspect some of them are
far easier for humans to learn to parse in realtime than others --
namely, those where the set of initial (or terminal) graphemes form a
natural set w.r.t. their phonological associations; those would
proably be easier to parse than those where the initial or terminal
set are a more or less random subset of the language's graphemes.
1. I suspect the set of schemes where all morphemes are exactly the
same length are even simpler than those where there is a single
terminal or a single nonterminal character.
2. All the above pertains to writing parsers for a stream of ASCII or
Unicode text. If we're talking about OCR recognition of an actual
original writing system, or speech recognition of a novel conlang
phonology, then indeed some graphemes or phonemes would probably be
significantly easier for the parser to treat as morpheme boundaries
than others, and in these cases I would expect somewhat more (but far
from perfect) congruity with which schemes are easier for humans.
http://wiki.frath.net/List_of_self-segregating_morphology_methods
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.5. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 11:42 pm ((PDT))
On 12/09/2010 22:23, Logan Kearsley wrote:
[snip]
>>
>> Indeed we would be. If the language is for human
>> communication then IMO it's humans we should be
>> concerned with. If we achieve a system whereby
>> self-segregation is evident to humans than any computer
>> programmer worth his/her salt should be able to write a
>> program so the machine can do the same.
>
> Er... I wouldn't be quite that bold. Human brains are
> *really* good at pattern matching (hence we can get along
> without self-segregating natural languages). There's lots
> of stuff that's blatantly obvious to people but
> incredibly difficult to program computers to recognize.
Oh yes, I'm well aware of that. I did do some work in AI at
one time in my past life.
> I don't know what it would be like, but I can definitely
> imagine a self-segregation scheme that would be highly
> compatible with human brains, but for that very reason
> extremely difficult to formalize for a computer.
Yep - I probably overstated the case. I guess what I meant
is that all the examples of self-segregating morphemes I've
come across so far will not be exactly difficult to program
- at least as far as written language is concerned. Even
those languages that restrict themselves CV syllables are
making things easier for computer voice recognition.
But maybe a "self-segregation scheme that would be highly
compatible with human brains, but for that very reason
extremely difficult to formalize for a computer" will come
along - but I haven't met such a beast yet ;)
----------------------------------------
On 12/09/2010 23:53, Jim Henry wrote:
[snip]
>
> And the reverse is probably true as well.
IMO the reverse is definitely true. IMO the Huffman coding
scheme of 'Plan B' is not human-friendly - but it's simple
to program.
I'm sure I could come up with other 'computer-friendly'
schemes that would not be exactly easy for human
communication, especially spoken communication. Such
computer-centric languages do not interest me.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"Ein Kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt,
wird immer Eingriffe in die Sprache thun."
[J.G. Hamann, 1760]
"A mind that thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language".
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.6. Oligosynthesis (was:: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregatin
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 12:01 am ((PDT))
On 12/09/2010 21:46, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 21:06:01 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>
>> Of course, as the language also has to oligosynthetic as it
>> has only 64 morphemes. (I'm rapidly going off the idea of
>> experimental oligosynthetic language and may revert to my
>> original idea of an experimental loglang).
>
> The I Ging was a too restrictive set of meanings, I guess?
64 morphemes is somewhat restrictive, whether based on the
Yì JÄ«ng (I Ching, I Ging, etc) or not. But as the myriad of
online offers of Yì JÄ«ng readings show, Yì JÄ«ng has cultic/
mystic significance for many. J.R.R. Tolkien was not exactly
happy to find New Agers using his Middle Earth; similarly I
would not be happy to find my language, if I had developed
it, being used for cultic purposes.
> I still feel that oligosynthetic languages do not really work,
> and that is part of the reason why my work with X-3/Quetech
> is utterly stuck
Exactly so. I just cannot see how they would work in
practice, tho experimenting with them might possibly throw
up interesting results.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"Ein Kopf, der auf seine eigene Kosten denkt,
wird immer Eingriffe in die Sprache thun."
[J.G. Hamann, 1760]
"A mind that thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language".
Messages in this topic (41)
________________________________________________________________________
1.7. Re: Possibly the simplest possible self-segregating morphology
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 5:05 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:28 AM, R A Brown <r...@carolandray.plus.com> wrote:
> On 12/09/2010 23:53, Jim Henry wrote:
>> And the reverse is probably true as well.
> IMO the reverse is definitely true. IMO the Huffman coding scheme of 'Plan
> B' is not human-friendly - but it's simple to program.
Even within the Huffman coding solution space, it would be trivial to
come up with a solution that's equally easy to code as Plan B, but
significantly easier for humans to parse (though still probably
nowhere near as easy to parse as those that involve fixed-length
morphemes, or subsets of initial and terminal phonemes or syllables).
For instance, plosives occur at the beginning of one-syllable
morphemes, fricatives at the beginning of two-syllable morphemes, etc.
Something that we haven't discussed here recently, though, is *how and
when* a self-segregating morphology is or would be helpful. Of course
it would make text in an engelang easier to parse with software than
that of any natlang, or even fairly regular conlangs without SSM such
as Esperanto. But, as Logan pointed out upthread, humans are really
good at pattern-recognition, and usually identify the morpheme
boundaries in languages they're familiar with without problems, even
in languages that present a lot of ambiguities to a typical software
parser. When and how and how much would SSM make things easier for
humans?
>From my experience, I'd suggest that it's most likely to be helpful
for intermediate learners, who've already learned the syntax and
morphology of the conlang fairly well, but whose vocabulary is still
small. People talk about the ambiguous parses of Esperanto compound
words, but in my experience such words are almost never ambiguous *in
context*, for a fluent speaker. And a fluent speaker, encountering
an unfamiliar morpheme in context, is pretty likely to be able to
identify it as such (if not, in fact, guess its meaning from context
as well) without confounding it with whatever affixes or more familiar
root morphemes it's compounded with.
It's for a less fluent learner, whose vocabulary is still small, that
being able to ambiguously parse unfamiliar words into their component
morphemes before looking up all the unfamiliar morphemes would save
time and reduce uncertainty. A few years ago, when I was learning
Volapük, I said this in the course of a conversation with a friend who
was also learning it:
On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 7:01 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes; "datuval" uses two different "um" affixes, and
> could be analyzed (before one knows many
> Vp morphemes) as "da-tuval", "da-tuv-al", "dat-uv-al"
> "datuv-al", or "datuval" (or maybe even "dat-u-val"?).
And in a situation like that -- reading a text in a conlang and
pausing to look up unfamiliar words from time to time -- I doubt
whether Huffman encoding would be significantly worse than
fixed-length morphemes or initial/terminal phoneme sets. Even the
most complex SSM scheme that anyone has seriously proposed would save
dictionary lookup time compared to the ambiguity of Volapük compounds
for an intermediate student.
On the other hand, for a real-time spoken-language situation -- a
conversation or lecture, for instance -- I'm not sure any SSM scheme
more complex than fixed-length morphemes would give a significant edge
over general human pattern-recognition abilities. One would have to
experiment to find out.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (41)
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1.8. Re: Oligosynthesis (was:: Possibly the simplest possible self-segreg
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 7:54 am ((PDT))
Hallo!
On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 07:49:16 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
> On 12/09/2010 21:46, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > The I Ging was a too restrictive set of meanings, I guess?
>
> 64 morphemes is somewhat restrictive, whether based on the
> Yì JÄ«ng (I Ching, I Ging, etc) or not.
Indeed. Even Toki Pona has twice as many morphemes!
> But as the myriad of
> online offers of Yì JÄ«ng readings show, Yì JÄ«ng has cultic/
> mystic significance for many. J.R.R. Tolkien was not exactly
> happy to find New Agers using his Middle Earth; similarly I
> would not be happy to find my language, if I had developed
> it, being used for cultic purposes.
I understand that very well. Indeed, I have a mild fear that once
I have uploaded the complete documentation of Old Albic to the Web,
some "Elvish" Otherkin and New Age cranks will abuse it. Probably
they'll use only the vocabulary and won't give a damn about its
grammar, and come up with a "pidgin Elvish" in which the Old Albic
words are used English-wise without any proper inflections.
> > I still feel that oligosynthetic languages do not really work,
> > and that is part of the reason why my work with X-3/Quetech
> > is utterly stuck
>
> Exactly so. I just cannot see how they would work in
> practice, tho experimenting with them might possibly throw
> up interesting results.
My plan with X-3 is to start with the vocabulary of Toki Pona,
assign a phoneme to each item, with lexical morphemes (including
pronouns) being consonants and grammatical morphemes such as
conjunctions and semantic relation markers being vowels. Then
I shall translate a small text corpus into it and count the
phonemes and the syllables. The question is, how much is actually
saved in comparison with "normal" languages such as English or
Old Albic? One one hand, the morphemes are as short as they can
possibly be; on the other, X-3 will have to take recourse to
compounds and circumlocutions in order to express many concepts
for which root morphemes exist in other languages.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
Messages in this topic (41)
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________________________________________________________________________
2a. Elomi and Ilomi
Posted by: "Anthony Miles" mamercu...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 6:22 pm ((PDT))
Well, between learning Esperanto, composing in Toki Pona, and finishing the
Na'gifi Fasu'xa Babel Text, I don't think I'm going to get around to learning
Ilomi anytime soon. I do have one question: how different is Elomi and Ilomi? I
presume it's not that different, if the lesson plan still works.
Messages in this topic (2)
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2b. Re: Elomi and Ilomi
Posted by: "Larry Sulky" larrysu...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 6:14 am ((PDT))
Elomi marked verbs with an initial "i" and names with an initial "e". Ilomi
reversed the two.
On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Anthony Miles <mamercu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, between learning Esperanto, composing in Toki Pona, and finishing the
> Na'gifi Fasu'xa Babel Text, I don't think I'm going to get around to
> learning
> Ilomi anytime soon. I do have one question: how different is Elomi and
> Ilomi? I
> presume it's not that different, if the lesson plan still works.
>
Messages in this topic (2)
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3a. Re: NATLANG: Isolating Languages Question
Posted by: "Anthony Miles" mamercu...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Sep 12, 2010 7:03 pm ((PDT))
I doubt Toki Pona, were it to acquire a community in one place, would remain
isolating. It's already developed arbitrary meanings for many compounds, so
my guess is it would become agglutinative and acquire voiced (pre-nasalized)
consonants.
If the CBB is anything to go by, that is the most common fate of isolating
languages. The newbie starts with an isolating language, and stress patterns
change it into agglutinative languages.
But for the sake of argument, TP e and en are already easy to mistype, and
some persons do reduce all post-tonic syllables to a schwa. Without a
speaking (rather than typing) community, it's hard to tell how various
individuals treat secondary stress. Going with Mandarin tones (which I've been
using over in Romlang to derive a Mandarinesque Romlang), jan pi tokipona >
jap1 to4po1 or ja1 pi2to41. e2 and e1 would come from e and en, assuming e
doesn't drop out altogether. Would jan unpa > ja1u1pa2 or ja2nu1pa1? Maybe
I'll cook something up in the jan nasa section of the toki pona forum, but of
course, I can't claim it under a Creative Commons license.
Messages in this topic (8)
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4a. Re: Reduncancy
Posted by: "David Peterson" deda...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 4:06 am ((PDT))
On Sep 13, 2010, at 3â34 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:
> A lot of engelangers try to reduce redundancy in languages, but in real life
> redundancy is quite useful, because it gives you more chances to work out
> what somebody has said if you didn't quite catch it. Has anyone ever tried to
> create a conlang that increases redundancy?
I'd hope that's what most naturalistic conlangs do naturally. For
example, anytime you have a conjugation paradigm that differs
in person and number, for example, and have these forms cooccur
with pronouns, that's redundant. In English, for example, "He hits"
is redundant: Either "he hit" or "hits" would be the most one-to-one
way to do it.
Another example is pluralization. Any conlang that has a more
or less regular plural and has that plural cooccur with numerals
is employing redundancy. So, for example, in Zhyler:
demven "water buffalo"
vaj demvenej "three water buffalos"
*vaj demven "three water buffalo"
Though that last example doesn't work quite well in English, as
"buffalo" serves just fine as a plural...
There are a few natural languages that work the opposite way.
In Arabic, for example, I've been given to understand that you
never say "1 x", you just say "x", hence the famous title /alf layla
wa layla/, "thousand night and night", which is "1,001 nights".
You also never say "two X", you just use "X-dual". I won't go so
far as to say that Arabic nouns have no number marking when
they're preceded by a number (that is in something other than
the singular or the dual), but it's not a straightforward plural that
marks the noun (or not always. I was really confused by this corner
of Arabic' grammar...).
My guess is that all conlangs attempting to naturalistic display
some sort of redundancy, either on accident or by design. A
conlang that maximizes redundancy might be interesting. There's
an example of a language where each nominal is case-marked,
each argument of the verb is marked on the verb, and all nouns
agree with the verb, so that in a ditransitive sentence, each noun
is marked with three cases, and the verb has marking for the
subject, object and indirect object. That's probably the most
redundant example I've ever seen--nat or con.
-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.com/
LCS Member Since 2007
http://conlang.org/
Messages in this topic (3)
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4b. Reduncancy
Posted by: "Peter Bleackley" peter.bleack...@rd.bbc.co.uk
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 4:09 am ((PDT))
A lot of engelangers try to reduce redundancy in languages, but in real
life redundancy is quite useful, because it gives you more chances to
work out what somebody has said if you didn't quite catch it. Has anyone
ever tried to create a conlang that increases redundancy?
Pete
Messages in this topic (3)
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4c. Re: Reduncancy
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Sep 13, 2010 5:15 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 6:34 AM, Peter Bleackley
<peter.bleack...@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> A lot of engelangers try to reduce redundancy in languages, but in real life
> redundancy is quite useful, because it gives you more chances to work out
> what somebody has said if you didn't quite catch it. Has anyone ever tried
> to create a conlang that increases redundancy?
My säb zjed'a has a higher degree of phonological redundancy than many
languages -- no two morphemes differ by fewer than two phonemes.
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/conlang13/intro.htm
But its syntax and morphology (such as it is; it's mostly isolating)
are not, I think, unusually redundant.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (3)
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