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--- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, And Rosta <arosta@...> wrote: > > It is easy to construct a self-segmenting engelang, but the real snag > is how to cope with names (etc., e.g. borrowings) where one wants > to minimize distortion of the original form of the name. I'd be > interested to hear people's ideas on possible solutions. Oh -- and > a further criterion: concision is a desideratum, so the question is: > What's a good way to handle names in a self-segmenting > engelang that constitutes an optimal balance between (a) preserving > self-segmentation, (b) distorting the original name as little as possible, > and (c) concision. > > --And. > Hello, everyone! I've been lurking for some time, and may go back to lurking for a few weeks, so please excuse me if I take some time to respond, but I wanted to say that I've read most of this mailing list and found it very interesting. Especially in relation to lojban and some of its perceived limitations. I was relieved to see smart people discussing them, because I thought that, for instance, there must be a simple way to map every lojban sentence, however intrincate, to polish notation, and it must be explained online somewhere, just that I was too stupid or lazy to find them. I'm working on a logical language myself, but it's still less than half-baked, and quickly evolving. To be brief, I'd like it to have a lisp-like syntax, and I think I've thought of a minimally verbose way to express deeply nested parenthesis, by using three parenthethical symbols (words) instead of two, with a bottom-up hierarchical markup. I think that this avoids ever having to write/say two consecutive parenthetical symbols, and also lets you pick a parenthesised expression and build another one from it, without altering its inner hierarchical markup. I can elaborate if someone is interested. Probably the idea has already been implemented by someone else, if it's not flawed. One of the first concerns when designing my language has been how to enter and exit it, and how to quote foreign speech. Those are, IMHO, two different concepts. When you quote foreign speech, your language controls the situation, and it can mandate that the piece of foreign speech ends when a given keyword is found. On the other hand, while you can and should have a keyword to exit the language, it makes no sense to define a keyword to enter the language inside the same language. For instance, in Earth-Minimal,(as far as I remember) HEX is said to exit/enter the language. So, if I'm tired of it and want to forget about it and switch to English, I must say HEX.. but then, if say the word HEXagon, I'm speaking Earth-Minimal again! That's plain absurd: the conditions under which one begins to speak in a language must be defined outside the language. Now, to adress the topic of foreign names, I've taken an approach that is probably overkill, but at least lets you express *any* name (except extremely long _hundreds of syllables_ hypothetical names,in this version, but this can be easily fixed) without changing its internal structure in any way, and withot pausing either before or after pronouncing it: Names are preceded by two monosyllabic words and followed by a monosyllabic word that coincides with the second preceding one. In addition to this, if the word begins in a vowel, a consonant is added at the beginning of the foreign word, and if it ends in a consonant, a vowel is added at the end of it. The first preceding word indicates the foreign name quoting, and whether it begins in a vowel and/or ends in a consonant, so there are four possible first preceding words. The second preceding word is an arbitrary syllable chosen by the speaker for the particular name in question. Whatever syllable is not present in the name can be used. My current implementation of first preceding words is: LIA: when the foreign word begins and ends in a vowel. Discard initial consonant. LIE: when it begins in a vowel and ends in a consonant. Discard initial consonant and final vowel LIO: when it begins in a consonant and ends in a vowel. Do not descard any letter. LIU: when it begins and ends in a consonant. Dicard the final vowel. So, for instance "albion" would be quoted as "liekatalbionaka", where "ka" was chosen simply because it's not present in "albion", and "lie" indicates that the leading "t" and the trailing "a" should be removed. What do you think? Is there a simpler way to achieve the same generality? Regards, Martin O.B.