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Re: [engelang] Re: Self-segmenting words & the treatment of names



On 5/6/06, Martín Baldán <martinob@hidden.email> wrote:

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.

Yes, please give some examples.

Now, to adress the topic of foreign names,
[...]
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.

That means no other word can start with lia/lie/lio/liu right? So for
example "liebre" could not be a word of the language?

Short names can become very long: "Ann" would be "liekatannaka",
goes from one to five syllables.

What do you think? Is there a simpler way to achieve the same generality?

Another approach that gives you shorter names in most cases might
be something like this: Reserve two rare syllables for the start and
the end of names, let's say they are written "qw" and "qy".

For any name that does not contain "qy" (which will be the great majority)
you just add "qw" at the beginning and "qy" at the end: qwalbionqy,
qwannqy, etc.

For a name that contains "qy" once, you start it with "qwqyqw"
instead. So a hypothetical name "Aqybe" would be "qwqyqwAqybeqy".
The name "Qy" would be "qwqyqwQyqy".

If the name contains "qy" twice, you start it with "qwqyqyqw".

If the name contains "qy" n times, you start it with "qw", n "qy"s and "qw".

So a few rare names will be longer than with your system, but
most names will be shorter. Uglier, but shorter. :)

Saludos,
Jorge