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On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 9:08 AM, MatthewDeanMartin <matt@hidden.email> wrote: > Dropping the ala X from the X ala X pattern in yes no questions doesn't affect readability at all. I suspect it would affect listening comprehension. In text, you've usually got a question mark as a suprasegmental (?) marker over and above any morphological or syntactic marker a particular Latin-script language might use for questions. > Again, the only pattern I see is that when items are marked multiple times, it doesn't hurt to drop the extra marks (double marked questions, double marked pronoun possessor phrases). And back to the original question, these feature also seem like the least stable syntactic features, most likely to be lost over time. Yes, thus my comment that design for short-term noise-resistance is likely to make the language more variable over time, if it's lucky enough to have a long lifetime (or any lifetime). The converse may not be true, however; if we design a language with low redundancy, speakers will probably devise some ad-hoc redundancy features to add noise resistance, and we can't predict in advance what those will be or how subject to change over time they'll be. This, however, I disagree with: >>>I think that the reading gotchas and the effort-less to read mistakes are signs of mistakes or limitations in the conlang’s fundamental design– underspecification and overspecification respectively. I don't think you can have it both ways. If Toki Pona's syntactic redundancies make it easier to recover from common mistakes, why is that a bad thing? Certainly there are many semantically ambiguous of the language that can make valid sentences hard to interpret. I'm not sure those are design flaws, more a matter of design limitations. The syntactic ambiguities that make it hard to parse valid sentences are more arguably design flaws. When you say >>things and things in the environment how do you mean to distinguish them? Is the first short for "unseen things (= not in the local environment)" or for "things recently or soon to be mentioned (= in the discourse environment, not necessarily the physical environment)"? -- Jim Henry http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/