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I had sent this to the Google Groups list having misremembered that we'd moved there.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: preliminary remarks on Toaq Dzu
Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2014 00:26:43 +0100
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: Engelang <engelang@hidden.email>
The existence of Toaq Dzu, begun last year, had escaped my notice until this week. It is a loglang created by Selpahi ('Amand, Amatus'; Miles Forster). It is described at
<http://selpahi.de/ToaqAlphaPrimer.html>
which isn't working for me at the mo, but is also accessible as Google cache version:
<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7EdqV3RN9RIJ:http://selpahi.de/ToaqAlphaPrimer.html>.
It is a rationalization and decrappification/decruftification of Lojban rather than being more immediately based on predicate logic as, say, Xorban or Liva are. In its monosyllabicity and tonality it is reminiscent of Guaspi.
Much of the key logic stuff is missing from the (short) primer. I can't find mention of how to do propositions that are arguments ("X believe that Y"; "lo du'u") or how to show that something is an argument of multiple predicates, or tricky stuff like wh-quantifiers and comparatives. And the examples are not interlinearly glossed, so it's hard to grock the details of the syntax.
Words are monosyllabic, C(C)(w|y)V(V)(q) (q = [N]). It's unclear how to create new lexemes. (Maybe certain monosyllables are instead prefixes?).
Toaq shares with Guaspi the elegant idea of having a word's lexical content signalled by its segmental form and its syntactic properties signalled by tone. Strikingly, there are 9 (!) tones (high/mid, rising, dipping, high-falling, peaking, low, creaky-falling, low-falling and neutral). I believe Selpahi capable of auditorily and articulatorily discriminating among these, for I have heard his very impressive pronunciation of Guaspi on Youtube, but few other humans could emulate him, I think. Since tone contributes to brevity, it is ergonomic, but I'm not sure what set of tone contrasts is optimally ergonomic. I feel sure that those nine are too many. Livagian once had 5 (rise, fall, level, rise-fall, fall-rise) back in the 80s, and since then it has gradually reduced to just a binary phonological contrast between level and nonlevel tone.
The primer says Toaq "is relatively succinct; the average Toaq Sentence is about as long as an English one, though there are many cases where it's noticeably shorter than English. And compared to Lojban, Toaq needs slightly over 50% fewer syllables to express the same things." While this is true, and succinctness is an ergonomic asset, multiplicity of phonological contrasts, especially beyond a certain threshold, is an ergonomic detriment, so the ergonomic loglang will have to strike a balance here. Certainly buying succinctness at the cost of inflating the number of contrasts requires no great ingenuity; one could easily define a language with a thousand phonemes, but not an ergonomic one.
the best cross-linguistic measure of brevity would be something like translating the sentence's phonology into a binary (diphonemic) version; or measuring the cross-linguistic size of a phonological string S in Lg X as the number of different strings in X that have the same length as S in the phonology of X. The interesting challenge is to find the most efficient use not of phonetic space but of phonological space, so as to minimize the size of the expression of the average proposition.
--And.