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Good news that a full blown reference grammar is in the works -- needless to say, I hadn't supposed that the design itself didn't extend beyond what was covered in the primer. selpa'i seladwa@hidden.email [engelang], On 11/09/2014 19:20:
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.The new version has 8 tones (one of which isn't actually a tone, so it's actually 7). I find them easy enough to distinguish (in theory :P ). I agree that 9 was one too many, as the two low tones (one of which I deleted) were too easy to confuse. I also changed most of the tone-to-POS correspondences.
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I have a short text in the new book, a translation of a fairytale, and it turns out that the Toaq Dzu version is considerably shorter than the English, but I don't think that it achieves that by artificial means. It's mostly a side-effect of the tones, which save a load of function words. Root words are monosyllabic, but compounds can be as long as you like.
As I said in my previous message, I would distinguish between brevity achieved by increasing paradigmatic phonological contrast and brevity achieved by other means, with the latter more especially of interest. That more interesting question concerns the most efficient use of phonological string length, and what is the most ergonomic approximation to a Huffman encoding?While the choice of optimal set of paradigmatic phonological contrasts is a pertinent engelang question, it's not really one where different minds all tend to converge on the same consensus. As I recall, although in Xorban we sensibly postponed serious consideration of of phonology, our respective views were similar but different in nontrivial ways (such as the number of vowels). I doubt that on this matter we can change one another's open minds; I don't think it is daft of you to go for 8 tones; but I myself do think 8 is too many, and I'm pretty sure that the number of tones favoured by the average loglanger is only fractionally above 1. I myself (who long ago taught English intonation to native and foreign speakers) have to turn my brain up to max nowadays when analytically recognizing tone, and would not be remotely as good at it as you seem to be. Does any natlang have as many as 8 contrasting tones? None that I know of (but that doesn't mean there aren't any). Unsurprisingly, the greater the number of contrasts, the rarer the system. How frequent is it that people who aren't native speakers of a tone language successfully learn a tone language? How does that correlate with the complexity of the tone system?
--And.