Hallo!

On Wed, 3 Mar 2010 16:41:52 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> MorphemeAddict wrote:
> > Has anyone actually used in a conlang the Huffman-like encodings that Plan 
> > B 
> > illustrates?
> 
> The only one I know of is Jörg's X-1 conlang.
> http://wiki.frath.net/X-1
> 
> But as it states on that page "X-1 is still under 
> development; consider everything in this article work in 
> progress," I'm not sure that it really counts.

X-1 is pretty much dormant; I haven't done anything about it for
several years.  What regards conlangs, Old Albic has MUCH higher
priority, and from that I digress into research on prehistoric
European languages, which are a fascinating subject on their own.

(I am currently involved in an endless discussion on the ZBB with
a guy from Barcelona who has his own ideas about those matters.
The main difference between us two, however, is that he is sure
he *knows* what happened even though his evidence is shaky, while
I know that I *don't* know and my ideas are just ideas which call
for more research.)

The FrathWiki page on X-1 is still pretty much up to date, and I
have no intention to abandon the self-segregation scheme as I feel
it is at the core of the language.  The idea behind X-1 is "Plan B
done right"; without that self-segregation scheme, it would no
longer be the same project.

> When I was still intending to develop a loglang, I did have 
> a page in which I discussed the Huffman-like encodings and 
> why I rejected such a scheme. The page is at present 
> off-line.  I guess with the present interest in Plan B, I 
> ought to think about getting it - or a modified version of 
> the page - back online.

I dimly remember such a page, but I am not sure.  I think it is
worth putting back online.

> But I know of no other conlang that uses it.  Basically, it 
> seems to me that using Huffman-like encodings is fine for a 
> computer and, maybe, extra-terrestrial aliens but not for 
> human usable languages.

Indeed.  With X-1, I feel that this encoding scheme is something of
a morphological straitjacket.  You get severe constraints on morpheme
shape, and as I also use morpheme length as an indicator of valency,
it means that I can have no more than 512 unary predicate words (and
that class includes most common nouns), so I am getting at something
pretty oligosynthetic.  That, I feel, is the main reason why I make
so little progress with it.

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