Hallo!

On Thu, 4 Mar 2010 07:16:17 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> Salvete omnes!
> 
> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo!
> [snip]
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Oh yes, self-segregation is a must in such a project.

For an oligosynthetic language, however, it is sufficient that no
morpheme is a prefix of another morpheme, i.e. there are no strings
A and B that both A and AB are morphemes.  If that condition is
fulfilled, the text can be segregated on the basis of a simple list
of morphemes.

>       I also  
> had the idea of "Plan B done right", but quite frankly the 
> more I looked into Plan B the more I felt like that little 
> kid looking at the "Emperor's new clothes.'    :)

Yes.  It is neither a loglan nor a loglang, only a relex of English
with a phonology that is both naive and bizarre, and a self-segregation
strategy that is original but unwieldy (and not even done logically,
as 1111 0011 ... counts as "6 consecutive ones" while 1111 1100 ...
does not!)  X-1 is meant to be "Plan B done right", but I now feel that
there is no way to do it right at all, and I have quietly abandoned
that project.  (I have just removed the "work in progress" remark from
the FrathWiki page, and instead installed a "This project has been
abandoned" sign on the top of it.)

> [...]
> > I dimly remember such a page, but I am not sure.  I think it is
> > worth putting back online.
> 
> I've now done so.
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Exp/Appendix2.html

Thank you!  It may have only historical relevance to what the project
has transmogrified into, but it definitely interesting to read.

> >> 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), 
> 
> Yes, Plan B didn't have the valency problem.  Its "case" 
> system merely labeled each morpheme for its place in the 
> binary tree that the C program would parse.

That's a *weird* morphological device, which perhaps makes the parsing
algorithm simpler, but is not of any use to a human being trying to
understand what is going on, I think.

>       As you know, I  
> gave up on the loglang idea. In any case, Plan B is not a 
> loglang or a loglan, as we now understand these terms. It 
> would seem that way back in 1990, the term Loglan was being 
> used basically to mean what we now call an engelang; and 
> Plan B is certainly an engelang (whether 'optimal' or not is 
> debatable).

I don't know how the terms were used 20 years ago.  _Loglan_ started
as the name of a particular language, and I think the Loglan Institute
has always used it that way, and would have objected to Prothero's usage
if they had noticed.  The Lojbanists use _loglan_ (with a lowercase L)
in the sense of 'a language based on the principles laid down by J. C.
Brown', and have been using it that way since the 1987(?) paper titled
_Lojban: A Realization of Loglan_.  No Lojbanist would have ever
recognized Plan B as a 'loglan', I think.  At any rate, today we have:

_logical language_: a language based on a system of formal logic
_loglang_: short for _logical language_
_loglan_: a language based on the principles laid down by J. C. Brown
_Loglan_: the original language developed by J. C. Brown
          (sometimes called _TLI Loglan_ to distingish it from other
           loglans such as Lojban)

Plan B certainly is *none* of these!  One could call it an _engelang_
for sure, but "engelang" is a rather hazy notion, I would say, more a
kind of making a language than a well-defined class of languages.

> >       so I am getting at something
> > pretty oligosynthetic.  That, I feel, is the main reason why I make
> > so little progress with it.
> 
> Having abandoned the ""Plan B done right", my 'experimental 
> loglang' has now indeed transmogrified itself into an 
> oligosynthetic language    ;)
> 
> The main reasons for slow progress on it are:
> - I still find that not all browsers will display the Yì 
> Jīng hexagrams;
> - I seem to be busier in retirement than I ever was when 
> working!

I know what you are talking about (I am too young to retire, but I have
been unemployed for years).  The more time you have at your disposal,
the more will the various things you care of expand into it.  Having
only a limited amount of time at your disposal causes you to do things
more focusedly, and you actually get *more* done.  I have observed that
I seem to achieve more in my spare time during the week, than on weekends.

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html