Hallo conlangers!

On Friday 09 September 2011 21:17:18, R A Brown wrote:

> On 09/09/2011 19:56, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> 
> > On Friday 09 September 2011 10:12:35, R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> As I stated on 30th Aug. that "for Brx, I intend to use the
> >> letters of the Roman alphabet as a _syllabary_. At last I've
> >> drawn up a first draft:
> >> http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Briefscript/PhonAndOrthog.html
> >> 
> >> Comments?
> > 
> > That is an excellently designed syllabary.  I like it very much.
> > What is most fascinating about this is that in a sense you set
> > out in the opposite direction than most other designers of
> > maximally concise languages: most designers of MCLs start with
> > a huge phoneme inventory such that they can construct many short
> > words.
> 
> Like Lin.  That's one way to go, especially if MCL is your
> main (or only) aim.

Yes.  Not only Lin does that, also Ithkuil (especially the older
version) and various others I have seen but no longer remember
the names of.  (Danny Wier's Tech is another example, though it
is a language of a fictional "Elven" race; but he did entertain
the notion that that race's language was more "efficient" than
the average human language.)

R. A. Heinlein once wrote a story (_Gulf_; I haven't read it yet,
though) in which a MCL called Speedtalk occurs, which achieves
an average morpheme length of 1 phoneme by (a) being oligosynthetic
and (b) using a huge phoneme inventory with as many phonemes as
there are morphemes.  AFAIK, Heinlein never worked out that language.
Former CONLANG list member Duke Keenan made an attempt at such a
language in the 1990s, but it appears as if it went nowhere.

My own project "X-3" is meant to try out how well that works in
practice, but it is on the back burner.  Actually, I expect that
in comparison with natlangs, much of the theoretical concision
is lost in practice because you need more morphemes than in a
natlang.  How much is won if you have to circumscribe a five-
letter word with a five-member compound?  Nothing!  It is also
not easy to do such a language without running into problems
with the phonotactics ;)

Of course, in order to write such a language, you need either
lots of diacritics, lots of special letters, or lots of di- and
trigraphs.  If you try to write it with just 26 letters, much
of the language's brevity will be lost.
 
> > You instead shrink the phoneme inventory down to the
> > point that there are only 26 possible syllables, such that you
> > can use the Latin alphabet (even without case distinction) as
> > a syllabary.
> 
> Basically, I'm trying to stick within the limits set by
> Dutton way back in the 1930s & 1940s - that means just using
> the 26 letters of the modern Roman alphabet (actually,
> Dutton used 27, both in his International Symbolic Script
> and in the subsequent version of Speedwords; but the 27th
> was _&_, used only for two words: & = "and", &e = "also")

A letter used for just two words?  Ach y fi!
 
> > This is quite a smart move, I must say.  And you
> > have chosen both the 26 possible syllables and the assignments
> > of the 26 letters to those syllables well.
> 
> Thank you.

Perhaps you manage to design your language such that
_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_ is a correct and meaningful
utterance in it (like the Japanese Iroha poem).  At least
it is pronounceable:

[apacituwipiɲinujijakalamanawapakulusatawumimuçijusu]

--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1