Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 12 July 2012 21:57:46 R A Brown wrote:

> The original thread seems to have broken up into at least
> three different one:
> 1. writing a story on a napkin.
> 2. Ernest Hemingway's "six word story."
> 3. Stories in general of six or less words.
> 
> Also, I see that (1) has become trivialized.  Of course, if
> the writing is small enough, a story can easily be written
> on napkin; and I am guilty of that trivialization.

Indeed.  Books on a postcard-sized slip of plastic (i.e.,
even smaller than a napkin) have been around for decades;
they are called microfiches, and most libraries have
thousands of them.  They are also a better way of archiving
literature in a space-saving way than digital media, because
they can be read with any generic optical magnification
device of sufficient strength.  No worries about obsolete
file formats!

>       I think
> Virginia was wondering about a writing system where
> individual characters, however derived, contain a lot of
> meaning so that a reasonably good story could be written on
> a napkin in characters that could be read by any normal
> sighted person without recourse to glasses, magnifying glass
> or whatever.  Interesting question which i don't think
> anyone has address yet.

Indeed not.

> However, I'll now confine my remarks to (3), hence the
> modified subject line.

And I'll skip them and change the subject line again ;)

> [snip]
> 
> Now to ponder (1) again.  ;)

Yes.  The good old briefscript idea.  Or speedtalk:
a language with so many phonemes and so few morphemes that
all morphemes are exactly one phoneme long.  I have a plan
for such a language on the back burner; I call it "Quetch",
which is an anglicization of the actual name [kʷətç], which
means 'language of small time' (/kʷ/ 'to speak', /t/ 'time',
/ç/ 'small'; /ə/ is an attribute linker which can be omitted
if that doesn't cause problems).  The language does not
distinguish between nouns, verbs and adjectives, which are
all consonants (so are pronouns); prepositions and
conjunctions are vowels.  The word order is head-initial.
So the word [kʷətç] can also be used as 'to speak fast', e.g.
[kʷətçaθ] 'you speak fast' (/a/ agentive case, /θ/ 2nd person
pronoun).

But Ray is so smart that he sets off in the opposite direction
in order to attain a similar goal: he uses a phoneme inventory
that is so small that he can use the Latin alphabet as a
syllabary.

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