Hallo conlangers!

On 03.08.2015 17:12, And Rosta wrote:

> R A Brown, On 03/08/2015 12:11:
>> If we use 'phonology' in its broader sense, then IMO talking
>> about the arbitrary division of a bit stream into quartets
>> as sixteen phonemes also does not make sense.  The smallest
>> significant unit in Plan B is a bit, i.e. it has only two
>> 'phonemes' - 0 1
>
> IIUC, morphological forms would be built out of quartets.

Yes.  The number of bits a morpheme is built of is *always* divisible by 
4.  Hence, the division of the bit stream into quartets is *not* 
arbitrary.  It is relevant to the structure of the language.

> There's nothing in the structure of the language itself that reveals 
> that the quartets are made of bits, is there? 

There is!  The length of a morpheme is indicated by the number of 
consecutive 1s at the begin of the morpheme, plus 1.  So if the first 
bit is 0, the length is 1 bit quartet.  If the first two bits are 10, 
the length is 2 bit quartets.  If the first three bits are 110, the 
length is 3 bit quartets.  And so on.  Thus, there *is* something in the 
structure of the language that reveals that the quartets are made of bits.

> --The bits seem to exist only in the inventor's imagination.

Nope; see above.

> So it looks like the quartets are the minimal combinatorial unit. And 
> hence it looks like there are sixteen phonemes.

Yes (in the extended sense the word _phoneme_ is applied, e.g., to sign 
languages); I think the bit quartets are the closest equivalent of the 
phonemes of an ordinary human language.  Sure, they are not spoken 
sounds, and each bit quartet has two *utterly different* spoken 
realizations which would, in an ordinary human language, could not be 
considered a single phoneme - but Plan B is *not* an ordinary human 
language!  Plan B is an engelang whose primary realization is as a 
language of bit quartets, and whose structure depends on these 16 units 
and their nature *as bit quartets*.

That each of the 16 bit quartets has an internal structure of bits does 
not mean that they cannot be held to be phonemes; after all, human 
language phonemes also have internal structure: they are collections of 
phonetic features.  The spoken realization of Plan B which Prothero 
proposed is as secondary to the structure of the language as the written 
representation is secondary to a human natlang.

Ray's argument for the *bits* being the "phonemes" of Plan B is not 
entirely baseless - they are the smallest units; they do not carry 
meaning in themselves; but when you change one bit, you change the 
meaning of the whole utterance -  but I would rather compare the bits to 
phonetic features as they do not occur *independently* but only as 
members of bit quartets.

One of course arrives at a different results if one considers the 
phonemes of the *spoken realization* of Plan B, as each bit quartet has 
a consonantal and a vocalic realization which are wholly different (if 
it wasn't for the internal structure of the vocalic realizations, that 
would amount to *32* phonemes - two for each bit quartet)!  But that is 
actually, as Ray said, a red herring, as Plan B is fundamentally a 
language of bit quartets, and the spoken realization secondary.

One must thus always be clear about *which* phonemes one is talking 
about - those of the bit quartet language or those of the spoken 
realization!

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