An Idea, which is Mine, which I Have

[packbat]

Quick background – I've been reading a lot of online stuff talking about conlangs.

Constructed languages, colloquially known as conlangs, are just that: languages which someone, or some ones, invented. Esperanto is a famous one; others include Tolkien's Elvish languages, Klingon, and many more. I don't know much about them; apparently, there is a conlangs LJ community, and the Language Construction Kit is a well-known resource in the field. My connection is mainly through the several persons whose online material I find interesting, who also have created languages.


Nevertheless, I have an idea. An idea which is probably as banal as that proposed in the Monty Python sketch which I referenced in the title, but still, an idea.


My idea is a trade language. Specifically, a trade language where there is no unique pronunciation. Any speaker of the language would, as part of the interaction with another speaker, be able to redefine what the fundamental set of phonemes are.

This idea was loosely inspired by the Vernor Vinge book A Fire Upon the Deep. One of the intelligent species in the book (actually, multiple ones, but that's not important) is able to speak many phonemes that humans cannot. It occurred to me that there should be a language which does not require the humans to make those sounds. Then, it occurred to me that such a language need not have any predefined sounds associated with it; that way, any set of sounds could be used.

Now, there are several obvious obstacles inherent in this. One is arranging the language so that impossible-to-speak arrangements of sounds do not arise. Another is arranging it so that speakers can negotiate each others' languages: if I cannot distinguish, or even hear, some of the sounds you planned to use, I need to be able to inform you of that.

In spite of these, I think such a language would be cool. Perhaps it wouldn't be useful, or practical, or elegant, but it would be interesting. And it could be useful for fiction purposes, if I wanted a language for some of the characters to speak.


As a point of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if such a language has already been formed. I'd love to see it, if it has.

Comments

Heinlein's GULF (Speedtalk), Lempel-Ziv compression, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

good idea (which is yours!) --- and in response, a few tangentially-relevant linguistic tidbits come to mind from my ill-spent youth of reading too much sf:

• Robert A. Heinlein's short novel GULF includes "Speedtalk", a super-efficient language for faster & better communicating & thinking
  
• BABEL-17 by Samuel R. Delaney; I esp. like the excerpt that I found: "Babel-17 is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at."
  
• title unknown, but as mentioned in http://zhurnal.net/HalfRememberedWorlds, a story set on: "a surreal planet where, as one moves toward the poles, time flows faster, words get shorter, language becomes crisper"
  

OK, the above are mostly about efficient languages, not adaptive ones ... sorry!

and perhaps slightly-more-relevant, I seem to remember that"Lempel-Ziv" (or LZW) and related adaptive data compression algorithms rely on building a "dictionary" of substrings as they are encountered during a scan through the stream being compressed ... presumably users of your adaptive-phoneme language(s) would negotiate a set of sounds to use at the start of the conversation ... and of course, the two (or more) parties in a chat wouldn't need to be using the same vocabulary of phonemes ... I esp. like your observation that the set of sounds one can hear isn't the same as the set of sounds one can make ...

Best, ^z

P.S. some perhaps-amusing links found while looking up Heinlein/GULF/language refs:
* http://home.inreach.com/sl2120/Introduction%201.htm
* http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=747641
* http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=138

Re: Heinlein's GULF (Speedtalk), Lempel-Ziv compression, etc.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your comments! I remember reading Babel-17 – the whole "efficient language" idea, as you term it, seems connected to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis): the idea that the language you read and think in affects how you think.

... presumably users of your adaptive-phoneme language(s) would negotiate a set of sounds to use at the start of the conversation ...

I quite agree. I didn't know about the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm, although I can remember you speaking to me of it (for some reason, it's associated with jogging up the hill towards the rail crossing at the country store!) and I had some thoughts already on the procedures that might be used for such a negotiation. Actually, part of my thoughts were that there could be two sets of sounds, one per speaker; the language was intended to support communication between parties whose speech capacities did not much overlap.