There are 12 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: Padraic Brown
1.2. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: Matthew George
1.3. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: H. S. Teoh
1.4. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: Patrick Dunn
1.5. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: George Corley
1.6. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: Daniel Bowman
2.1. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: Isaac A. Penziev
2.2. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: R A Brown
2.3. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: Roger Mills
3a. Conlanging as Philisophical Exploration
From: Daniel Bowman
3b. Re: Conlanging as Philisophical Exploration
From: James Kane
4a. Re: Creating a Proto-language
From: BPJ
Messages
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1.1. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 1:18 pm ((PDT))
--- On Sat, 3/23/13, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Just popping in to say that me I'd draw the line broad and wide -- if
> > the word is now or has ever been an English word, no matter how
> > ancient, no matter how obscure, no matter how dialectical, no matter
> > how foreign seeming, then it gets counted.
>
> It seems to me that gives an unfair advantage to languages with the
> longest written record.
Not really. I think it can rightly be argued that Indian and Chinese and
Hebrew and so forth all have written records quite a bit longer than ours.
English's sole advantage is, as regards vocabulary size, as I've said many
times in the past, its ability to seek out and take words from other
languages as it wishes. If French or Icelandic want to keep themselves
"pure" by reining in what gets imported, that's fine by me. If English
operates more of a free-for-all smorgasbord of word borrowing, that's
great for us.
> Does that mean we count all of Chaucer's words as English as well?.
Of course. As I said, "no matter how old / how obscure", etc.
> And what about even older Anglo Saxon words?
I'd still count them -- after all, A-S is at the beginnings of our written
record! As I said, I'd draw the line rather broad and wide. But I can
certainly see the sense in excluding A-S words that clearly did not
continue or evolve into Modern English. (After all, if I accept A-S words,
why not Saxon words? Why not go all the way back to Common West Germanic,
or Proto-Indo-European!?) I wouldn't balk too much about Old English not
being counted. I'd be increasingly hesitant about excluding MidE,
especially as time progresses into early ModE.
I don't have a good answer as to where the cut-off should be -- 1066 might
be as good as any. But so is "the date of the first scrap of parchment
with Old English written on it".
The point, as I understand the exercise, is to determine which language
has the most words -- not "which language has the most words given certain
highly circumscribed conditions".
> I would use a much more pragmatic approach and use something like a
> large-circulation English newspaper as my source. If a word appeared
> in print in that newspaper in the last year then I would count it.
I have no problem with this approach in the least -- so long as we're
honest about NOT calling the result any kind of definitive census of
English words, and so long as the results are clearly labeled as to which
domains were left in and which were left out.
I'd agree to call something like this a "census of words used in the LA
Times or the New Yorker" (and one wonders at how different the count might
be between them!) -- but of course, this really can neither support nor
deny the claim that English has the most words. The only real way of
doing that is to find out how many words there actually are! ;)
> If it's too archaic to appear in print today then it's no longer part of
> the language, but has become part of an older ancestral language.
Well, you are certainly welcome to this opinion -- though it's one I hope
most people don't share! I certainly and vehemently reject the very idea.
Even if I agreed about not counting obviously OE or ME words, I would, and
with all due respect, consider any accounting of English words that
specifically left out whole swathes of modern English vocabulary (be they
dialect, rare, scientific, medical or technical terms) to be inaccurate
and utterly unusable.
As far as being "pragmatic", I find it much simpler to actually count
everything, rather than argue about what ought not to be counted. I mean,
if you're counting out a jug of pocket change, do you nòt count the
pennies and nickels, just because they're not worth anything? It's much
more pragmatic, as well as accurate, to throw the whole lot into a
Coinstar machine and find out what's actually there.
Just my opinion, and now, I bow out again.
> --gary
Padraic
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.2. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "Matthew George" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 1:19 pm ((PDT))
There's probably a limit on how many words unwritten languages can possess
- if they're not used regularly, they vanish. Like the monkeysphere, there
are probably constraints as to how much vocabulary a human being can
actually retain - and the words we use are necessarily fewer than those we
can recognize.
How would we compare agglutinating and non-agglutinating languages? Would
we count 'words' or 'morphemes' or what? Because I think that screws up
comparisons quite effectively. English probably has distinct words to
describe states other languages describe just as effectively with compounds
- but the word count in that case wouldn't be related to the *expressiveness
* of the languages.
To pick an example mentioned in the Conlangery podcast: Navajo. It has
(at least) eleven different ways to express "to give", depending on the
nature of the thing(s) given. Are they different words, or different forms
of one word? If the latter, how should we approach constructions in
English like 'atheist' , 'polytheist', 'monotheist', and 'theist' - are
they different forms of one word as well?
The more we think about this question, the more complex it becomes, and the
less obvious it seems that it's important.
Matt G.
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.3. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 2:23 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 04:19:52PM -0400, Matthew George wrote:
> There's probably a limit on how many words unwritten languages can
> possess - if they're not used regularly, they vanish. Like the
> monkeysphere, there are probably constraints as to how much vocabulary
> a human being can actually retain - and the words we use are
> necessarily fewer than those we can recognize.
And herein lies the key to the puzzle: there is no such thing as "the
English language" as an entity that exists apart from its speakers!
Every English speaker has their own personal version of the language,
which is not necessarily the same as the version used by another English
speaker. (In fact, they are in all likelihood different in some way.)
For the most part, they do coincide (and hence we can communicate!), but
I think it is fallacy to imagine that "English" is a single, unambiguous
entity of fixed identity that can be measured in a definitive way (like
how many words there are, etc.).
For the purposes of communication, which is the point of a language, the
speakers of a language do try to conform their respective personal
languages to each other. But this does not necessarily imply that
convergence is 100%, or that it is even possible in theory. There will
always be the need to express novel ideas within the confines of
established language, and so language is constantly undergoing change,
as we all know.
How is this change happening, though? Surely it does not happen by every
single speaker of English suddenly agreeing that expression X should be
a new way of saying something, and therefore, their collective version
of English is spontaneously updated to a newer version that incorporates
X. No, the change begins with a small group of speakers (which may
consist of a single person) seeking to express some novel idea and
thereby coining a new word, and, if it catches on, the new word spreads
to those they are in contact with, etc.. And it may not even spread to
every single English speaker there is, even if it manages to attain
widespread adoption. So there is a group of English speakers who now
incorporate that new word in their version of English, but there is also
the remaining English speakers who haven't yet. Now if we were to take a
census of the number of words in "the English language" at that moment,
would it include this new word or not?
The problem is, there is no definitive answer, because we have not
defined "the English language" unambiguously. What is the threshold N of
the number of speakers who recognize a new word X before it would be
considered a part of "the language"? I would hazard to guess that a
*lot* of common English words have not attained 100% adoption among all
English speakers. Keep in mind that even the notion of an "English
speaker" is by no means unambiguous -- as one example, there is a group
of people in Malaysia whose parents were English-educated, and therefore
only spoke English at home to their children. Their children, therefore,
arguably have the full right to call themselves "native English
speakers" (it *is* the only language they know!); yet the language they
speak is quite foreign to, say, an English speaker from Britain. And
they are all at different levels of mutual comprehensibility with said
English speaker from Britain. At what point would they be counted among
the set of English speakers, by which we will measure the percentage
adoption of new word X? Even within the USA alone, there are different
regional dialects of English associated with their respective regional
groups of English speakers. The fact that we recognize their respective
languages as English dialects proves that there are significant
differences in the languages they speak.
So really, the quest to count the "exact" number of words in "the
English language" is futile, because it is unclear where the exact
boundaries of "the English language" lie, which version thereof we're
referring to, which regional dialect we regard as "standard", and, even
if we somehow manage to pin all of that down, we are still left with the
problem that every English speaker has a personal version of the
language that, practically speaking, consists of only a subset of the
"full" language (i.e., used by other English speakers).
The only two clear alternatives therefore are two extremes:
(1) Take the union of the set of all versions of English of all English
speakers across time and space, which is what Raymond proposed; or,
(2) Take the intersection of the set of all versions of English of all
English speakers across time and space. This set, in all likelihood,
will be laughably tiny (all it takes is for *one* person among the
millions to not know some word X for it to be excluded from the result
-- almost all words would be thus excluded!).
Anything in-between (which, unfortunately, is where the region of
practicality lies) will rely on arbitrary judgment calls as to what
should or shouldn't be included, and therefore no agreement will ever be
reached.
And this is assuming we agree on the definition of "word", which is yet
another can of worms that will banish this already futile situation to
the remotest ends of futility.
[...]
> The more we think about this question, the more complex it becomes,
> and the less obvious it seems that it's important.
[...]
Exactly!!
T
--
Some days you win; most days you lose.
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.4. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "Patrick Dunn" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 5:14 pm ((PDT))
The English language (all natural languages, actually) doesn't have a
birthdate. If you include any word, no matter how ancient, then you must
stretch back to Middle English, Old English, Proto-Germanic, PIE, and back
and back and back.
And then there are non-words that nonetheless find their way into
dictionaries, such as dord. Do we include them, because someone once
thought that "D or d" was a word?
Also, the definition of "word" isn't simple. I will argue that
"extra-large pepperoni pizza" is a single word, no matter how it's written,
because it's morphologically impenetrable -- you can't say "extra-large
delicious pepperoni pizza" without it sounding odd or wrong.
On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> --- On Sat, 3/23/13, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > > I think it would be more useful to look at the words people actually
> > > 1) recognize, and then 2) use. If a word is in the OED, but is never
> > > found in the general culture - or anywhere outside of obscure literary
> > > backwaters - there's not a lot of practical difference between that
> > > word being part of the language and being truly foreign.
> > >
> > > Technical terms exist in every language that needs them - adopted if
> > > necessary. So I don't think they should be counted. [...]
> >
> > The distinction is not clear-cut, though. For example, words like
> > "oxygen" or "carbon monoxide" are clearly technical terms, yet in this
> > day and age most people understand them even if they are non-chemists.
> > And while most people *wouldn't* know what "monosodium glutamate" refers
> > to, they *would* understand what its acronym "MSG" is.
> >
> > So where does one draw the line?
>
> Just popping in to say that me I'd draw the line broad and wide -- if the
> word is now or has ever been an English word, no matter how ancient, no
> matter how obscure, no matter how dialectical, no matter how foreign
> seeming, then it gets counted. Just because a word is spelled with funny
> little marks over some of the letters doesn't make it any less English.
> MacKay said it best, of all our immigrant and newly coined words:
> "[English] borrows, it steals, it assimilates what words it pleases from
> all points of the compass, and asks no questions of them, but that they
> shall express thoughts and describe circumstances more tersely and more
> accurately than any of the old words beside which they are invited to take
> their places."
>
> I see no problem at all with highly technical words or specialist words
> and so also have no issue at all with older or more obscure terms. Like
> with an honest census, if you're going to cut corners by arbitrarily
> leaving out whole segments of the total lexicon, then any answer you
> arrive at will be murchy cogging.
>
> We may never be able to say with absolute confidence "English has 849,423
> words" -- we may never be able to say better than "English has something
> like 850k words, give or take a few thousand". But it's better than lazily
> saying "well, we didn't want to be bothered with all these horribly long
> organic molocules; or foreign food; or any word that hasn't been used since
> 1800; or any other word we just couldn't be bothered with -- so we just
> ended up averaging the number of words per page in the AHD and hey presto!
> English has 482,123 words!"
>
> The *only* line I'd draw a little bit narrow is obvious inflexional forms.
> So, "car" and "cars" or "see" and "sees" don't count as two words -- both
> have the same fundamental meaning. The only time a grammatical termination
> should be counted as a word is if, for example, the plural of something
> has a different meaning from the singular. For example, "men" where it has
> the connotation of a team or a group of soldiers. I could be argued away
> from this bit of line drawing, mind, if it proved to be to unuseful in the
> context.
>
> Padraic
>
> > T
>
>
--
Second Person, a chapbook of poetry by Patrick Dunn, is now available for
order from Finishing Line
Press<http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm>
and
Amazon<http://www.amazon.com/Second-Person-Patrick-Dunn/dp/1599249065/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1324342341&sr=8-2>.
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.5. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 5:36 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 7:13 PM, Patrick Dunn <[email protected]> wrote:
> The English language (all natural languages, actually) doesn't have a
> birthdate. If you include any word, no matter how ancient, then you must
> stretch back to Middle English, Old English, Proto-Germanic, PIE, and back
> and back and back.
>
True, which is why we need a test to see if a word is in current usage --
setting an arbitrary date wouldn't do well either.
> And then there are non-words that nonetheless find their way into
> dictionaries, such as dord. Do we include them, because someone once
> thought that "D or d" was a word?
>
I'd think that would be at trivial case. Unless "dord" has gained some
currency on its own (perhaps as a word for this type of error, for
example), we shouldn't count it, but I think that's an issue of careful
data gathering and publication, not so much "oh is this a word or not?"
> Also, the definition of "word" isn't simple. I will argue that
> "extra-large pepperoni pizza" is a single word, no matter how it's written,
> because it's morphologically impenetrable -- you can't say "extra-large
> delicious pepperoni pizza" without it sounding odd or wrong.
Actually, I can, but _*pepperoni delicious pizza_ is completely wrong.
That said, I might consider it a word in a certain sense -- it acts like
one syntactically -- but it is not a lexical item. English is capable of
creating these sorts of nonce compounds on the fly, even having more
complex structures, like "university network systems engineer". There are,
of course, lexical compounds as well, like "blackbird" and "greenhouse",
so, although there are some that will be clear, the fine line between these
two might be a little difficult to find.
I would argue that "pepperoni pizza" is a nonce only because it's meaning
is so transparent and compositional, especially when you compare it to
myriad similar constructions: sausage pizza, cheese
pizza, anchovy-and-pepper pizza, apple pie, pumpkin pie, meat pie. We seem
to have a general category of compounds of the form XY with the meaning "a
Y made with X" that seems quite productive (I could, say, coin a term
"pepperoni pie" if I had a need for it.) Then again, there might be some
compounds that seem similar, but might be a little less compositional in
meaning -- for me a "cheese cake" is a very specific thing, and has some
other necessary physical qualities other than the requirement of including
cheese in a cake-like form.
Of course, now you've got me thinking about food and my groceries aren't
here yet :P
Messages in this topic (40)
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1.6. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 9:16 pm ((PDT))
I started this thread to address my uneasiness with the assertion "English
has the most words of any language." Contrary to my expectations, I've
been convinced that this assertion is probably true. However, I am more
inclined to think that it is an ill posed problem. I agree with list
members who say that the English word count cannot be determined exactly.
I am interested to see two main divisions on how the list addressed this
problem. The "preservationist" strain claims that all words that are or
ever were in use should be considered in the count. This puts words not
used since Chaucer (or before) on par with "sexting" and other bright eyed
newborns.
The "modernist" strain asserts that only words in use now should be
considered. They cite surveying methods that might allow some sort of
quantification of the number of words in use, methods that could shed light
on how English measures up to other languages.
I lean towards the modernist interpretation. While English has a vast
backlog of historical vocabulary, if most of the native English speaking
population cannot use this vocabulary, then it should not count. If it did
count, then the richness of a given language is related on the existence
and length of its written record.
It is clear that the definition of "word" itself is an ill posed problem,
but even if global assertions about English cannot be made, the
quantification methods proposed by modernists could still shed light on the
question that started this thread.
I challenged the person who claimed English had the most words primarily
because it sounded Anglocentric. Such word counts are in some measure
"dick-measuring," though perhaps not as much as they would be in the
conlanging world. However, I'm pleased to see that the question has
generated problems of real interest, some of which may actually be solvable.
When all is said and done, I am not sure if I want to be a native speaker
of the world's biggest lexicon. On one hand, it is be a point of pride
(let's get our rulers out), and might indicate that such a language has an
easier time expressing complicated concepts. On the other hand, it might
mean that my native language is dragging a whole trainload of baggage that
is rarely, if ever, useful to the modern speaker (unless s/he is a linguist
or a conlanger :-)).
Danny
Messages in this topic (40)
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2.1. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "Isaac A. Penziev" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 3:07 pm ((PDT))
23.03.2013 10:28, R A Brown пиÑеÑ:
> Yes, Finnish is often quoted as an example of an
> agglutinative language; but clearly from what both you and,
> indeed, BPJ have written, it has fusional elements as well.
I would say, Turkish is a much better example of an agglutinative language.
Yitzik
Messages in this topic (36)
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2.2. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "R A Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sun Mar 24, 2013 12:56 am ((PDT))
On 23/03/2013 22:07, Isaac A. Penziev wrote:
> 23.03.2013 10:28, R A Brown пиÑеÑ:
>> Yes, Finnish is often quoted as an example of an
>> agglutinative language; but clearly from what both you
>> and, indeed, BPJ have written, it has fusional elements
>> as well.
> I would say, Turkish is a much better example of an
> agglutinative language.
I know; I would say so also.
But it doesn't help much with the problems I've
cited in fusional languages, or languages with significant
fusional elements. ;)
======================================================
On 23/03/2013 16:34, David McCann wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:50:47 +0000 R A Brown wrote:
>
>> How does one analyze _sing ~ sang ~ sung_
>> morphemically?
>
> The 1940s structuralists like Harris would say sang =
> sing + PAST where "sang" is an allomorph of "sing" and
> PAST has a zero allomorph.
...and, presumably, _sung_ = sing + PERFECT PARTICIPLE,
where PP has a zero allomorph ;)
> The problem then was that they'd defined a morpheme as a
> set of allomorphs in complementary distribution. So how
> do you study the distribution of zero?
Presumably you contrast zero with the -(e)d of 'weak verbs',
and the -t of 'mixed verbs;, i.e.
love ~ love.d ~ love.d
buy ~ bough.t ~bough.t
The PP morpheme then also contrasts with the -n(e) of other
strong verbs: e.g. see, saw, see.n
Suppletion adds, of course, another jolly element:
go, went, go.ne
Can you really say "went" = go + PAST?
> A better approach would be to say that the word "sang" is
> exponent of the lexeme "sing" in the context +PAST, while
> PAST has no exponent in the context +sing.
Yes, but isn't saying that "sang" is an exponent of the
lexeme "sing" tantamount to saying it is an allomorph of
"sing"? Which is what I began by saying. If
> Generative linguistics would have yet another
> description. The assumption (common to Harris and
> Chomsky) that any descriptive technique is the only true
> method and applicable to all languages is one that I find
> unconvincing.
So do I.
> My favourite book on the subject is Morphology, by P. H.
> Matthews.
Thank you. I'll investigate.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language ⦠began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (36)
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2.3. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Sun Mar 24, 2013 4:34 am ((PDT))
That is all true. But keep in mind that Chomsky cut his teeth, so to speak,
under Z.Harris (IIRC), and TG was actually kind-of based on structuralism.
Your phrase structure rules would generate a string .... Past + Sing...-- in
the Transformational rules, later in the Phonological rules, there would be a
the statements: :
T-rule: Past + Verb --> Verb + Past (this allows for the regular affixation of
//-d//
P-rule: /SING/ + past --> /SANG/
The exceptional cases like this would be specific P-rules; and would be stated
first; the final, general "elsewhere" rule would simply be
Past --> { /@d/ / [+Cons -cont +coronal] } (to cover e.g. PAT > patted)
{ /-d/ } all other regular cases.
(with a later rule, of course, devoicing /-d/ after voiceless +continuants.)
Isn't that pretty much the way it works, no matter how you analyze it????
Or am I mired in the past? ;-)))
===============================================================
--- On Sat, 3/23/13, David McCann <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:50:47 +0000
R A Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> How does one analyze _sing ~ sang ~ sung_ morphemically?
The 1940s structuralists like Harris would say
sang = sing + PAST
where "sang" is an allomorph of "sing" and PAST has a zero allomorph.
The problem then was that they'd defined a morpheme as a set of
allomorphs in complementary distribution. So how do you study the
distribution of zero?
A better approach would be to say that the word "sang" is exponent of
the lexeme "sing" in the context +PAST, while PAST has no exponent in
the context +sing.
Generative linguistics would have yet another description. The
assumption (common to Harris and Chomsky) that any descriptive
technique is the only true method and applicable to all languages
is one that I find unconvincing.
==============================================
RM Well,_all languages_ may be a stretch, though it can be done it with a fair
amount of contortions. But it works I suspect for most of the standard
European langs. (Certainly Spanish has entirely regular formations in the
Imperfect-- -ar verbs all > -(a)ba, -er and -ir verbs all > -ía, and I can't
think of any exceptions aside from 'ser > era'. Preterits ad participles of
course are another matter..........)
============================================
My favourite book on the subject is Morphilogy, by P. H. Matthews.
Messages in this topic (36)
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3a. Conlanging as Philisophical Exploration
Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 23, 2013 10:26 pm ((PDT))
Hi All,
My conlang Angosey was once a strictly hermetic language, and I used it during
adolescence and young adulthood to work out certain philosophical (and I
suppose, psychological) concepts of selfhood and relation to the 'other'. I've
started exploring this process on my blog, and I just posted "Splitting the
Soul: How Angosey Taught Me Philosophy." I thought I would pass it on to
everyone, you can read it here:
http://glossarch.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/splitting-the-soul-how-angosey-taught-me-philosophy/
Danny
Messages in this topic (2)
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3b. Re: Conlanging as Philisophical Exploration
Posted by: "James Kane" [email protected]
Date: Sun Mar 24, 2013 12:44 am ((PDT))
This is very cool!
On 3/24/13, Daniel Bowman <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> My conlang Angosey was once a strictly hermetic language, and I used it
> during adolescence and young adulthood to work out certain philosophical
> (and I suppose, psychological) concepts of selfhood and relation to the
> 'other'. I've started exploring this process on my blog, and I just posted
> "Splitting the Soul: How Angosey Taught Me Philosophy." I thought I would
> pass it on to everyone, you can read it here:
>
> http://glossarch.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/splitting-the-soul-how-angosey-taught-me-philosophy/
>
> Danny
>
--
(This is my signature.)
Messages in this topic (2)
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4a. Re: Creating a Proto-language
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Sun Mar 24, 2013 2:16 am ((PDT))
On 2013-03-23 16:55, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews wrote:
> Thanks. Didn't even know we had IPa Braille.
A terribly heretical thought:
Provided that your ordinary Braille system has a
notation for such 'computerish' symbols as @
(commercial at), & (ampersand) and \ (backslash) you
may be better served by a straight transliteration of
CXS (Conlang X-SAMPA) into your ordinary Braille system
since you then can use the 'same system' for writing
IPA in Braille and when communicating with other
conlangers.
CXS is the system for transliterating IPA into ASCII
which we used extensively on this mailing list before
we could use Unicode, and still occasionally use e.g.
when writing on a smartphone where it is hard to enter
Unicode IPA. CXS is described at
<http://www.theiling.de/ipa/>. (Look at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII> if you don't know
what ASCII is!)
I hope all the tables on that CXS page are accessible
to you. It has tables where each symbol is shown with
the CXS symbol in the top row and the IPA symbol in the
bottom row of a one-column, two-row table inside a cell
of another table, which makes everything very clear for
a sighted person but probably less so with a
screenreader, I'm afraid.
For the purpose of checking the accessibility of
webpages I write myself I installed have a screen
reader 'emulator' which gives a print approximation of
how a screenreader would render a page, and it does not
make the CXS page look promising!
If you like I can write up, or rather have the computer
write up, a list of all CXS symbols and their
corresponding Unicode characters along with their
Unicode character names and their phonetic description.
It's not something I will have time to do right away
but I have anyway planned to do something like that for
a computer program I've been meaning to write.
Ideally a screenreader would say "voiceless
palatoalveolar fricative" when it sees an Ê, or even
synthesize the sound from the Unicode symbol, but I
don't know if that could be set up. As you have
probably seen the IPA Braille page Garth linked to has
links to instructions for setting up screenreaders to
handle Unicode IPA.
In case you wonder I care about accessibility
because I have cerebral palsy myself and one of my
friends is color blind. That has heightened my
awareness. I guess a lot of modern webpages are
terrible from a screenreader point of view. They
certainly are when it comes to navigate with the
keyboard rather than a mouse!
Regards,
/bpj
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On
> Behalf Of Garth Wallace
> Sent: Friday, March 22, 2013 10:49 PM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Creating a Proto-language
>
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 12:15 AM, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'll look for that as well. I'll try audio first, and Braille as a last
>> resort.
>
>
> Speaking of braille, you might find this link handy:
> http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~reng/BrlIPA.html
>
> It's about IPA Braille in particular, and IPA accessibility in
> general. I can't personally vouch for it, but it seems promising.
>
Messages in this topic (26)
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