Re: Plausibility Check



Franz Gnaedinger wrote:

DJensen wrote:

Is anyone willing to give me some feedback on the below points, or has
my flaunting of linguistic history (in speculating on events,
societies, organizations, etc in a hypothetical future) soured too many
people?

I wrote:

I assumed that given their global dominance, Rosetta would be most
influenced by [English, French, Hindi, Mandarin, etc) on all fronts.
Even after centuries and reforms,
their phonological footprint would remain. The sounds of the seed
languages are no longer fully represented in Rosetta, because I've
trimmed away the sounds that were the least common.

Phonology:
Consonants (36): m n n^ N p b t d t. c k g q ? f v T D s z s. z. x h h?
r r<trl> r" l j w<vls> w dz ts ts. dz.
Vowels (16): i y u I U e @<umd> @ o E O" O & &. a a.
(based on sci.lang's FAQ's guideline, as best as I could decipher)

(Note: Devanagari has 34 consonants and 12 vowels represented, so the
numbers I listed for Rosetta are not that unrealistic.)

Could someone say what Devanagari is? (A living or an extinct
language and where?)

BTW, I happened to come upon an ancient article written by
a British linguist Francis Lodowyck in Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc.
(1686) entitled "Essays towards an universal alphabet". That
alphabet, motivated by phonetic considerations, has, if
I counted right, 38 consonants and 14 vowels. A transcription
of "The Lords Prayer in English" in that alphabet was given
as an example.

[snip]

What is the plot of your novel? You spoke of a posthuman era.
What do you mean by that? a time after a nuclear war? or
a new species? Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens? or perhaps
humans in a new shape, genetically modified? Some years ago
I read an article in The Scientific American, as I recall, wherein
doctors improved the human body according to their ideas. If
this should be possible one day, and if also the voice apparatus
should be inflicted, language will change. Language also changes
with technology -- the more self constructed things we use, the
more words we create. English in the time of Shakespeare had
some 200,000 words, information technology alone introduced
200,000 new English words. What you need for your novel are
a clear idea about the people and their material culture. Then
you might experiment with language. For exampel yu mait jast
wrait words as spouken. Luks fanny. Then you might follow words
into the future by pronouncing them silently, over and over again,
and observe what happens to them. When you voice the words,
the phonological system of the brain sets in and keeps them
in place within what I call the verbal morphospace, which is the
reason why languages are so stable, but when you pronounce
words without giving voice, over and over and over again, they
can shift and drift. You have to try out, it's fun. So far my advice.
For the time being I can't say more, as I know nothing about the
plot of your novel.

Perhaps sometime in future one wouldn't even need to speak
at all. For scientists are endeavouring to establish
communication channels to the brain. Certain disabled persons
who can't type on the keyboard can already operate the computer
by means of their "thought".

M. K. Shen

.

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