Small Language Design- Choosing Meanings

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janKipo
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Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:20 pm

Re: Small Language Design- Choosing Meanings

Post by janKipo »

I want to continue this but the need to do taxes intervenes. For the interim I leave two notes:
1) I jotted down everything my wife and I said to one another one day and then tried translating them into tp. In the context, I didn't find anything that required more syllables than the English and nothing that would be obscure to a person coming into the scene from without. But then, we don't talk a lot.
2) Science has shown and developmental experts continue to ignore that sign languages is the best tool to teach communication to the uncommunicative (barring obvious exceptions).
janMato
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Re: Small Language Design- Choosing Meanings

Post by janMato »

janKipo wrote:I want to continue this but the need to do taxes intervenes. For the interim I leave two notes:
1) I jotted down everything my wife and I said to one another one day and then tried translating them into tp. In the context, I didn't find anything that required more syllables than the English and nothing that would be obscure to a person coming into the scene from without. But then, we don't talk a lot.
I've got a teenager at home. This makes it difficult to speak with him in English, not to speak of tp, since he's often in a lawyer-like, actively-trying-not-to-understand mode. In these scenarios, imho, a phrase that doesn't require a co-operative listener would come in handy, if only for when people have a chance to cool down and remember what was said earlier.
janKipo wrote:2) Science has shown and developmental experts continue to ignore that sign languages is the best tool to teach communication to the uncommunicative (barring obvious exceptions).
I think the world has got the point on that-- I don't hear too much about attempts to get the deaf to talk vocally. What I did run into was attempts to use various communication boards, that in effect are conlangs of various levels of sophistication, but these are conlangs that aren't even targeted at the non-disabled community. So these systems have a hard time getting off of the ground for lack of any focus on building a community. If such a system was compatible with a spoken version at some level and if the system offered some benefit to ordinary people, there would be larger communities for the people who have to use these systems. Anyhow, I'm no expert, I'm going on pure reason, a short conversation at book club and the chapter in Arika Orkent's book about Blissymbols.

Also, I recently saw a movie about autistic children that have to laboriously type their thoughts a letter at time, there's Hawkings (the physicist) who uses an alphabet keyboard. It seems that in both scenarios, a small language system would probably have a higher throughput than English-a-letter-at-at-time without the size of the keyboard getting too large.
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