New CBB

The wrong way to approach what? Just to be clear: I wasn't talking about "the observed tendency" at all.



I know that. Do you know any natlang that uses the word order "conj X Y"?



My intention is that my conlang should handle any sentence of any complexity without upper limit unambiguously.

Why address a problem that isn't there? Yes, my conlang doesn't allow that.



The reason I wrote "and otherwise having pleasing design" is that it's easy to make an unambiguous language with SVO word order, the solutions that I've so far found, however, doesn't please me aesthetically.

I mean "ambiguity" in "the strict, logical sense".

I was referring to you saying a language is "... either ambiguous or unambiguous". It's a little like saying "shades of gray are either black or white". Perhaps there is some engelang or loglang that has entirely eliminated ambiguity, at least syntactic ambiguity. But outside of extremely careful construction of a language that humans probably couldn't use effectively, I can't see anyone creating a totally unambiguous language.



No, though I wouldn't be surprised if it existed somewhere.



OK. So you are creating a loglang.



I didn't know the problem wasn't there until you told me. That's why I asked the question.



Fair. You are entitled to your own aesthetic opinions.

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

*implosion of the mind*

Hey, wait. I did have an idea for an entirely vowel-less language. It would be tonal, mostly voiceless, full of plosives and ejectives, a couple of voiceless ingressive, inspirated stops (the totally reverse airflow of an aspirated stop, I don't think quite the same as "voiceless implosives"), and it would be stress-timed and often metronomic. Think of beatboxing as a language. And I may have been inspired by that one scene in Men in Black II. I'd call it pʼː tʼ pʼː kʼ or something.

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Hra'anh, Ponese

Could it be tonal of it's mostly voiceless? Or are you referring to the few voiced sounds that actually exist?

When you say 'vowel-less', do you mean 'no vowel phonemes' or 'no vowel sounds at all'?

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constructedlanguages.net

uh, hi. Is anyone else having issues playing these podcasts?

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"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever."

A number of people seem to be, yeah.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

I suppose all its vowels would be completely devoiced. And the tonal system is just an illusion based on the way things are articulated. Lots of non-pulmonic consonants with tense (resulting in "high tone") and lax (resulting in "low tone") articulations.

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Hra'anh, Ponese

Super awesome to get Jim Henry on the show: Conlangery #49: The Noun Phrase

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

Whether a language is unambiguous or not is a binary opposition, even if it is a matter of degree how ambiguous an ambiguous language is.



My point is that having VSO word order and allowing nouns to be used attributively isn't a problem to begin with. Only if you make a lot of assumptions about the rest of the language will it be a problem.

Please show me a totally unambiguous language. If any of the loglangs and engelangs out there have achieved zero ambiguity, I highly doubt it's a user-friendly one.



This confuses me. Are you saying that it wouldn't be a problem even if it did have attributive nouns? Or are you suggesting that I assumed that the language had attributive nouns a priori (which I didn't, I asked you whether it had them)?

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

Looks good. I've been thinking a lot about sound changes, and this'll help a lot.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

= | = | =

Just listened to the last two podcasts, and both were very interesting. I especially liked the episode about writing technology.

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| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

A little departure to celebrate a year of episodes: Conlangery#52: Conlangery at the Movies

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

This should be stickied.

Congratulations on a year of podcasting.

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♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

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| | | (Nahuatl) | (Sanskrit & Pali) (Yaghan) | (Antregabua)
CrazyEttin's Lair

Why does whether any conlang has achieved it matter?

I'm not talking about the set of existing languages, but the set of possible languages.

What's the source of your doubt?

In my conlang, whenever a clause is directly followed by an adverb phrase, it must be terminated with a particle that indicates that the clause ends there, otherwise the adverb phrase will unambiguously be a part of that clause. Likewise, whenever a noun phrase is directly followed by an adjective phrase, it must be terminated with a particle that indicates that the noun phrase ends there, otherwise the adjective phrase will unambiguously be a part of that noun phrase. This principle applies to all constituent types that have heads that could take modifiers.

Also, every word that takes arguments have a single valency, and the number of overt arguments must exactly match this valency. Thus if you have a bivalent verb you are prohibited from leaving out the object, instead you need to use an anti-passive voice or something else to reduce the valency of the verb if you want to omit it, e.g. "I know" and "I know it" use different forms of the verb "know".

It also has an anaphoric system where anaphoric "pronouns" incorporate a part of the root of their antecedent to unambiguously refer back to the latest clause or noun phrase where the head verb or noun contained that root segment, and if you want to refer back to the previous possible clause or noun phrase you add another affix to the anaphor, and you could add any number of such affixes to refer back to any possible antecedent that might have appeared far before the anaphor.

Additionally, the language lacks polysemy and null derivation completely.

These are some highlights that hopefully help you see how a language could be unambiguous without being unnatural or ridiculously complex. That is, the unnatural feature of being unambiguous for arbitrarily complex sentences emerges from the interaction of simple and natural features.

(My conlang isn't finished, but that isn't due to any problem in creating an unambiguous language. The reason I'm not finished is that there are a lot of other design criteria that I try to make it satisfy, e.g. that it should have only one open lexical class. Creating a language that has no other design criteria than being unambiguous is no challenge and no fun.)



What does that last "it" refer to? Does it refer to my main conlang, or does it refer to that generic hypothetical language I was talking about? If the former: No, if I changed my conlang to allow them and made no other change to it, then it would become ambiguous. If the latter: Yes. A language that is VSO and allows nouns to be used attributively could be unambiguous. It depends on the other features of the langauge, and there is no primacy to the features that would make it ambiguous, thus assuming that the unstated features are such that the language is ambiguous just begs the question.



No.

I second the motion!

(and I agree with the following)