Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

Dan Sulani wrote:

>    OTOH, of course, sometimes, we just like to play with
>ideas! :-)
>    Forget "real". What _would_ a non-real conlang involve?
>    How about non-real in the _mathematical_ sense?
>Instead of using what are known as "real"  numbers
>for the three dimensions in which the speech articulators
>(tongue, lips, etc)  are usually described as moving around in,
>how about using a system of complex numbers?
>(For those who haven't had the joy of meeting them,
>they are basically numbers which have both a real
>component and a component which involves the square
>root of minus one.).
>
And what, pray tell, is the purpose of these beasts? What problem can't
be solved with real numbers that it requires us to take the sqrt of -1?
is it a ligitimate problem?[1] and how about the sqrt of -5? or the 4th
root (is that the right term?) of -1? are they both imaginary numbers
and as useful as i? [2]

[1]: I don't know how one might define that, so you can be generous.
[2]: I haven't officially come across imaginary numbers, but I've heard
a bit about them. Basically that i=sqrt(-1) and not much more... We're
supposed to come across them sometime in one of the Maths I'm doing this
semester...

> One could then ignore or reduce to
>zero the "real" part of the measurement of each speech
>movement, and use, for a conlang, only the "imaginary" part.
>    One could "speak" a lang with this kind of phonology
>without producing any "real" mouth movements! :-)
>    Of course,  _listening_  to such a lang might be
>a little bit of a challenge! ;-)
>
>
Nevertheless, I'm going to have to work on a language that has it! I
wonder if it's compatible with Pidse! :)

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>

There's no such thing as an infinite loop. Eventually, the computer will break.
-- John D. Sullivan

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle:
You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."

- Alan Perlis

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