briefscript logo

The Briefscript Project


Babm and Lin

The purpose of this page is to show two examples of briefscripts which are not relexifications of English. It would be more satisfactory, perhaps, if the St. Joan passage given in on the "Speedwords is (largely) a relexification of English" page in International Symbolic Script and three different versions of Speedwords, were translated into Babm and Lin. Unfortunately, this is not possible as R. Srikanth has not, as far as I know, given Lin sufficient vocabulary to do this. I have no doubt that a translation into Babm is possible, but I do not know the language nearly well enough to attempt this.

Lin was developed specifically as an experiment to see how compact a language could be. R. Srikanth used some ingenious methods to maximize not merely "word compression" but, indeed, phrase and clause compression. It would be difficult, I think, to produce a significantly more compact language. It is more compact than Speedwords is and, I expect, Piashi will be. But Srikanth did not intend Lin to be an IAL and, therefore, was able to concentrate on the single aim of brevity, so this is only to be expected. But, although Lin is not, for various reasons, suitable as an IAL, it does contain ideas worthy of consideration by someone designing a briefscript, for whatever reason.

Babm, on the other hand, was specifically designed as an IAL and, therefore, does afford direct comparison with Speedwords as regards brevity or compactness.

Babm

The name is pronounced [bɔ'ɑ:bɔmu] and the language was created by Fuishiki Okamoto (Universal Auxiliary Language Babm, Tokyo, 1962). The language thus shares one of the same goals as Speedwords: to be a universal IAL.

Okamoto did not express the aim that his language should also be an alphabetic shorthand. But in fact the language does achieve brevity. One of the reasons for this is that: "...Roman letters are used in quite a different way from existing European languages, namely the pronunciation of the letters is especially determined for every letter respectively..... The respective utterance is the same as the name of letters in Babm carefully chosen among the most clear voices, avoiding any similar sound, so that there is no troublesome need to make some pronunciation by combining a consonant with a vowel."

In otherwords, Okamoto uses the Roman letters not as an alphabet but as a syllabary (as indeed we see in pronunciation of the name Babm).

In fact the same idea had quite independently occurred to me before I knew about Babm. In the late 1950s I experimented with schemes for a "Roman syllabary". In my case, of course, it was specificlly with the aim of achieving brevity.

Three sample sentences:

The three examples are taken from Okamoto's book with his English translation. For the sake of interest, I have added the Speedwords translation for comparison as Speedwords has been claimed to be "the Universal Word-Compression system". To facilitate comparison, monotype font is used for the sentence in each of the three languages.

Babm:  Bcet cojao op clob rayb.
English:  In a civilized society, persons are quite free.
Speedwords:  I u sokyd sok, erz e ga libs.
 
Babm:  V ch migip, V meiqipiru.
English:  If I had studied, I should not have failed in the examination.
Speedwords:  X j hy stu, j yr n h suko i l tese.
 
Babm:  Kodb cmoh kig.
English:  The care of health is absolutely necessary.
Speedwords:  L ene d san e gae nes.
 
Top

Lin

Lin is the creation of R. Srikanth who used to post to the Conlang list under the pseudonym 'Skrintha'. He said of his language:

"Lin is a spacially compact language........
"Lin derives its compactness from the use of small words, avoiding to state contextually-inferrable information and allowing polysemy (multiplicity of meanings) of words which is disambiguated by means of morphology that takes up inter-word spaces."

In fact it was an experiment to see how far compactness could be taken. It is thus clearly a briefscript, but with its polysemy (in practice words generally have enneasemy, i.e. nine possible meanings, but a few have a tenth possible meaning) and its system of 'external and internals cements' (the disambiguating inter-word morphology), few people would deem it suitable as an IAL and Srikanth did not have that aim in mind.

Unlike Babm, it was a work in progress, not a finished work as Okamoto claimed that Babm was when he published it. Early in 1999 Srikanth made Lin version 4.3 files available via file transfer protocol (ftp) and I have hard copies of these but not, alas, electronic copies. In response to requests, I edited and posted the information I have about version 4.3 to the Conlang list in nine emails during March and April 2002. But since that version, Lin had subsequent updates:

  • 4.4: Date 20th April 1999 The alphabetic system was altered. The earlier system in which the non-alphabetic letters (numbers, shift-number signs on the qwerty keyboard) assumed variable sound values was given up. All letters (alphanumeric and signs) are assigned a constant value.
  • 4.5: Date 20th April 1999; Interrogative system revised.
  • 5.0: Date 21 April 1999; Relative Clause structure revisited.
  • 5.0.1: The order in relative clauses can no longer be changed. Null letter "0" to demarcate clause introduced. Thus the old "u v px>N/ i" changes to "u v0i N
  • 5.0.2: The pairs (/) [/] all introduce relative clauses at the 3 generations.
  • 5.0.3: Date 22 April 1999: The distinction between inclusive/exclusive is scrapped.

Click here for Lin version 5.0.3. Unfortunately, version 5.0.3 does not appear to have been finished; links to 4. Postpositions and Morphology and to 7. Notes are not working. However, there is enough information to give the flavor of the language and to give ideas for any one else who wishes to attempt a spatially compact language.

Also, unlike Babm, Lin uses the Roman alphabet as an alphabet, i.e. some letters denote vowels and most denote consonants. However, Srikanth departs from traditional practice in that upper and lower case letters are considered as separate letters and given their own separate sounds. He includes includes the numerals 0 to 9 as characters in his alphabet and the symbols +, =, \, |, *, :, ^, % as well as the single space (U+0020, ASCII 32). In version 4.3 only the alphabetic symbols have constant values; the numeric and other symbols are variable, acting as vowels if between consonants or as diacritics showing vowel length and tone if between vowels, and acting as 'cements' "to disambiguate Lin's nonasemous words."

In version 5.0.3 all the symbols have constant values: the consonant alphabetic symbols (including W, w but not Y, y) have consonantal values (in version 4.3 both W, w and Y, y have vocalic values); the vowel alphabetic symbols, the numeric symbols and the other non-alphanumeric symbols (+, =, \, |, *, :, ^, % and space) all have constant vocalic values. Vowels come in four varieties: short, short+nasal, long, long+nasal. But the table of vowels given does not include y, Y, and one has to ask why. Also we are told that 0 (zero), which also is not part of the vocalic table, "is a vowel pronounced like "er" in "her" OR like "eu" in French "FEU". It is possible to introduce a schwa-sound (or Russian "y") between any two consonants within ßa word."

In version 5.0.3 those vowels denoted by alphabetic symbols may be used as words; the 18 vowels denoted by numeric and non-alphanumeric symbols are used as 'cements' (see above): the former operating within a component, the latter operating across components. There are, in my view, several loose ends that need tidying up both in regard to vowels and the cements which, hopefully, a version 5.0.4 (or indeed 6.0) would have done.

Three sample sentences:

The three examples are taken from Srikanth's own version 5.0.3 examples. Once again, for the sake of interest, I have added the Speedwords translation for comparison and used monotype font for the sentence in each of the three languages.

Lin:  i5o m
English:  The important agreement is possible
Speedwords:  l por kon e ib
 
Lin:  m+n(u a+ki
English:  Management knows that you help the baby
Speedwords:  Regt sa k v opo l june
 
Lin:  u v px # s -v u
English:  You see the bird but it doesn't see you
Speedwords:  V vu l avi b t n vu v.
 
Top