An Experimental Conlang:
Introduction & External History

• The use of the Yì Jīng (I Ching) hexagrams does not imply that I endorse Taoism, the teachings of the Yì Jīng or any associated philosophy.
• Nor, on the other hand, is it my intention to satirize the Yì Jīng or parody oligosynthetic languages. I do not wish to cause anyone any offense.
• The language is pure whimsy on my part and is being developed simply as a mind exercise

[1: Plan B & Plan C] [2: Oligosynthetic language] [Problems & Solution]
 

The origin of the language

This language has no name yet and results from two discussions on the Conlang list :

1. September 2005¹ about Jeff Prothero's article "Design and Implementation of a Near-optimal Loglan Syntax" in which a language called 'Plan B' is described (May 1990). The article prompted a satirical response in Jacques Guy's 'Plan C' (Sept. 1992).
2. March 2009 in threads connected with the notion of an oligosynthetc language.

¹Also arising from the first of these discussions Jörg Rhiemeier has been developing his X-1 language.

1: Plan B & Plan C.

In fact, 'Plan B' does not give a syntax for what we now call a loglan (a language based on the principles set out by James Cooke Brown) or even a loglang, in that it does not implement formal logic. Indeed, it seems clear from what Jeff Prothero himself wrote that Plan B is what we now call an engelang; cf.:
"Here I will propose a loglan syntax which:
* Is simple enough to be parsed by a couple of hundred lines of straightforward C. (See attached program.)
* Is simple for humans to learn and use.
* Allows for unambiguous resolution of continuous human speech.
* Offers near-optimal conciseness and simplicity."

'Plan B' cetainly fulfils the first criterion. This, however, has no direct relevance to a loglan(g), but it may, of course, be the aim of an engelang. However, I am (and I write as a retired computer scientist, whose specialism was programming) firmly of the opinion that computers are tools to make life easier for humans, not machines for which we should make 'life' easy. Also in my opinion it is not relevant what programming language is used for writing a parser. One hopes that if a loglan(g) is well-designed that writing a parser will relatively straightforward whether the programmer chooses C, C++, Java, LISP, Prolog or whatever else she/he wishes.

As regards the second criterion, there are, in my opinion, features about 'Plan B' which do not make it easy for human use, e.g. the bizarre spelling system in which each letter may be pronounced as a vowel or as a consonant, that every morpheme has two quite phonetically disparate allomorphs, that morpheme segregation is effected by a "Huffman-style expanding-opcode sort of scheme". It is my opinion that the first criterion has been achieved at the expense of this second one.

From the examples which Jeff Prothero gives in his article, it would seem that 'Plan B' does offer an unambiguous resolution of its input. But, as far as I can see, this is achieved by relexifying English and providing it with a syntax so that it can be unambiguously parsed using a binary tree. Whether this makes for "near-optimal conciseness and simplicity" is, I think, a matter of debate.

In short, what Plan B does, it seems to me, is to implement a method in which:

• a stream of characters (whether alphabetic or of binary digits or, indeed, any other characters such as Tengwar) can be unambiguously broken up into morphemes or 'affixes', as the author calls them;
• the 'affixes' can be reconstituted as a binary tree.

Thus, Plan B provides a way whereby one may analyze an English sentence as a binary tree and then generate a continuous stream of characters (alphabetic, bits or whatever) which both maintains the same word order as English and unambiguously represents that tree. I leave it to the reader to decide if the language is justly parodied by Jacques Guy's'Plan C' or not.

The discussion in September 2005, however, concerned itself mainly with the orthography and phonology of 'Plan B'. From in March 2006 I returned to this and developed a radically different solution: a syllabary of 16 symbols. I also considered the question of 'self-sgregating morphemes' and the 'Plan B' grammar. The latter two are no longer relevant to this experimental conlang; however, I do keep the two pages (a little modified) as appendices.

2: Oligosynthetic language

An oligosynthetic language uses very few morphemes, perhaps only a few hundred, and combines them synthetically to form sentences. In the past, it had been claimed that the native American languages Nahuatl and Blackfoot were oligosynthetc; this claim has largely been rejected by linguists today and these languages are now regarded as polysynthetic. Indeed no natural human language has been shown to be oligosynthetic and many linguists regard oligosynthesis as impossible or impractical for productive human use.

There are, however, several conlangs which may be considred oligosynthetic. One common approach has been to attempt to identify a closed set of semantic primitives which would constitute the morphemes of an oligosynthetic language. I am skeptical that any such a set of 'Platonic' universals exists; I firmly believe that any set that is humanly devised must necessarily be conditioned by the author's cultural milieu. This was very much the subject of some threads (the original one had split into two or three related ones) in March 2009. During these threads, I wrote:

Friday, 20th March at 08:28

I recall that in the late 18th century Father Joachim Bouvet sent Leibniz a letter in which he described the I Ching (yi4 jing1). He listed the hexagrams not in the weng-wang order in which they are commonly listed, but in the Fu-xi order. Leibniz read the hexagrams as the numbers 0 to 63 in binary notation!
So why not 2^6 concepts? 64 'primitives' would still constitute a challenging oligosynthetic language.

Monday, 30th March at 08:13

I see oligosynthesis working only with a community that is isolated from the rest of humanity and retains a conservative world-view that understands everything in terms of a closed set of semantic primes. That is possibility in an alternate history or a science fiction scenario.

Monday, 30th March at 19:57

Quite so - completely isolated and inordinately conservative. I was imagining something like a group isolated in some remote Himalayan valley which knew only the 64 Yì Jīng (I Ching) hexagrams, read them as 64 distinct syllables, associating a 'semantic primitive' meaning with each. This was their language by they expressed all they needed.

Problems & Solution

The thinking behind this is that a language with only 16 possible consonant+vowel syllables has a reduced phoneme inventory; therefore it seemed fitting it might also have a reduced morpheme inventory. But there is a problem if we stick with the 16 syllables. The only way to express any of the 64 'primitives' is by using two syllables. But the total number of possible bisyllabic words is 256 (16 x 16), i.e. four times the number of Yì Jīng hexagrams. There are two possible solutions:

1. Extend the morpheme inventory from 64 to 256 (in effect, the hexagrams mutate into 'octograms').
2. Extend the syllabary from 16 to 64 syllables.

It may be argued that (i) is not likely if this is the language of an isolated and very conservative group. But if they had been using the Yì Jīng hexagrams then we can assume that they were of Chinese origin and, presumably, spoke some early form of Chinese. A change would have had to happen to have reduced their inventory of phonemes. At one time there would have been quite a revolutionary change. We may perhaps attribute this to some great figure in the past, maybe a religious reformer. It may, indeed, have been because of him that they left their homeland to seek a paradise in some remote Himalayan region. So could he not also have extended the hexagrams?

The answer, of course, is that he could have done. But why would he have done this? This was centuries before the age of computing and the practice of grouping binary digits in groups of eight, known as bytes. There was no reason for him to extend, presumably, the trigrams by adding another line to make them into tetragrams, and then of doubling up such tetragrams to form a set of 256 octograms.

The other question we have to ask is why this charismatic leader reduced the number of syllables possible in the spoken language. It would seem a little surprising if he anticipated Jeff Prothero by a several centuries and decided upon 16 syllables because that is the total of possible four-bit patterns! In view of the ancient origin of the hexagrams and, indeed, of their continuing importance in folk religion, the most likely scenario, it seems to me, is that he formulated a syllabary that corresponded to the 64 hexagrams. Therefore, I shall adopt solution (ii) above.

Created March 2006. Last revision: Copyright © Ray Brown