You sound like a fellow conlanger ;)
Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> What you need is something speakable to represent the parentheses, so
> that people don't just say "open paren" ... "close paren". Very little
> phonetic space should be dedicated to this opening and closing so that
> it is unobtrusive.
What I have in mind for my labeled markers ("(n]", ")n]" and "|n]") in
one syllable for each, up to third order (which takes up 9
monosyllables total from the vocabulary). For orders higher than 3, a
number suffix is appended.
>
> Suppose, for instance, that the sound "ee" means open list, and "oo"
> means close list.
>
> If we borrow English words to create an example, we get:
>
> ((ideas colorless green) (sleep furiously))
>
> which renders as:
>
> ee ee ideas colorless green oo ee sleep furiously oo oo.
>
> In the morphology of the language, these sounds can be dedicated to
> their role, such that words cannot start with them, and so the sounds
> can be glued to the words to which they are adjacent without creating
> an ambiguity.
What if the "ee" or the "oo" is in the middle of the word? I guess you
have in mind glottal stops to separate parens from atoms as well. It
may be necessary to require that all atoms (normal words) begin and end
in vowel, so that glottal stops are easily marked (otherwise an
epenthetic vowel is required). When you speak of "the morphology of the
language", do you have in mind some slightly modified controlled
English or something totally different? Would you include glottal stops
to parse atoms in a list?
In my conlang, I wrote a "monosyllables table", each monosyllable has
the form "CV(V)(V)", so it's a consonant followed by a vowel, dipthong
or tripthong. I have 18 consonants and 31 vocalic groups, giving a
total of 558 monosyllables, of which 22 I prefer not to use (I find
them too similar to others), so it's 536 valid monosyllables. All words
are constructed from this table. Grammatical markers are monosyllables.
The most used roots should be monosyllabic. Some monosyllables are
reserved as beginning of bisyllabic roots, and yet others would allow
roots of arbitrary length, but my intention is that most new words are
derived words or compounds. Compounds (unless otherwise indicated by
special markers) have the form (in EBNF) "Compound = Root {C Root}",
that is, a chain of roots linked by consonants. Each inserted consonant
marks the kind of compound (coordinate, subordinate or literal) and the
compounding hierarchy. The compounding hierarchy works pretty much like
the hierarchical brackets I described (bottom up), but instead of
brackets, they are more like hierarchical hyphens. The inserted
cononant creates a consonant pair. Whenever this is problematic, the
vowel "u" can be inserted between them, so, a "u" between two
consonants is the epenthetic vowel, and no roots have the form " C+"u"
", but "u" can appear in dipthongs and tripthongs.
-Martin