More on Sinnish...
Dec. 9th, 2002 07:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaxjediEleri came up with a bloody brilliant idea for Sinnish, but it may force a redesign of the language.
Essentially, Eleri came up with the idea that Sinnish was originally a language that could be spoken AND tactile. You could 'speak' Sinnish by forming patterns with your hand on someone's skin - fingerpainting the language, as she put it. This is perfect for Sinnish.
It does beg a lot of questions. First off, HOW do you do it? Ideally, I'd like it to be done with one hand.
Well, you could have each pattern represent a sound, i.e. each symbol is a letter. This is simple. However it requires each word to be spelled out. This could be very unwieldy.
The other end is to go the ASL route and have a symbol per word. However, that requires tons of symbols, difficult to do and hard to learn. And we wouldn't have the range of actions that a sign language would have.
A middle ground is to have a pattern for each syllible. However, my langauge as it is has 1580 possible syllibles. That isn't that much different than the symbol per word.
So, if I want to do the finger spelling idea, I may need to redesign the language. I would have to optimize the grammar to use as few letters as possible, thus making it a very heavily inflected language (i.e, one ending gives a lot of grammatical information) so grammar keeps words short. I may require more 'phonemes' tho.
I like the sound and structure of the verbal langauge so far, however... I wonder where the compromise it, because I think the tactile version is a fantastic idea.
Any suggestions out there?
Essentially, Eleri came up with the idea that Sinnish was originally a language that could be spoken AND tactile. You could 'speak' Sinnish by forming patterns with your hand on someone's skin - fingerpainting the language, as she put it. This is perfect for Sinnish.
It does beg a lot of questions. First off, HOW do you do it? Ideally, I'd like it to be done with one hand.
Well, you could have each pattern represent a sound, i.e. each symbol is a letter. This is simple. However it requires each word to be spelled out. This could be very unwieldy.
The other end is to go the ASL route and have a symbol per word. However, that requires tons of symbols, difficult to do and hard to learn. And we wouldn't have the range of actions that a sign language would have.
A middle ground is to have a pattern for each syllible. However, my langauge as it is has 1580 possible syllibles. That isn't that much different than the symbol per word.
So, if I want to do the finger spelling idea, I may need to redesign the language. I would have to optimize the grammar to use as few letters as possible, thus making it a very heavily inflected language (i.e, one ending gives a lot of grammatical information) so grammar keeps words short. I may require more 'phonemes' tho.
I like the sound and structure of the verbal langauge so far, however... I wonder where the compromise it, because I think the tactile version is a fantastic idea.
Any suggestions out there?
