CDR: Re: Treatment of subjugated people (and bagpipes)

[Sampo A Syreeni]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2000 ocorrain at esatclear.ie wrote:

>However, one cannot discount the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics
>the Rosetta Stone.

Or the Linear A ordeal.

>I imagine it would be extremely difficult to decipher a language that very
>structurally different from what is known.

Indeed. With Linear A, the connection to ancient Greek was what solved the
puzzle. OTOH, hieroglyphs and similar ideographic writing systems do have
some figurative characteristics which can help in their interpretation. Not
so with syllabary/alphabet based ones, in which you would prefer at least a
cursory understanding of the spoken form before going for an interpretation.

>It is interesting to speculate about artificial grammars. Most human and
>computer languages (with interesting exceptions, such as the Hopi Indians'
>concept of time -- others can describe computer exceptions) 

Such exceptions always arouse my curiosity. Any online sources?

>I don't know whether any work has been done on constructing a seriously
>structurally different artificial grammar. Jorges Luis Borges has an
>interesting riff on the idea. If anyone's interested, I'll dig out the
>details.

Aye. Hit me.

Sampo Syreeni <decoy at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university