how many root words is enough?

http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/esperanto.htm

From the base of 15,000 to 20,000 root words - once can combine roots and suffixes to form over 150,000 words in Esperanto.

There is an extensive set of suffixes that can be added to word roots to allow various shades of meaning or newly derived forms; compound words are also used. (Source: "Esperanto," Britannica.com)

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Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.

----
Finally, a look at an 'extreme language' - Toki Pona, with very few roots.
I suspect 'simple' translates to 'extremely limited', 'ambiguous' or 'extremely wordy for clarification'. But to capture Tao thought, that's fine.

The entire language has only 123 words

http://en.tokipona.org/wiki/What_is_Toki_Pona%3F

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OK - regarding Esperanto, in what world is 'only 15,000 roots to make 150,000 words' a boast?
Honestly, I sometimes wonder what Esperantists are smoking.
I oversimplify, since a compound word will contain multiple roots/stems/words, but that means that a root is used on average to make only 10 words.
I suppose one can claim that this results in precision - the disambiguation claim of Lojban, ironically enough, though Lobjan has only 1/10 the the roots to work with.

Esperanto- suffixes to allow various shades of meaning.

D: ok, why suffixes? Let's look at English as the de facto world standard. The power on the throne. The folks you need to suck up to...

Well English uses both prefixes and suffixes. Given that suffixes have a certain ordering, one can argue infixes in the middle also.
In English, the prefixes vary the word meaning in nuance, but do not change the grammatical category. For example, view, review, preview.
Whereas suffixes often change the part of grammar. For example, heavy, heaviness.
So the unexamined assumption by Espo that suffixes are the only way to go is mistaken.

For compounded nouns and whatnot, I figure a middle infix is the way to go. Something derived from a simple preposition system.
Again, my example: spaceman.
Do we mean an astronaut? (Literally, a sailor of the stars, or thereabouts.)
Or... do we man an alien extraterrestial.
A man to space. From space?
Here we see the rich potential for using middle-position infixes for compounded lexical items.
How about a human being designed to be suited to orbital existence? A man FOR space.


"Thus the acquirement of this rich, mellifluous, universally-comprehensible language, is not a matter of years of laborious study, but the mere light amusement of a few days. " (Zamenhof)

D; Oh, the bitter tears as I laugh at that! I grind to a halt mid-intro-book after months of study. Like I said, a language by a linguist, for linguists.
That is a variant of a joke about the RPG Rolemaster - a game by an accountant, for accountants...

----
So far, Espo requires:
1) a linguistic background that does not have a rigid word order and
2) is heavily infixing - but particularly with suffixes.
So we are talking about a narrow margin of language speakers.
Leaving... polyglot linguists as the only likely consumers of this language.
Exactly what we see in the comment section.
This is a language doomed to be stillborn.

BTW, Barker, talking about a 'thriving online community' is a polite way of saying an Esperantist is unlikely to find any other speakers in their physical region.
That is NOT a pitch for Espo being widely adopted.
It is a condemnation for the poor early adopters.
But they've had the problem of being early adopters for... a frickin' CENTURY.

D: back to the (low-balled) ONLY 15,000 root word boast - boast? That's a boast?!

I'll reread the most common 1000 English words. And I'll point out which concepts are re-used constantly. THESE are the words that should be emphasized in any initial small group of root words to learn.
This initial step would have addressed some issues of Z's for Espo.

I reiterate my test. The same # of basic-literacy speakers as Espo in 20 years, or bust.
How? 1/10th the interested parties. But 10x easier to learn.

The year is 2010. In 20 years, it'll be 2030. Growing up with an aux-lang for kids to be native speakers means the children will be around 15 for 2045.
The UN's 100th anniversary.
So I have ten years to nail down the basic design with beta tests and open source help.
And then 10 years to recruit learners for the finished product.
NOT beta-testers.
NOT the Espo approach of treating the entire first generation of early adopters as beta-testers!

D: update. Still chipping away at SPE by Chomsky. Gawd so hard...
I should have found a Cole's notes version.
My head hurts.

better than metric. planck measuring system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_scale

The nature of reality at the Planck scale is the subject of much debate in the world of physics, as it relates to a surprisingly broad range of topics. It may, in fact, be a fundamental aspect of the universe. In terms of size, the Planck scale is unimaginably small (many orders of magnitude smaller than a proton). In terms of energy, it is unimaginably 'hot' and energetic. The wavelength of a photon (and therefore its size) decreases as its frequency or energy increases. The fundamental limit for a photon's energy is the Planck energy, for the reasons cited above

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D: I speak facetiously, but this'd be our best bet for a unit system compatible with advanced aliens.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units

Planck units are often semi-humorously referred to by physicists as God's units. They eliminate anthropocentric arbitrariness from the system of units: some physicists argue that communication with extraterrestrial intelligence would have to use such a system of units to make common reference to scale. Unlike the meter and second, which exist as fundamental units in the SI system for historical reasons (in human history), the Planck length and Planck time are conceptually linked at a fundamental physical level.


Planck length Length (L) l_\text{P} = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar G}{c^3}} 1.616 252(81) × 10−35 m
Planck mass Mass (M) m_\text{P} = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar c}{G}} 2.176 44(11) × 10−8 kg
Planck time Time (T) t_\text{P} = \frac{l_\text{P}}{c} = \frac{\hbar}{m_\text{P}c^2} = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar G}{c^5}} 5.391 24(27) × 10−44 s
Planck charge Electric charge (Q) q_\text{P} = \sqrt{4 \pi \varepsilon_0 \hbar c} 1.875 545 870(47) × 10−18 C
Planck temperature Temperature (Θ) T_\text{P} = \frac{m_\text{P} c^2}{k_B} = \sqrt{\frac{\hbar c^5}{G k_B^2}} 1.416 785(71) × 1032 K

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This would be as provocative as switching to a decimal-based time system from our present sexagesimal one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

Decimal time was introduced as part of the French Republican Calendar, which, in addition to decimally dividing the day, divided the month into three décades of 10 days each; this calendar was abolished at the end of 1805. The start of each year was determined according to which day the autumnal equinox occurred, in relation to true or apparent solar time at the Paris Observatory. Decimal time would also have been reckoned according to apparent solar time, depending on the location it was observed, as was already the practice generally for the setting of clocks.

The French made another attempt at the decimalization of time in 1897, when the Commission de décimalisation du temps was created by the Bureau des Longitudes, with the mathematician Henri Poincaré as secretary. The commission proposed a compromise of retaining the 24-hour day, but dividing each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. The plan did not gain acceptance and was abandoned in 1900.

D: it failed for the simple reason that folks got one day of rest per 10 not 7 days!

However, switching to a perpetual 3 day weekend today would mitigate this.

Conversions

There are exactly 86,400 standard seconds (see SI for the current definition of the standard second) in a standard day, but in the French decimal time system there are 100,000 decimal seconds in the day, so the decimal second is shorter than its counterpart.
Decimal unit Seconds Minutes Hours h:mm:ss
Decimal second 0.864 0.0144 0.00024 0:00:00.9
Decimal minute 86.4 1.44 0.024 0:01:26.4
Decimal hour 8,640 144 2.4 2:24:00.0

D: Joseph Campbell, my spiritual guru, pointed out the mystical significance of the old time system #s.

In Joseph Campbell's, The Inner Reaches Of Outer Space, he writes about the similarity between the Babylonian and Genesis flood stories. In the Babylonian or Sumerian story, there were ten kings who lived very long lives from creation to the time of the flood. This is given as a total of 432,000 years.

In the Biblical account, there were ten patriarchs between Adam and Noah, who also lived long lives. Noah was 600 years old at the time of the landing of the Ark on the mountains of Ararat (in present day Turkey). The total years add up to 1,656.

In 1,656 years, there are 86,400 weeks, and half that number is 43,200. There are myths about cycles in time, and out of time, so this doubling/halving is not uncommon. He believed that someone carefully gave the age of Noah to secretly hide the time cycle number.

He points out a number of other strange things about the numbers. Viking eddas were found in Iceland that told the story of the Day of Ragnorook, the Doomsday of the Gods. At that time, 800 Divine Warriors will come out of each of the 540 Doors of Valhalla (800 x 540 = 432,000).

The number can be found in an internal clock in the body, as well as in the Cosmos. A trained athlete's heart beats one time each second. In a 24 hour day, that is 86,400 beats.

The earth's axis wobble that causes the precession of the equinoxes is given as 25,920 years. Divided by the ancient number called "soss," 60, which was used in calculations, results in 432.

A manufacturer of golf balls once did a test to find the ideal number of dimples to put on golf balls. It turned out that balls with 432 dimples went farther than the rest.

D: neat!

D: about that heart rate thing... not really.
Lance Armstrong rests at 32 beats per minute.
Mine was so low after 2 cups of coffee that my partner in CPR class thought there was something wrong with me. 60-80 is normal and mine was 50 at that point!
I joke we need 'decimal seconds' to reflect our heart beats on our coffee.

G&M fail. A tove honey loves - return to Jabberwocky

D: its not it's! Bloody hell....
S'ok - HIOXian punctuation can overtly denote which subset a punctuation is expressing. Should be clear.
Still nailing down which figure-shape denotes what aspect of language. Syllable stress and pitch are getting tacked on the left/right half of the HIOX figure presently. Likely. Paired punctuation like brackets and Spanish-style sentence-initial cues imply I should reserve the left/right HIOX for those punctuation symbols. That would leave the 3 tiers (top, mid, low) for stress/pitch.

----

Jabberwocky.

To review:

http://a-new-world-language.blogspot.com/2010/01/through-looking-glass-lightly.html

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

That poem is now famously known as “Jabberwocky.” It is often hailed the most important nonsense poem in the English language. But if a reader looks closely, there is a method to the speaker’s madness in this poem. As Humpty Dumpty explains the poem to Alice, he demonstrates that the poet actually created an important, intelligent poem that is not entirely nonsense.
D: English has grammatical indicators. They are a closed class of function words. The list hardly ever changes historically. I think the last addition was from old English, "will".
These function words, infixes and word order all effectively create distinct meaning in English.

Infix cues in English include:
1) plural - s
2) possessive - 's
3) 3rd person singular - s
4) past tense - typically -ed
5) present participle -ing
6) past participle - (have plus) -ed typically
7) comparative and superlative -er and -est.

Word order is SVO - subject verb object. Noun verb noun.
With some details, like Subject: Article, adjective, noun...
Subject and object pronouns provide additional detail.
Subject: I. BUT object: me.
Twas -, and the -y -s
Did - and - in the -:
All -y were the -s,
And the - -s out-.

D: If we used existing standard vocabulary, the first line could easily be as follows.

'Twas pithy, and the funny puns

But even without these known words, the nonsense verse somehow FEELS sensible as our grammar brain organ parses it according to cues.

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"A tove honey loves."

By using Yoda style SVO reordering, we have completely spoofed the grammatical cues to denote sentence structure.

Slithy toves - adjective noun(plural).

Honey loves - noun verb.

Both -y -es.

i can only imagine how difficult such variations must be to ESL students.

I keep reading newspaper articles saying immigrants are not being taught enough English.
Well, how about inverting that to English is too hard for most immigrants?
Then the logical conclusion becomes we need a simple interlang for typical adult second-languagers.
An aux-lang - auxiliary language. An artificial designed human language.
Lacking the complex stress contours of English.
(Making headway on Chomsky's SPE. NOT an easy read at all. Finishing up chapter on phonology so I can complete HIOXian. I get the PC that can handle the font design software this afternoon.)

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D: Other English quirks - the illusion of apparent syllable/word abundance with generous syllable design rules.

Take, for example, the apparent simple indefinite article / singular plus adder.
An adder.
Well, it was originally a ... NADDER!
Examples of the reverse can also be found.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/dont-be-so-quick-to-repudiate-sarah-palins-refudiate/article1664537/

The word “nickname” was originally rendered as an “ekename,” because “eke” is an obsolete word that means “additional.” Similarly, the original word for a “newt” was “ewte,” and one can easily see how “an ewte” became “a newt.” The process often worked in reverse with words that started with “n”: “An adder” was “a nadder,” “an apron” “a napron” and an auger” “a nauger.” Also, “an umpire” was at first a “noumpere,” a word that derived from the Old French nonper, “not equal” and thus qualified to settle disputes.

D: we get no farther ahead if we try removing that particular indefinite article.
Some or any other word preceding it poses the same problem.
Nouns and other grammatical elements lack a distinguishing and unique syllable structure, or choice of phonemes.
Decimese will solve this. <:

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation

Many words came into English by this route: Pease was once a mass noun but was reinterpreted as a plural, leading to the back-formation pea. The noun statistic was likewise a back-formation from the field of study statistics. In Britain the verb burgle came into use in the 19th century as a back-formation from burglar (which can be compared to the North America verb burglarize formed by suffixation).
Other examples are:
adj. "couth" from "uncouth"
Verb "edit" from "editor"
Singular "syrinx", plural "syringes" (from Greek): new singular "syringe" formed
Singular "sastruga", plural "sastrugi" (from Russian): new Latin-type singular "sastrugus" has been used sometimes
"euthanase" or "euthanize" (verb) from the noun "euthanasia".

D: Examples of other 'make-work' English vocabulary items abound.
Notice that the very cues we needed to make sense of Jabberwocky have become the enemy when word boundaries and lexical parsing is considered.
... we've painted ourselves into a corner! Natural languages are like that.
Only a designed language is not.

Note: I'm porting HIOXian and Decimese to LiveJournal blogs. This blog will focus solely on new language news and research. D.

tolkien. the 1 ring. the black speech of Sauron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech

The Ring Inscription
The only example given of "pure" Black Speech is the inscription upon the One Ring:
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul,
ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

When translated into English, these words form the lines:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Parallels to natural languages

Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski identified an ergative suffix (-uk in "durbatuluk" is the verb suffix meaning "them all" and is related to object and not to subject, verb forms related to object are specific to ergative languages), and claimed a "strong lexical similarity" to Hurrian (also an ergative language).[1]
Hurrian was a recently deciphered language at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.[2]

http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/blackspeech.htm

D: nice analysis of the Black Speech.

The black speech has a CVC syllable structure.

We will assume for the moment that gh is one sound, rather than a g sound followed by an h sound (which would be unpronounceable finally).

The following consonants are attested: sh, d, r, b, th, k, m, p, t, l, k, gh, z, g, n, h, s.

We know that the l and r are pronounced at the back of the mouth (similar to English but without exception) - this is a sound which the Elves find extremely unpleasant.

Some consonant clusters occur; these are thr, kr, gl, sk initially, and zg, mb, mp, rz, nk finally. Medial consonant clusters usually result from compounding or affixing.
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D: now I have some fun.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Otherkin

D: I have had the ill fortune in my life to meet self-identified Otherkin.
I ran into them in gaming circles, being into RPGs myself.

Otherkin think they are various mythical creatures. "I'm an ELF!" Yeah, sure you are....
It is a strange fringe sect. By that I mean a religion that never got popular.
It can be best summarized, as by my roomie, who made a university presentation about this group, as if all the kids playing Shadowrun scifi/fantasy RPG about awakened modern supernaturals in the 1980s in their mom's basement managed to later network over the internet. LOL. Yeah, pretty much.
I played DnD 'n Shadowrun and whatnot. At no point did I think I was my character, or anything but human.
I don't mind some of them, but know too many unsavoury types in their circle to ever trust the group.

So here is where it gets funny.
They suggest maybe Tolkien was an otherkin.
Then they whip up subcultural idiom, all based on English phonotactics.
Well... if Tolkien's elves really hate the L/R sound, then that sinks that theory.
Leave poor Tolkien alone. He'd be rolling over in his grave if he knew!

As an aside, Tolkien learned Esperanto as a teen. At first he liked it.
Later, he lamented the lack of literature and a mythology/culture associated with this.
I took this to heart. I hope to breathe life into my language projects via sci-fi fiction.

Cheers.

bliss symbols writing system. thoughts.

http://www.blissymbolics.us/

CHARLES was born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, a mixture of peoples where, as he wrote in 1965, “20 different nationalities hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.” In the year of Charles’ birth, the Emperor, Franz Joseph I, was in his 49th year on the throne, Johannes Brahms died, and Gustav Mahler became director of the Vienna Opera. Anton Bruckner had died the year before, and the year after saw the pointless fatal stabbing by an Italian anarchist of the Empress Elisabeth while she was sightseeing in Geneva, Switzerland, on 10th September, 1898.
The languages Charles heard all around him were not logical at all, and by the time he was in high school, he says, he refused to learn the unruly rules of languages, and he refused to differentiate between the relative, indefinite, intensive, reflective or reciprocal pronoun. He would not believe that children must be tortured with such illogical matters. By this time Charles had been impressed by two wonderful logical languages expressed in the symbols of mathematics and chemistry which could be read by anyone no matter what their mother-tongue might be.

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D: not sure how this is supposed to work. The symbols are not linked to any spoken sounds.
But we sound out written material in our heads when we read.
So thinking in Blisssymbols must be problematic.

D: there are 4-5000 symbols. This is the same as a mid-level fluency with Chinese. So immediately, it does not seem to be learned faster than existing ideographic schemes (logographic really).

D: I read over Crockford's PDF. Right from the start, his appraisal of it seems too optimistic.
Simple, yet recognizable and memorable? This is the same red herring ASL deals with. It is not very iconic. The symbols are only clearly linked to a real-world object or event once explained. For example, a circle means 'sun'. This is only clear after the fact, once explained. So the simplified pictograms are not in fact so easily recognized.
The hand sign is sufficiently abstract that I would never have guessed what it is meant to represent.

Thoughts:
- octomatics seems to have a better grasp of ideal shapes. The computer versions are all straight lines. Whereas the cursive writing forms are rounded. I incorporate this into HIOXian. The rounded shapes don't display well on a monitor.
- many of the symbols are very wide for a standard 8x12 rectangular character space
- many of the symbols involve very tiny parts. For example, the set of wheels for 'car'.
- nouns are the default shape, and an extra indicator is needed to turn this into a verb.
- showing subset parts of 'hand' is very clever. Just have a pointer indicating the subset part.
- it is clearly earth and human-centric. Which is fine, since humans are the intended users.
- the man/woman symbols are *almost* interesting. They remind me of Jewish mystical numerology.
I think father plus mother equals son or thereabouts.
The woman symbol contains that most primitive portrayal of the vulva, the triangle (sometimes a card-diamond).
The author shied away from the obvious portrayal for man (tripod joke from Austin Powers here).
The gender-neutral 'person' figure is anything but intuitive, being a flat base with a pole above it.
It is not clearly related to man, woman, or man and woman.
Now, superimposing the man and woman figures with my anatomically-correct suggestion would work for man-or-woman. De-emphasizing gender would result in a basic 2-legs-torso figure.
- that grass and hair should involve the same symbol at different heights is anything but intuitive.

---
D: I realize he was designing a system for mechanical typewriters. But with the advent of computers, certain portrayals become possible. For example, my proposed layered-colour HIOXian bi/trigraphs.
The man/woman symbols, once superimposed would now indicate the following:
1) both figures involve the the basic 2legs-and-torso character. This is indicated by a 3rd colour which is the other 2 blended.
2) clearly, the 'man-part' is derived from a single figure
3) clearly, the 'female-part' is derived from a single figure.
If we wish to include 'all people of any age', we could even add a 3rd figure with a shorter torso with a similar colour shift.
After a certain number of colours, brown or black could be used.
i suppose we could accomplish the same thing in greyscale.

A stray thought was that a liquid ink could in fact physically blend and accomplish the same thing on a mechanical typewriter.

------
Decimese.
All this colour-blending got me thinking.
If we have compound nouns, verbs, or adjectives we could use a final-syllable condensed indication.
Since all vocabulary items must end in a CVC syllable, with the final consonant being M, N, or NG, we have a problem.
If I only denote the final main element (e.g. black board is noun not adjective) then, we may lose too much meaning.
In Decimese, 'black' does not default to adjective. In fact, 'board' does not default to noun. And nothing defaults to verb either.
Without being assigned a grammatical role, the bound-root cannot be used independently.
The root for 'black', for example, becomes undefined. It has yet to be defined as to blacken, to make black, to become black. It is not yet blackness or blackly. It is not the colour black, or any analogy or metaphor thereof.

So what do we do with a concept such 'blackboard', let alone 'blackboard eraser' or 'black board-eraser'?

Well, if we reserve an HVN (H plus vowel plus nasal consonant) final syllable for this purpose, then we could use vowel diphthongs to this end. This only works with linguistic backgrounds (for both speaker and listener) able to use diphthongs.
English and Chinese, for example.
In the case of blackboard, the concept is a noun with board being the core concept.
So we are left with black as an adjective.
Since -N means noun -NG means verb, and -M means descriptor (either adverb or adjective, depending on sentence position), blackboard in Decimese will end in -N. Ergo, the final diphthong would be selected to indicate an adjective, or adjective plus noun redundantly with the final consonant. In theory, if we avoid this redundancy, we may even be able to denote the nuanced difference between 'blackboard eraser' and black board-eraser' and whatnot.

D: why -N for noun? Noun starts in N. -NG is verb cuz English has verbs ending in -ing a lot. Leaves -M for 'modifier'.
Note earlier proposals for Mandarin vs Cantonese speakers that only involve 2 not 3 nasal consonants.

----
Next stop: recreate my top-1000 common English word list and nail down common recurring concepts.
These words occupy a special niche, being neither closed class function words, nor quite open class vocabulary items.
Because of their common usage and complex meaning, they are assigned simple short-hand one-syllable words to denote them. Their construction involves certain consonants only as an indication of their special status.
They are likely to be formed from LRWY and H and not the usual pairs of voiced/voiceless consonants like PB.
Sufficient planning will allow future expansion to include triple consonant clusters such as STR and such. This is not intended for at least the first generation of users.
Common recurring concepts in the 1000-word list include system, study-of (ology), social and organization hierarchy, and social/political/economic/religious distinctions.
This immediately cuts down on vocabulary demands.

Hopefully it will avoid such past nonsense such as Esperanto and books/libraries.
Book -libro. You'd think book place - librujo? would suffice. Maybe a distinction for sell-place.
But nope- out of nowhere - and never to be seen again in other vocabulary items - we get biblioteko!
Haha found the Espists fixed this one on their own - libraro.
libraro book collection
librejo library
D: not sure what the distinction is.
Biblio Bible
bibliografio bibliography
bibliotekisto librarian
biblioteko library
D: so are these related to the bible? Wouldn't bible-place be a church? The -isto a priest?
teko briefcase, file
So now a sloppy translation of biblioteko might be...
bible... briefcase?
Wow.

We see here that one must not skimp on having a sufficient number of core concepts and words, even if this places increased demands on memorizing lists.
The alternative is heavily compounding in a way that is fairly arbitrary and not at all clear.
Not to mention wordy.

Decimese will be pretty wordy. There are just not that many syllables possible in the most basic form. And it MUST have a basic form, for world-wide appeal and utility.
The shorthand options must squeeze as much as possible out of the limited consonant clusters and vowel clusters.
This is an inherent constraint of my design principles.

It's gonna take a long time to figure out right the first time. So initial users do not end up being beta-testers.
That's the way it has to be.
Plus there is no rush.

My self-imposed goal is 2045 - the 100th anniversary of the UN.
Presumably, around 2020- the 75th anniversary, the subject could be brought up, mostly playfully.
A simple thought experiment.
A what-if.
This gives me to about 2020 to nail down the language- another decade for vocabulary.
After that, the goal becomes to encourage as many early adopters as possible, to create online communities.

And not to stagnate - level off at a marginal rate- like Espo.

Gonna be a heckuva trick to pull off.

detect autism with syllable forming delays

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100719162645.htm

The autistic sample showed little evidence of development on the parameters as indicated by low correlations between the parameter values and the children's ages (from 1 to 4 years). On the other hand, all 12 parameters showed statistically significant development for both typically developing children and those with language delays.
Warren says that children with autism spectrum disorders can be diagnosed at 18 months but that the median age of diagnosis is 5.7 years in the United States.

Could be cheaper.

making a speakable version of Stokoe's notation via Visemese

D: I just finished a book called "The Linguistics of American Sign Language" by Isenhath.
It was an easy read which was not too heavy on theory.
It outlines the premise that Stokoe used, that there are 5 aspects to each ASL sign.
The devil is in the details, of course.
Some unusual signs use full-head movement.
The speed of the sign also carries meaning.

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Aside on sci-fi story language project.

The key lesson I learned was that one can remove the 'filler words' in English - really function words- and still carry on a meaningful conversation when context is already provided on the subject.

I applied this to my sci-fi story English creole which uses musical quarter-pitch notes to convey English function words.
ASL typically does not bother to include definite / indefinite articles such as a or the.
By paring away articles, I finally have enough quarter-pitch-note meaning slots to completely supplant common English function words.
The sentence "Dog bite boy" uses quarter-pitch-notes to convey all additional information.

------

Anyway, I thought cross-mapping Stokoe's notation onto syllables in Visemese that can be pronounced could be interesting.
Every sign typically contains a wealth of steps required to form it properly. ASL shies away from forming compound words in the same fashion as English, since 2 signs consecutively take quite a lot of time to do.
Instead, it tends to incorporate details into a single sign, such as replacing a natural hand position with a letter sign to change the meaning. It also heavily truncates 2 signs, resembling spoken language agglutination.

I remain intrigued by the prospect of a truly international spoken-sign system.
Sadly, we have recreated the national and regional boundaries of spoken languages with proprietary sign languages.

I have noted in the past that Decimese can be modified to interface with my lip-readable Visemese scheme.

I suspect Stokoe's notation will take too long to say since there are so few phonemes available to Visemese.
Various 'cheats' such as vowel gemination could be used. However, as always, Speedtalk-esque gemination has the problem that it then takes longer to say. This does not seem to be worthwhile to pursue.

An interesting approach to compressing Stokoe's notation would be to include facial expressions as a meaning-unit.