Just a note to say I got this wrong. Although there are petroglyphs on Easter Island, and some of them resemble Rongorongo glyphs, Rongorongo itself is carved into wooden tablets, of which only 25 are known to exist. So it's not strictly petroglyphic.
For anyone interested in why the Rongorongo script is so difficult to decipher, I recommend Andrew Robinson's Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts, published this year.

Grant Hutchison

Sounds somewhat like a star/exoplanet naming system proposed on BAUT a couple years ago.

I've wanted to do similar things - developed an alphabet and some association rules for such purposes - but have never really found anyone interested, so it seemed best to try to use what was widely and historically understandable with others. "W" isn't a distinct phoneme, but otherwise that is an interesting system.

The phone [w] is phonemic in the version of English I speak, and certainly looks to be phonemic in Matthias's chart: that is, the chart doesn't offer an English speaker any allophones for [w], as far as I can see.

Grant Hutchison

Oh, you're correct, Grant. I thought he was separating basic vowels from consonants, and I saw "u" and "ou" listed, which I thought were ascribed to the "oo"s. I wouldn't consider "w" a basic phoneme, as it is easily recognized when replaced by the common and versatile horseshoe sound. Very few people would be able to tell the difference. But now I see the lack of allophones.

Sorry for a blatant self-reference, but because you guys are discussing sound symbolism and phonemes and things like that, you might be interested in the project I have. It's a project for an international language, called Neo Patwa. And sound symbolism plays a part in it, along with other things. There are no names for planets, sort of. For the main planets, I've adopted the system used in East Asia, so Mars is fire-star, Venus is gold-star, Mercury is water-star, Jupiter is wood-star, and Saturn is earth-star.

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As above, so below

I would be interested in the book, but just out of curiosity, have you read it? My (limited) understanding is that the Rongorongo script is strange because it doesn't follow Zipf's law. You don't find a system of the most common character being repeated often, and next most common character a ratio of that, etc. Another sort of interesting thing, but I've seen comparisons of Rongorongo with inscriptions found at the Indus valley sites. And there is really some striking about the resemblence.

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As above, so below

I thought that phonosemantics and sound symbolism were basically synonymous, with onomatopes beings something much stricter. For example, the sound bowwow is onomatopoeic, but I thought the association between the vowel "a" and large size could be termed either phonosemantic or sound symbolism. But there may be some distinction that I don't understand...

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As above, so below

Yes, stories about the island and the language abound. Some evidence has supported all kinds of things: Thor Heyerdahl's work, the bizarre ideas of Lemuria, etc. The island seems a sort of melting pot of the believe-it-or-not.

Neo Patwa - extremely interested! Thanks for the info, would love to find out more.

I have. As I say, I recommend it.
Yes, the odd structure of Rongorongo is partly what makes it such a challenge to decipher. One suggestion Robinson mentions is that it isn't a written language at all, but a set of standardized mnemonic images to aid ceremonial chanting. Robinson also discusses and illustrates some of the resemblances between Rongorongo and the Indus script.
You're right, they do often seem to be used interchangeably. I've also seen them used as a spectrum (onomatopoeia -> sound symbolism -> phonosematics) with phonosemantics as the most general, and sound symbolism including only those sounds that seem to have real-world auditory cues (that is, coming from onomatopoeia, but not necessarily being onomatopoeic). The fact you used "cut" as an example made me think you were talking about this latter, more restricted, meaning of sound symbolism. Sorry.

Grant Hutchison

Hugely unpopular among the Rapa Nui people, it turns out. They set much store by their Polynesian origins.

Grant Hutchison

Who would imagine? Oh well, the IAU has coopted their religious icons out of their own context and ascribed meaning for the solar system, placing island gods between the gods of chaos and the underworld. Now that their business is world business, we may as well tell them what their history is as well. Especially considering that mythology and feeling have no merit when considered against the body of cold, dead, and much-random scientific knowledge. [addition:] I'm not trying to reach the sun, just not fall into the ocean.

Well, the Rapa Nui people I've met had a strong sense of their own history and culture, but were comfortably smart enough to tell the difference between a borrowed name and cultural imperialism. After all, they have practical experience of real cultural imperialism.

Grant Hutchison

I don't recall reading that. Anyways, I'd do more than just make it a base-100 phonocipher. I'd somehow incorporate orbital-element categorization data into the phoneme system directly. Maybe the end result would be the same, I dunno.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

I have a wiki page describing it, and I'm definitely the person to answer any questions or criticisms or suggestions. . . It's basically a very simple kind of travel or trade pidgin, influenced by languages like Chinook Jargon, Sabir (Mediterranean Lingua Franca) and South Seas Jargon. A great book that uses similar forms is The Sea of Poppies.

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As above, so below

No need to apologize. I was a bit unsure myself of how the terms are used; I think in a lot of cases different scholars use different terms to use the same thing, but others don't, so terminology is always confusing. In any case, you might know I'm a big fan of yours, I even invented the term "grant unified theory."

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As above, so below

Neo Patwa looks neat. I think the word selections are pretty good, and sentences seem to have a good flow.

Just tiny notions:

"Malato" and "mali" sound similar, which to my mind has possessions sounding malo. Possessions can be helpful, though. And if they're not, you can just give them away. Although, "m" often has connotations of grinding weight, such as "mill", "murder", "mash", etc. And possessions can be a burden to take care of. And they might be used to crush the have-lesses.

"Safahi" and "maha-y" are the only cases in the dictionary I see that contain the "ahi" or "ahai" sound combination, which often practically becomes "eye" or "ay" instead. Eg, "nahiin"->"nein" or "nay".

With some Hindi in the mix, I was a bit surprised that the question subjects "kahan", "kya", etc didn't show up (and "jahan", etc).

I think that sounds like the right approach. There are many details to this, and many more applications than just astronomical bodies. But the astronomical may be a good test field. The physical universe is fractal, so sounds may as well represent that. Let's assume a sort of system. Let us say a star is "S", and "I" represents a heuristic such as "noticable", and "N" means friend or offspring. Then Ganymede reading from left to right is ISININ: "noticable star's noticable friend's noticable friend". I would lock the phonetic "I" to the sound between "ee" and "ih".

In this case the vowels represent characteristics and the consonants represent objects, so they are spaced naturally.

I'm not saying that's the right approach. The first that came to mind. :^/

Just my two cents about philosophical systems for naming is that it often leads to a situation where things that are similar to one another end up having names that sound alike. Which is actually a bad thing in many situations, because for example, when talking about two planets, it's usually fairly obvious from the context that you are speaking about a planet -- what is less obvious is which planet you are talking about. And having similar names makes it hard to catch the difference. For example, the numerals in a human language should sound different from one another, not similar. One of the many stupidities of the English language, IMO (not intentional, of course!) is that words like 13 and 30 sound almost the same. So pilots have to use a different way of counting to make sure that a pilot instructed to fly at 30,000 feet doesn't accidentally bump into the 14,000-feet mountain that happened to be in the area. . .

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As above, so below

I happen to believe so, and basically my suspicion is that the universe is fractal "all the way up." But I think many, perhaps most people, would disagree, and say that the universe is basically homogeneous at some scale.

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As above, so below

That's one of the problems for connectionist approaches: Are "hot" and "cold" closely related because they both describe temperature, or are they disparate because they represent opposite concepts? And if they are close together, what's the opposite of temperature? The Gabor function, because it describes such local extrema neatly, may prove to be important in such studies understanding how minds and senses respond to these things, as it has in the retina.

European languages often follow the right-to-left broadening-detail convention, as opposed to the left-to-right I gave. Assuming "-ology" to be a broad context, "Biology" and "Philology" contain the small-scale identification at the beginning, getting to the point more quickly. A student in a biology class may just say "Bio" class of course. I don't know if there is a good general heuristic for determining when something's context is already apparent, so that it need not be stated, without a lot of mental record-keeping. "Astrology" is not the class you would expect to find in a (reputable) school.

Yes, "13" and "30" is a bad one for confusion. "Can" and "can't" also. There are lawyers making a living off of such things. There is a lot of ambiguity for meaning in the language also ("you" and "you all"). You may have heard of the McGurk effect, which demonstrates that (for most people) word sounds may even be misinterpreted when intoned completely correctly.

[addition:] Ridding a language of ambiguity seems to me to be a risky process, susceptible to pleiotropy - in the same way that changing the human DNA sequence to provide humans with wings might also unintentionally give disease or deformity.

Hmm, I was speaking practically, but didn't think that deeply when that statement was made, picturing images of wispy superclusters. Maybe there's something more to that line of analogy. Sorry for any misinformation I gave.

A relational system is probably better than an attempt at an absolutist system, but the incorporation of numerical and physical parameters into the phonemes might help prevent confusion from similar sounding names. Instead of "noticable friend", I would clarify the hierarchy more directly with orbital elements and omit the higher hierarchy that is unnecessary for context. It's not necessary to include the galactic coordinates of the star, which could be a preceding name used when talking about a planet or moon from a galactic perspective. Once in the star system, only the localized, short name is necessary for identification. We only need three levels of hierarchy, and that will let us code necessary data into the names directly since a single phoneme can represent several bits of information.

So, instead of "noticable star's noticable friend's noticable friend" it might be Star x's "4th-&-largest-planet's 3rd-&-largest-planetoidal-moon". The "largest" bit may not be needed for either the planet or its satellite, but might be useful for easier identification, kinda like a checksum. Of course, referring to the gallilean moons with an adjective planetoidal will help rule out any smaller satellites in orbit around the planet in question. Come to think of it, it might be better to work the names backwards, so it's Sun X's "planet-#4-(largest) posessing planetoidal/moon-#3-(largest)

BTW, I think we should use all the phonemes separately, instead of having long vowels and short vowels. Unfortunately, this will still result in mispronunciation by speakers from differnent languages unless we use new glyphs and give every language and dialect it's own pronunciation guide so that their own latin letter spelling would be different than that of another language that uses latin letters.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

But assuming we are doing this from broadest category to least broad, the category is already implicit (assuming there are distinct categories such as "planet", "moon", etc). You are also assuming that overall spatial distance is the implied ordering metric. Perhaps we should compare the scheme to common data-encoding schemes..

A few comparisons of basically random bitwise data and astronomical classification in this context would appear to be the following:

1) The classification of smaller and smaller bodies depend on the larger bodies being there. (A moon doesn't exist without a planet-like object.) Random data shows no dependence overall. At the universe level, perhaps there is no dependence. (So perhaps in the referent language, "universal" systems should be different from "astronomical" systems.)

2) The simplest encoding scheme, run-length encoding, provides context initially, and then is basically pluralization. Ie, "star X - planet 4 - (Gal. moon 1)(Gal. moon 2)(Gal. moon 3)(Gal. moon 4)". There could be various stopping points for the context throughout a sentence, but that would require mental book-keeping.

3) The speech process is linear-time, as a speaker may be thinking things out while they are speaking. Encoding methods that assume knowledge of later data may not be applicable. Also, methods that are used to encode high-resolution data may not be applicable, because there is not often that much data to encode and certain filter types may not be useful to speech encoding.

Maybe there could be some built-in Hamming correction for misheard coordinates or such. There are so many data filter types, it's probably best to consider elegance over hybridization. I don't know.

[addition:]

A basic convention for word length might be something like,

Word length inversely proportional to (probability of reference) * (cost if word is not expressed clearly in time)

I don't quite follow all you are saying. I did study communications theory in college as a minor, but we didn't get into linguistics.

1 - I'm not sure what you are saying. Are you saying that planets do not generally orbit stars? We could have a phoneme for galactic-orbiting rogue planet and include galactic coordinates as we might with a star.

2 - I should have also included orbital parameters with the moons, such as a distance-from-parent-planet parameter to be encoded. Still, just labelling the moons as something akin to Joveplanetoidmoonone, Joveplanetoidmoontwo, Joveplanetoidmoonthree, Joveplanetoidmoonfour still have the ability to sound different with the use of distinctive phonemes where the distinctions occur. But the way I list it above may not necessaily seem so cumbersome if we consider that we might omit Jove as redundant if we know the context is the jovian system, and "planetoidmoon" can be a single phoneme or phone of, let's say, poo. Or perhaps we can code such that poo is at the end of the word. A smaller, asteroidal-type, moon might be something completely different sounding, such as las. Also, as we can assume that large plantoidal moons are rare and that a planet will only have a handful of them, we might include ryhmes to distinguish between the first, second, etc and per planet-of-a-sun. So, the first might be poo, followed by boo, doo, and voo.

We may also use basic known metrics for distance from the primary/parent planet such as hundred-thousand-kilometers or light seconds or radii. As I mentioned above, we still might include a unique phone or phoneme as a check to increase the identifiability, perhaps as the initial phoneme. So, we might end up with (and I'm making this up as we go along)a three syllable name for a moon: checkname-distance(in multiples of 100km)-order&type&parentplanet. Thus, Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede might be something like: Yolipoo, Yershaboo, Ganiboo, and Calayvoo. the names would be distinctive enough to tell apart but similar enough to be related in a certain way. The Earth's moon might be Lunapoot.

3 - I have no problem with people not necessarily being able to extract all the information from the encoding in their head. They will probably have charts and computers available to look it up if they need to know more about the object beyond the ability to distinguish it's identification from others. If they can't do that, they shouldn't be in the field of astronomy or astrogation.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

I was trying in a generalized way to differentiate random data from this astronomical data. I'm not making an evaluation - just trying in an unbiased way to determine what information generally characterizes astronomical systems. I was attempting to show that there is already information inherent in the system (planets orbit stars, moons orbit planets), whereas with random data there is not. The information that is implied may be transferred to the language system to lessen the amount of information that needs to be communicated. So, filling in the gaps between variables: X "orbits" Y "orbits" Z. Other systems may have other implied data; by connecting the systems informationally, a robust language may be constructed.

Under a numeral system, we could say p=1; b=2; d=3; v=4. But "p" in many languages represents a precise bursting, as in "pop", "prick", "plop". What if that concept was best represented by a planet other than the first? And what if new planets are discovered that throw off the numeric ranking system? Isn't it easier to remember a person who looks like a "Hillary" than one who doesn't? (Unless that person is so noticably different as to be memorable, such as a transsexual.)

I find it kind of spooky that you chose the suffix "oo", as that's the one I think of in my own system (in which "oo" is noted with two circles and is associated with the mouth, which somehow reminds of oo-ing over a circular planet). I think a lot of sci-fi uses "oo" too for planets, doesn't it?

What you are doing is disconnecting the ideas of astronomy from other ideas, and creating a technical vocabulary. I think a robust language should be able to connect many ideas in surprising but honest ways. You wouldn't want to say, "I said 'Yo', which obviously means Io in this context, as I am an astronomer - not 'Help! I'm having having a heart attack!'"

Following basic Huffman coding, if we talk a lot about the Moon, you might just want to shorten it to "Lu", whereas those others might be more syllables.

I still feel confused. That doesn't happen often. I guess what I'm thinking of is more of an addressing system where the phonemes and phones create words that can also serve as a proper name. The system I'm suggesting below is a bit redundant, by encoding data that may not be relevant but might allow for additional phonemes and phones to be logically included in the name so that not all of the names sound alike. I was thinking that your purely relational code might produce names that might be all but indistinguishable, such as ISININ, ISINIT, ISINIM, or whatever is the code for -next-noticable-friend, -third-noticable-friend, and so on. Or would that be something more like ISININ, ISINAN, ISINON?

I was just using those phones as examples. I'm not married to them. I once, after reading Tolkien a few times, tried to create my own language and script using certain phones certain ways because I thought the sound implied some basic thought. So, I inderstand what you mean about words needing to feel right. However, building an entire language system seems to be more than what is necessary for a naming system. I know that at some point a relational hierarchy might take on similarities to languages like latin where we might be conjugating in certain places to possibly indicate activities and declining in others to show possession (genitive), typologies (not unlike genders), plurals, etc.

The system I was using above is also a relational system, and the moons in question were the four large, unmistakable and unambiguously planetoidal moons. For asteroidal moons, a different numbering system might be used to indicate a more ephemeral status more befitting of a catalogue than cognative destination. Big moons aren't going anywhere. Little asteroidal moons might be ground up from impacts or moved around or ejected or mined into oblivion. If we are using the naming convention as a form of addressing instead of a physical description, then the sound that comes to mind when a visitor first sees the object won't matter if he can't figure out where the object is from the name.

I simply abreviated "planetoidal moon" into a form that sounded somewhat similar.

I didn't want to start off with a two-syllabic vowel-sound for a single andress coordinate. I thought "yo" was a better and perhaps more historically accurate pronunciation of the name, which I incorporated as a check-variable. The first syllable has no addressing function except to make it unique from any other "-lipoo" that might be in the catalogue in another star system. The "-lipoo" would indicate that this particular moon
(Yo) was the moon at approximate radius of 400,000km (li) and the first planetoidal moon out from the fourth planet (poo).

I have to admit I don't know much about Huffman coding, and reading the wiki summary didn't change that. But anyways, I did shorten it to "Lu". The "na" was meant to imply an approximate radius of 200,000km and I used "na" for humor, as it fit the original name, which I probably should not have done. The "-poot" should, perhaps, be something different too, although I thought that "poo" would again imply the first planetoidal moon and that the ending "t" could be the phoneme that signified the third planet. I didn't spell it out very well and in comparison with the jovian system shows room for improvement. I was making it up as I went along for the same of example. A robust system would have more rigor to it. Maybe a singular moon won't need the "p" phoneme added to the "oo" to identify it as first since it is "the only" and might use another phoneme to mark that distinction. Things to think about.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau

With apologies to T S Eliot

The naming of planets is a difficult matter
It isn't just one of your holiday games
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you a planet must have three different names

First of all, there's the name that the public use daily
Such as Mercury, Venus, Earth or Mars
Such as Victor or Jupiter, Saturn or Uranus
All of them sensible, everyday names

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter
Some for the dwarf planets, some for the asteroids
Such as Ceres, Vesta, Eledris, Disnomia
But all of them sensible everyday names

But I tell you a planet needs a name that's particular
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified
Else how can he keep up it's MP registration
Or spread out it's moons, or cherish it's pride?

Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum
Such as Triton, IO or Titan
Such as Calisto, or else Encelidus
Names that never belong to more than one planet

But above and beyond there's still one name left over
And that is the name that you never will guess
The name that no human research can discover
But the planet itself knows, and will never confess

When you notice a planet in profound occultation
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
It's "mind" is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought
Of the thought
Of the thought
Of it's name

It's ineffable effable effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name

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Sticks, that poem is very good! Is it completely original? I especially like the last portion.

Yeah, those were the observations that led to my tone of disillusionment at the end of that post. It was just an example, though. I think it's pretty clear now that words best begin with the small-scale identifier, so ININIS, ANINIS, ONINIS. I'd also abandon the vowel-consonant convention I was using for identifier-object, as some vowels are often difficult to distinguish in practice for the untrained ear or mouth. "Oo" would be a sound representing "orbic body", and it's a vowel; it seems to make more sense to use deep vowels for objects.

The conversation in here inspired a thought about words. I'd often thought the word separation convention seemed rather arbitrary. Spaces were once non-existent in many written languages, and every syllable connected to its neighbors in some sense. But really, words are a chance to reverse the flow of thought, so as the ideas of a sentence move from broad to specific, the sounds in a given word go from specific to broad. It's like sweeping a broad swath of hair from left to right, and then feathering it up from right to left.

The ideas of language in general seem applicable in this context. It seems that to add extremely precise astronomical data would be to needlessly confuse things. I think it's as important to remember the basic character of a body as its precise distance.

For conjugation, I've been trying to work on ideas as well. Nothing much yet, except identifying certain "natural" vowels that combine with consonants.

Incidentally I was reminded by these posts that the popular Russian mystic Gurdjieff actually had a rather unusual system for representing cosmological category or "scale": the musical scale in solfege syllables (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si). I don't know if he was the first to use it; the ladder to heaven is a common mystic symbol, repopularized by people like Raymond Lull. Solfege syllables have been seen by some as a "natural" way of singing. The relative wavelengths of Gurdjieff's musical notes did not express the actual sizes of astronomical scale in exact proportion, but instead he followed representational word association, such as..

do = dominus ("God", the inner absolute ideals)
re = regina ("queen" of the sky, the Moon)
mi = microcosmos (the Earth and those on it)
fa = fatus ("destiny", the planets)
so = sol ("the Sun")
la = lactea ("milk" of the heavens, the Milky Way)
si = sidus/sitara ("star")

These ideas can be incorporated into a coding scheme to make it more pleasant to speak and hear. But other than those "ergonomic" considerations, the linguistic and philosophical reasoning will be lost on most of the people who would employ such names.

On the contrary, I think encoding multiple levels of astronomical data demands a much broader range of phonemes and phones increasing both the number of possible permutations. The more phones we have to work with, the more will we have the ability to distinguish one object from another. Not everyone who knows a name will need or even want to decode it. That they know it can be decoded to reveal encoded detail is enough, should they wish to look up a decoding table.

The point of having a name for anything is to distinquish it from something else. Once upone a time, names had meanings in a language like "beloved of God" but these days a person may be named "David", because it's a family name and sound different from "Jonathan". The namers may know what the original meaning of the name is, but the name no longer evokes that meaning in everyday utterance because the sounds and constituting words do not have that meaning in our present language. (I refer to english, since I don't know if that is the case with Hebrew speakers.)

If we look at two pairs of names, which ones seem to be more easily distinguished from their partner: ISININ & ASININ or Mellimor & Kezelmat? I think it is the latter pair, and if we want to figure out a naming convention that uses harsh sounding "k" to represent some aspect of the object that we would consider harsh, then that can be built into the code. Perhap "K" will be restricted to use in rocky, terrestrial planets.

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"What you think you thought you saw you did not see." Agent J, MiB - Manhatten Bureau