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There are 21 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: "Ph. D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-message)
From: Tristan McLeay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Swearing in other cultures (was Langmaker.com and...)
From: Jeffrey Henning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Kris Kowal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. OT: Romanian
From: # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: OT: Romanian
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: Encoding (was Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-messag)
From: Dan Sulani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: Encoding (was Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-messag)
From: Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: Swearing in other cultures (was Langmaker.com and...)
From: Jörg Rhiemeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Ivan Baines <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
19. Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
20. New Language - Ńullyu
From: Joe Fatula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
21. Re: New Language - Ńullyu
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 20:53:04 -0500
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
"Christian Thalmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I like Muke's "nonlanger". Natlanger, while a sensible construction,
> still feels too active to me. Natlanging implies the creation of
> natlangs, which makes no sense.
Modern Hebrew.
18th century prescriptivist English.
> On second thought, a natlanger could be someone who shows great
> interest in natlangs and learns several of them. A distant cousin
> of the conlanger, so to speak.
The term is "polyglot".
"Bryan Parry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We could just call em 'humans' *rolls eyes* ;)
>
> How about "Clangers".
No, "Clangers" are pink mice who speak tonal Morse code.
"Sally Caves" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Are you referring to the (I think fairly
> recent) psychiatric term "clanging," an employment of language based on
> phonic connections rather than semantic ones--common example: "what do you
> think of history?" "It's a mystery"--and often considered pathological if
> that is one's only way of speaking or making connections?
A tendency toward "clang association", sometimes spelled "klang
association", often shows up in people with schizophrenia.
But after I've tried unsuccessfully to learn to rhyme in real time
("freestyling" as practiced by Eminem and several other rap artists),
I'm almost thinking you need a touch of that in order to produce
some forms of verse.
--
Damian
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 23:32:50 -0500
From: "Ph. D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
Joe wrote:
>
> Sally Caves wrote:
>
> > Ah, but that's so dull! We're all of us natlangers, too. None of us
> > DON'T
> > speak a natural language. The point was to put us in a special
> > category,
> >
> > (self-correction... that should be "DOESN'T)
>
>
> Should it? That seems strange to me. I think you were right the first
time.
Well, a pedant would point out that "none" is singular, so "doesn't"
would be correct.
While we're on the subject, I like "nonlanger" since these people
do not create any kind of language.
--Ph. D.
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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 13:33:55 +0900
From: Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
Dan Sulani wrote:
> Anybody else have any ideas as to what we should call
> those who don't create langs?
Any Mage: The Ascension player here? I like "Sleepers" vs. "Awakened"
terminology from the game, but it's not really appropriate for this. Well,
"muggle" is equally inappropriate anyway.
Seo Sanghyeon
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Message: 4
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 16:04:40 +1100
From: Tristan McLeay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-message)
A lot of messages in this thread are being sent in the ISO-8859-8-i
text encoding, apparently intended for Hebrew. This is making the text
come out right-aligned with punctuation placed at random. Obviously,
this makes it hard to read, especially when their are masses of
quotation marks and I can't work out where the quotes are.
Could you please stop it? You should normally have a text encoding menu
option somewhere like in View or Edit or Message or something like
that.
--
Tristan "Unicode will be good enough for my hypothetical children, so
it's good enough for me!" McLeay
On 4 Mar 2005, at 1.56 am, Dan Sulani wrote:
> Hi all!
> In a recent off-list email to Sally Caves,
> I had occasion to mention those who do not
> participate in our (well, whatever it is we do ---
> art, craft, hobby, etc).
> I couldn't come up with an acceptable (to me,
> at any rate) term for the collective non-us.
> "Non-conlanger" doesn't really do it for me.
> So I borrowed a leaf from Harry Potter and called
> them "muggles". But that's not it either. (And besides,
> that would imply that we conlangers are all wizards
> and witches! Well, language-wizards, maybe. ;-)
> But still...! )
> Sally thought that we might refer to them as
> "avlangers" or "Avvles? (i.e., average users of language)"
> Anybody else have any ideas as to what we should call
> those who don't create langs?
>
>
> Dan Sulani
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.
>
> A word is an awesome thing.
>
>
>
--
Tristan.
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Message: 5
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 01:01:37 -0500
From: Jeffrey Henning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Swearing in other cultures (was Langmaker.com and...)
Wow, I haven't seen Langmaker and swearing together since those problems
with Langmaker/Win and Windows 2000.
Speaking of swearing, I was shocked recently to discover that the Fithians
are herbivores and any references to meat-eating are the most foul and
obscene things you can ever say to them. They are herd creatures (picture
an antlered centaur) and much of their language and society developed in
response to threats from carnivores, which fortunately are no more
intelligent on Fithia than they are on earth.
I love meat myself and would not be a good candidate for a first-contact
mission to meet the Fithians.
More on Fithian swearing from http://www.langmaker.com/stackconj.htm...
'Here is an example of _skuunh_, "*drop all": the phrase _shi vum vai e_
("you were an egg", lit. "you egg be") is a dire insult, roughly equivalent
to "f-- you" in English (and is a reference to the pestilent monotreme
rodents native to the planet Fithia). However, the phrase _shi vum vai
skuunh_ is the equivalent of "shucks" or "you goof"; it is the mildest of
oaths, said by parents to their children and lovers to one another. (Imagine
saying "f-- you never mind" to your child!)'
Best regards,
Jeffrey Henning
LangMaker.com Webmaster
http://www.langmaker.com
"At some point in the next century the number of invented languages will
probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages."
- Cullen Murphy in Atlantic Monthly (October, 1995)
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Message: 6
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 23:24:48 -0800
From: Kris Kowal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
iglanger?
...
langlubber?
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Message: 7
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 02:34:51 -0500
From: # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: OT: Romanian
I know this is OT but I don't know whom else I could ask it to
That question concerns the romanian language about which I'm interested
since I have a new teacher who comes from there and speak the language
It's about the pronounciation, so if someone here speaks romanian (a natal
or anyone who thinks their pronounciation's good) I'd need help
The question is: how are pronounced the final "i"'s in a words?
(like in: Ce mai faci? = How are you?)
On the websites indicating the pronounciation, they never use real phonetic
terms
They say that it is a final whisper but I don't know what they really mean
Do they mean that it is a voiceless /i/? like /i_o/? or any other voiceless
vowel?
Or do they mean that the preciding consonant, that the "i" is also supposed
to make shorter, is aspirated so that a final "i" is /_h/?
Or it is really a whirstle that could be like a /h=/? a syllabic /h/ (I'm
not even sure that's possible)
These are the only three possibilities I see but it could be something else
Maybe you'll say the best way would be to ask my teacher but I'm not sure
she knows phonetic and I don't want to seem showy and pretentious with her
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Message: 8
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 10:29:30 +0100
From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
What about "Noclangers"?
"Ordinary people" and "unimaginative linguists" come to mind.
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
(Tacitus)
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Message: 9
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 01:50:15 -0800
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OT: Romanian
Plain i palatalizes the preceeding consonant. Accented I is XSAMPA
/1/, according to:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Romanian:Pronunciation_and_alphabet
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Message: 10
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 11:13:08 +0100
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> What about "Noclangers"?
> "Ordinary people" and "unimaginative linguists" come to mind.
I say we call 'em "deviants" and be done with it. ;)
Andreas
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Message: 11
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 11:53:27 +0000
From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
Ivan Baines wrote:
>>>Ha! I think this one's the best. First, it rhymes. Second, even
>>>though it would seem to technically imply that these are people
>>>without language, the only people who use "prefix-lang" are
>>>conlangers, so it seems like the "-lang" suffix implies conlanging,
>>>even in a word like "natlang". Yeah, my vote is for nonlanger
>>>(not that we're voting).
>>
>>I'd second it. Actually, I thought of it as soon as Dan asked for
>>suggestions, but didn't get around to saying it :). It seems a little
>>bit mean, but since it's clearly nonsensical as well, it's IMHO much
>>preferable to "avlangers", "civvies", "[mun]danes", etc etc...
>
>
> Definitely gets my vote. But it doesn't necessarily imply people
> without language. I see it this way: there are a number of words
> ending in -langer, right, which describe people who engage in
> various related activities - e.g. conlanger, romlanger, loglanger,
> etc. These people could be collectively called "langers". Thus
> those who don't engage in such activities would quite clearly be
> "non-langers"!
Your email address suggests you're in the UK (and I think tiscali
isn't in NI, so I can probably conclude you're outside of Ireland);
But I wonder does "langer" have the same meaning over there as it
does for us (in Ireland)? Not that I can adequately describe what
it means, apart from saying that it doesn't have anything to do
with languages. Damn, now I've started to see "langer" in words like
"conlanger" and "nonlanger", which previously appeared innocent.
s.
--
Stephen Mulraney [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The best way to remove a virus is with vi and a steady hand -- me
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Message: 12
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 15:23:04 +0200
From: Dan Sulani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Encoding (was Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-messag)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tristan McLeay" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 7:04 AM
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-message)
>A lot of messages in this thread are being sent in the ISO-8859-8-i
> text encoding, apparently intended for Hebrew. This is making the text
> come out right-aligned with punctuation placed at random. Obviously,
> this makes it hard to read, especially when their are masses of
> quotation marks and I can't work out where the quotes are.
>
> Could you please stop it? You should normally have a text encoding menu
> option somewhere like in View or Edit or Message or something like
> that.
The problems probably originated from everybody replying to my recent
message.
Sorry.
(I just got my computer back from the shop a few days ago. They formatted
my entire hard disk to solve a problem, and I've been trying to undo
a lot of things they did without my knowledge while reinstalling Windows
and other programs. :-P)
I thought that I had the coding of emails down; apparently not.
Sorry again about all the problems. How is _this_ post coming through?
What format _should_ I be using? ISO? Windows? Western Europe?
Eastern Europe? Unicode (which one?)?
Dan Sulani
----------------------------------------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.
A word is an awesome thing.
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Message: 13
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 14:57:40 +0100
From: Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Encoding (was Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers (meta-messag)
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 15:23:04 +0200, Dan Sulani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> How is _this_ post coming through?
iso-8859-1
> What format _should_ I be using? ISO? Windows? Western Europe?
iso-8859-1 is good, unless you're using certain characters such as
"smart quotes" or em dashes, in which case windows-1252 (aka "Western
Europe") is more honest.
> Eastern Europe?
I assume this is either windows-1250 or iso-8859-2; either should
work, but you should probably only use those if you need certain
Eastern European characters (e.g. Polish letters such as e-ogonek or
n-acute, or Hungarian o-with-double-acute, etc.).
> Unicode (which one?)?
Hm... UTF-8 is probably the most widely-supported (by email programs)
encoding for Unicode, but occasionally, UTF-8 characters are mangled
by the list. (I believe it depends on which bytes are used to encode a
given character, so only certain character ranges are affected.)
UTF-7 is list-safe but not quite as widely-supported.
In general, though, I'd use the first one from this list that contains
all the characters you want to send: us-ascii, iso-8859-1,
windows-1252, utf-8.
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Watch the Reply-To!
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Message: 14
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 10:47:25 -0500
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 11:24:48PM -0800, Kris Kowal wrote:
> langlubber?
That's my new vote. :)
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Message: 15
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 19:01:47 +0100
From: Jörg Rhiemeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Swearing in other cultures (was Langmaker.com and...)
Hallo!
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 01:01:37 -0500,
Jeffrey Henning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Wow, I haven't seen Langmaker and swearing together since those problems
> with Langmaker/Win and Windows 2000.
>
> Speaking of swearing, I was shocked recently to discover that the Fithians
> are herbivores and any references to meat-eating are the most foul and
> obscene things you can ever say to them.
The Elbi (speakers of Old Albic) were vegetarians and considered eating
meat not really obscene, but nevertheless disgusting (perhaps comparable
to what most westerners think about eating rats or worms, or kitchen
scrappings salvaged from the gutter), and the word _macalmatara_,
literally `meat-eater', acquired the meaning `barbarian': meat-eating
was a habit associated with the less civilized inhabitants of the
Great Lands (the European mainland).
One of the most dire swearwords in Old Albic is _chastal_ `husk',
because it also refers to a class of vampire-like mythological beings
which have human bodies but no souls. Of course, _chastelim_ were
imagined to eat meat, with a special taste for - fresh human flesh!
> They are herd creatures (picture
> an antlered centaur)
Antlered centaur? Oh, then I had an entirely wrong imagination about
what a Fithian looks like. I always imagined them to be small, furry
humanoids (similar to Herman Miller's Zireen) with marsupial pouches.
> and much of their language and society developed in
> response to threats from carnivores, which fortunately are no more
> intelligent on Fithia than they are on earth.
>
> I love meat myself and would not be a good candidate for a first-contact
> mission to meet the Fithians.
Regarding me, I am a vegetarian just like the Elbi (though I am not
all that ideological about that).
Greetings,
Jörg.
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Message: 16
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 19:12:27 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
On Friday, March 4, 2005, at 01:53 , Damian Yerrick wrote:
> "Christian Thalmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> I like Muke's "nonlanger". Natlanger, while a sensible construction,
>> still feels too active to me. Natlanging implies the creation of
>> natlangs, which makes no sense.
>
> Modern Hebrew.
So is revived Cornish (in all three varieties). As no one was around to
record either Biblical Hebrew nor Cornish before they ceased to be anyone'
s L1, there's bound to be some "conlanging". Also, of course, the world
moves on after languages die or, like Hebrew & Latin, have an liturgical
existence only, so some creativity is inevitable in order to express
things and concepts unknown to earlier speakers of these languages. But,
in every case, the revivalists were really upgrading natlangs, albeit
creatively at times - not really true conlanging.
> 18th century prescriptivist English.
Well, the same can said of the French of the French Academy or the Spanish
of the Spanish academy or, indeed, any 'official' prescriptivist notm.
>> On second thought, a natlanger could be someone who shows great
>> interest in natlangs and learns several of them. A distant cousin
>> of the conlanger, so to speak.
>
> The term is "polyglot".
Yep - it has been for the past few centuries :)
>
> "Bryan Parry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> We could just call em 'humans' *rolls eyes* ;)
>>
>> How about "Clangers".
Are they mice? They're certainly pink. But tho their language is indeed
tonal, it doesn't sound like Morse Code - more like Solresol :)
==============================================
On Thursday, March 3, 2005, at 11:01 , Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Joe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[snip]
>> I was just playing with the Natlang-Conlang distinction. Since a
>> Natlang is the opposite of a Conlang,
>
> well... and mind you, I'm being obnoxious and ornery here, unlike my true
> sweet self; I just had/have problems with "opposite" in this case. But
> again, what do I know?
Quite a lot, IME :)
I too have problems with "opposite" in this case. In fact, I find
'oppositeness' too vague - it covers things like privative opposites,
equipollent opposites, complementaries etc, etc. (and some conlangs -
AFAIK not creations of list members - treat 'oppositeness' in a very
confused manner). But, if you asked most people what the opposite of
'construct' is, they'd probably answer 'destroy'. So the opposite of a
language constructor, is arguably a 'language destroyer' - someone who
wants the whole word to speak English :)
But I appreciate Joe was being facetious.
=================================================
On Thursday, March 3, 2005, at 09:08 , Ivan Baines wrote:
[snip]
> [nonlanger]
> Definitely gets my vote. But it doesn't necessarily imply people
> without language. I see it this way: there are a number of words
> ending in -langer, right, which describe people who engage in
> various related activities - e.g. conlanger, romlanger, loglanger,
> etc.
Exactly!! (Don't forget engelangers :)
> These people could be collectively called "langers". Thus
> those who don't engage in such activities would quite clearly be
> "non-langers"!
Yep - 'nonlanger' seems the obvious choice to me - it fits in with all the
other langers.
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
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Message: 17
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 20:24:59 -0000
From: Ivan Baines <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
Stephen Mulraney wrote:
> Your email address suggests you're in the UK (and I think tiscali
> isn't in NI, so I can probably conclude you're outside of Ireland);
Yep. Cumbria in NW England.
> But I wonder does "langer" have the same meaning over there as it
> does for us (in Ireland)? Not that I can adequately describe what
> it means, apart from saying that it doesn't have anything to do
> with languages. Damn, now I've started to see "langer" in words like
> "conlanger" and "nonlanger", which previously appeared innocent.
Oops, sorry! No, it doesn't have any meaning where I'm from, as far
as I know. Should I dare ask what it means to you? :-)
IB.
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Message: 18
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 16:59:06 -0500
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: What to Call Non-Conlangers
"Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [Re: the Clangers]
> Are they mice? They're certainly pink. But tho their language is indeed
> tonal, it doesn't sound like Morse Code - more like Solresol :)
Now that I think about it, the closest comparison would be Silbo
and other whistle languages. Search the list's archives. But would
raising a child with Silbo as L1 be even more child-abusive than
raising a child with a conlang as L1?
> But, if you asked most people what the opposite of
> 'construct' is, they'd probably answer 'destroy'. So the opposite of a
> language constructor, is arguably a 'language destroyer' - someone who
> wants the whole word to speak English :)
Think of the former policies toward Native American languages
in the United States, where speaking Injun in school was a
punishable offense.
--
Damian
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Message: 19
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 14:25:41 -0800
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11
On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:45:26PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:21:26AM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > >...
> > > Only my first conlang Fukhian had three core arguments, and I think
> > > that was more a similarity I copied from langs I know than thinking
> > > about it. In the next two major projects Tyl Sjok and Qthyn|gai, I
> > > also started with three core cases, but instead of keeping them, I
> > > dropped them in order to keep the number of grammar rules and ordering
> > > constraints low.
> >
> > What kind of ordering constraints were you considering?
>
> In Tyl Sjok, I wanted to have an isolating grammar that works by order
> of the constituents. I decided that the 'verb' should separate
> subject and objects and I chose SVO order. If I had had a third
> argument, the problem would have been that two noun phrases would have
> been next to each other and I feared that this would be hard to
> understand, especially since 'noun noun' is a valid phrase and the
> language is pro-drop, so I decided to have serial verb constructions
> instead.
Ah I see.
It occurred to me, though, that with suitable noun marking, this might
not be that much of a problem. You could even use something really
basic like have conditional sandhi, that applies a mutation to
adjacent words in certain cases but not others. Strange as this may
sound, this is actually happening in Tatari Faran already. In Tatari
Faran, when two clitics ending with _ei_ are adjacent, they fuse:
hausi fei sei -> hausi fisei ['hawsi fi,sej]
_fei_ here is a demonstrative meaning 'that'. However, it is also a
3rd person pronoun, and when it is used in this latter sense, it does
*not* fuse with _sei_:
fei sei -X-> *fisei
['fej sej]
Also, if the two words happen to belong to different clauses, they
don't fuse, either.
The point is that some mutations don't happen sometimes, because in
the speaker's mind they belong to different "parts" of the whole. You
could use something like this to solve some of the ambiguity that may
arise.
[...]
> has control over the patient. To get to only one word class, this
> became
> (controller (controller controlled))
> \__controlled_________/
>
> Strange system, actually. There is only one grammar rule in Tyl Sjok
> now (disregarding the particles that can optionally make the structure
> unambiguous) and most of the documentation is my understanding and
> interpretation of that rule.
Whoa. That's awesome.
> It reminded me of Ancient Chinese: the grammar rules seem vague and
> most of the time when you try to describe them, it's actually more
> like a very long interpretation instead of a concise description.
> :-)
Even with modern Chinese, sometimes native speakers' attempt to
describe it leaves foreigners feeling like there really are no rules,
it's just a matter of interpretation. :-P
[...]
> > One idea that just occurred to me is to use directional affixes on
> > nouns (vaguely similar to Ebisédian), e.g.:
> >
> > I kick you --> my_foot you-TOWARDS
> > You speak to me --> your_words me-TOWARDS
> > The dog runs away --> dog here-FROM
> > I leave the house --> I house-FROM
> > I look at him --> my_eyes him-TOWARDS
>
> Ha!:-) That looks like Fukhian! :-) By inspiration from Finnish, I had
> three spatial cases (for 'at', 'from' and 'to') and from Russian I
> stole that the copula could be dropped.
Hmm. Both my conlangs so far have no copula (at all). After thinking
about it, I've decided that the idea of verbs serving as a copulas is
an arbitrary one, and that languages can do just fine without them.
(More on this below.)
> You arrive at *exactly* the same structure above (including word
> order!), and at least for the motion verbs, the translation is very
> similar. Fukhian does have verbs for 'to kick', though, (and uses
> them) so most sentences would have a much more literal sense:
[...]
Cool. Another case of acadebism. :-)
[...]
> > Hmm, this is starting to look vaguely similar to your system. :-)
>
> Adpositions and verbs are very similar anyway, yes, especially in SVC
> languages like Chinese (yong = 'use' or 'with', gei = 'give' or 'to',
> dao = 'arrive' or 'towards', etc.) That was one inspiration. :-)
It's funny how I grew up learning a Europeanized version of Chinese
grammar, and so never realized I knew what serial verbs were. :-)
> BTW, I just love structures like 'hen3 you3 yong4' = '(it's) very
> useful', lit. 'very has use', since this shows how vague word class
> distinctions can be. :-)
Speaking of class distinctions... recently I'm beginning to notice
that in Tatari Faran, adjectives and verbs share a LOT of
similarities. If I'm not careful, the unification mob may show up at
my door demanding that adjectives become verbs and vice versa...
[...]
> > Other verbs can be similarly rationalized. So far, I haven't come
> > across any verb that doesn't fit into the model in some way.
> >...
>
> Really? Hmm, how do you translate:
>
> 'I cook water.'
>
> What's the origin? Is this transfer of energy? :-)
Nah, the Ebisédi don't really think about energy transfer when they do
everyday things like cooking. :-) The paradigm for 'to cook' is:
chef-ORG oven-INSTR ingredients-CVY cooked_dish-RCP. So the
translation would be:
I-ORG cook-V water-CVY
Ebisédian has a number of verbs involving process (apply process P to
X to produce Y), and in fact, its most generic verb _ka'k3_, "to
cause", uses the same paradigm. All these use the paradigm:
originative - original state, or initiator of the change
instrumental - cause of state change, or that which drives the change
locative - the current state
conveyant - the thing being processed
receptive - the result of the process
(Note that the distinction between originative and instrumental here
is a bit blur---which shows one of the weaknesses of the system.)
The Ebisédian model, although it's easiest to describe in terms of
movement, actually does not necessarily mean *movement*. It's the
abstract concept of changing from one state to another under the
action of the verb.
[...]
> 'I am tired.'
>
> This is a state, so what concept moves?
Ebisédian does not use verbs for states. It uses an idiosyncratic
system of juxtaposing different noun cases in a verbless clause to
express states. (In retrospect, this system is too arbitrary, and
leaves too much ambiguity, so I dropped it from Tatari Faran.) The
translation is:
eb3' dhaa~'i.
1sp:MASC:CVY fatigue:LOC
[?E'[EMAIL PROTECTED] 'Da~:?i]
"I am tired".
There is, of course, no copula (in fact, as you can probably tell, the
copula does not fit into the aforementioned model in any satisfactory
way).
In this sentence, the 1st person pronoun is in the conveyant case, and
'fatigue' (note that there are no real adjectives in Ebisédian either)
is in the locative case. This conveyant-locative juxtaposition
expresses the idea of being "in", e.g., a tree(cvy) is in the
forest(loc). Here, of course, the usage is very idiomatic: the literal
reading of this sentence is "I am inside fatigue".
Like I said, this system, although it does somehow "make sense" in its
own way, is too ambiguous for my tastes, so I've abandoned it in
Tatari Faran.
[...]
> > Does Afrikaans have something similar to the Tatari Faran complements?
> > How do the negation complements work?
>
> Quite simple: at the end of a negative clause, you have a final
> repeated 'nie' = 'not'.
Ah, I see. Well, the Tatari Faran complement is the opposite. It
serves to reaffirm the positive. :-) In fact, it is often left out
when the statement is negative:
Positive: tara' sei jui'in kakat.
3sp FEM:CVY pretty COMPL
['ta4a? sej dzuj'?in kakat]
She is pretty.
Negative: tara' sei jui'in be.
3sp FEM:CVY pretty NEG
['ta4a? sej dzuj'?in bE]
She is not pretty.
The complement is actually being left out here; in strongly negative
statements, the negation can be applied to the complement itself:
Strong negative:
tara' sei jui'in bei-kakat.
3sp FEM:CVY pretty not-COMPL
['ta4a? sej dzuj,?in 'bej.kakat]
She is absolutely not pretty!
[...]
> > Wait, so the evidence markers always begin a sub-clause? So where is
> > the matching relative particle for "JIT" in your example sentence
> > "John JIT LU Mary MAT KHAN NI" ?
>
> They mark the beginning of *any* clause, so also of the top-level
> clause. In an embedded clause, this can be used to determine which is
> the first noun.
Ah I see.
[...]
> >From your other posting:
> > On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:57:09AM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
[...]
> > I like this. But how would you translate something like "what are you
> > doing today"? Or, "who did what?" Or, "what did he do to her?" Since
> > there would not be a generic agent.
>
> Hmm, good point! I'll have to be careful about generic verbs.
>
> I did not want to say that the concept of a patient is *semantically*
> lacking in the language. Only it's lacking in the hard-wired guts of
> the grammar (e.g. no specific case-marking for the 'agent' role).
Yeah, it helps to distinguish between syntax and semantics, as the
recent thread on Tagalog shows. Agents and patients are semantic
concepts, and are always present whether or not they are marked as
such syntactically (and whether or not they are markable in the
syntax).
[...]
> But just like in English, you could identify the entity in a sentence
> that is the affected, the causer, the means, the location, etc., and
> you could analytically talk about that, thus there will probably be
> verbs that specify generic roles. So you could ask for these roles.
> And as in English, there will be words for asking for verbs. :-)
Right.
> The generalisation that has to take place is the same as in answering
> 'I will *eat*.' to '*What* will you *do*?' in English ('do' is the
> generic action, 'eat' is the specific action.)
>
> A generic 'do' will not have two arguments, that's correct, so there
> is no direct equivalent of 'to do'. But unary 'to do' will exist,
> e.g. expressing a generic 'undertaking', etc. And some other verb
> would be 'to be affected by', 'to be an event', 'to be an action' etc.
This reminds me of some rather interesting thought experiments I did
after coining the generic Ebisédian verb _ka'k3_, "to cause". This
verb can more-or-less substitute for any other verb, so it's somewhat
like the English "to do". Now, in Ebisédian, the interrogative noun
_ghi'_ is inflected for case, so if somebody asked you:
ka'k3 gh0'?
cause what-ORG
your answer can only be in the originative. Ditto for the other noun
cases. In other words, it's more like asking "who/what caused
something?" or "what was caused?" or "by what was something caused?",
rather than a real equivalent of the English "what happened?".
At this point, it dawned on me that I needed an interrogative verb, so
that you can ask for the event itself, not just the participants. This
means that "what" in the English question "what happened" can serve
both as an interrogative noun and an interrogative verb. You can
answer with either a noun or a verb equally validly.
> Let's see the examples:
>
> 'what are you doing today'
>
> -> 'Do' probably means 'to undertake' here, so the basic structure
> would be something like:
>
> 'which INTERROG be-event you undertake this-day happen?'
> lit. 'Which event will you be undertaking happening today?'
Another interesting observation here: this implies that the role
designated by "undertake" is generic, since in your answer you can
pair the noun referent "you" with any other verb. Whereas in
Ebisédian, the interrogative is stuck with a specific noun case. In
order to work around this, I decided that the locative case serves as
a generic case which can be substituted for another case in the
answer. However, this sacrifices some symmetry in the system.
> 'who did what'
>
> -> 'which INTERROG PAST-happen?'
> -> 'which INTERROG PAST-undertake which be-action?'
[...]
Interesting. So you need a verbalizing verb to turn 'which' into a
verbal interrogative. :-)
T
--
Never trust an operating system you don't have source for! -- Martin Schulze
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Message: 20
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 17:38:30 -0500
From: Joe Fatula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: New Language - Ńullyu
Thanks again to all the people who helped proofread my other two language pages.
Here's another one, a bit different than the first two. The page isn't
complete, of course, but I hope you enjoy it.
http://mechanorium.tripod.com/artlang/nullyu.html
If anyone could help me with proofreading this one, that'd be great.
And I give a whole discussion of valency here, since it's rather important
in this language, but I'm really not an expert. Am I explaining this the
right way at all?
Joe Fatula
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Message: 21
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 18:42:09 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: New Language - Ńullyu
Joe Fatula wrote:
> Thanks again to all the people who helped proofread my other two language
> pages.
Hmm, I meant to but never got to it......
>
> Here's another one, a bit different than the first two. The page isn't
> complete, of course, but I hope you enjoy it.
>
> http://mechanorium.tripod.com/artlang/nullyu.html
>
> If anyone could help me with proofreading this one, that'd be great.
Clerk RM finds no typos, nor even awkward phrasings. +imprimatur+
I think your vowel chart might be arranged a little differently; /y/ and /ö/
ought to be moved so as to be more clearly _front_; and perhaps you need a
category "Central" for /î/ and /â/ (and maybe plain /a/?). The status of /ű/
isn't clear-- is it meant to be rounded counterpart of /î/?? Or it could
be, in view of vowel harmony, that a simple front/back + round/unround would
do it.
More questions as I look at it: is /î/ meant to be unrounded counterpart of
/u/? or is that /ű/? If the latter, is /î/ simply a high central V that
stands alone in the system? That I could see.
Is /â/ [3] unrounded counterpart of /o/ perhaps?
This makes the most sense to me (pairs arranged unround/round):
FRONT hi i y CENTRAL î BACK ű u
mid e ö â o
lo ä a
But I suspect the coming explanation of the harmony system will clarify
things.
----------------------------------------------
It's probably still "to do", but I'd like to see some examples under the
"passive" heading.
> And I give a whole discussion of valency here, since it's rather important
> in this language, but I'm really not an expert. Am I explaining this the
> right way at all?
Seems OK to me; but for variable verbs like "eat", I was expecting to see
some sort of dummy object suffix required, rather the change to 1-valency.
Something like (based on one of my Indo. langs)--
yau uan ase
yau u-an asa-e
I I-eat mango-def "I ate the mango"
vs. yau uano
I I-eat-"obj." = either 'I'm eating' or 'I ate it/something' (never
*yau uan)
(at least I think that's how it works :-)) )
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