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There are 23 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)
From: Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: aspects / nasal consonants / meanings
From: Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Eng (was: Name mangling)
From: Jean-FranÃois Colson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
From: Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: McGuffey Readers now available in Tatari Faran!
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: Help with Japanese
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Conlang Dream
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Help with Japanese
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: Conlang Dream
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Eng again (was: Name mangling)
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Fwd: Floral script.
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
19. poem of the day
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
20. Re: aspects / nasal consonants / meanings
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
21. Piraha Article
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
22. Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
23. Re: aspects / nasal consonants / meanings
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:52:31 +0100
From: Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:54:24 +0100, Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I assume you pronounce your given name [fIlIp]?
Yes, though the /l/ differs depending on whether I'm speaking English
or German. I don't know the IPA for the different sounds, though. (I
suppose one of them might be [5], though.)
And my last name is [EMAIL PROTECTED] in English and [njutn=] in German.
> In Meghean, [[...]] "Newton" would
> become Nuton [nuton] (with the quality of the second vowel picked from the
> spelling more than anything else; Meghean doesn't have schwas).
>
> Tairezazh would make [["Newton" into]]
> Nuten [EMAIL PROTECTED], or possibly Nouton
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Yargish: Firip Nutan.
Is there no [nj] possible? I do tend to prefer it over (what I
consider) the American pronunciation without the [j].
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Watch the Reply-To!
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:54:49 +0100
From: Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: aspects / nasal consonants / meanings
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:21:31 -0500, # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Are there natlangs that dont distingish verbs like "to eat" and "to drink"
> and link them in a single word?
There are certainly some which draw the distinction differently: for
example, in English, you generally "eat" soup, while in Japanese, you
"drink" it AFAIK.
> or that distinct more types of drinking and eating with suffixes or
> independant words for "water", "fruit", "medication/drug", "blood",
> "meat"...
I wonder this, too.
I know conlang examples for both questions (one verb for everything,
and three verbs for food/soup or stew/liquids), but you did ask for
natlangs.
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Watch the Reply-To!
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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:47:25 +0100
From: Jean-FranÃois Colson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Eng (was: Name mangling)
On Thursday, March 10, 2005 10:30 AM CET, Tristan McLeay wrote:
> On 10 Mar 2005, at 5.52 pm, Ray Brown wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 07:07 , Andreas Johansson wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Joe suggested eng, but, AFAIK, it doesn't have an uppercase form, and
>>> it'
>>> s
>>> riskier in electronic form than is Ã.
>>
>> Eng certainly has an upper case form. It's like the ordinary upper
>> case N
>> with the 'eng tail'. Eng is actually used in some natlang
>> orthographies.
>>
>> But you're sure right that it's riskier in electronic form than à and
>> Ã.
>> Upper case eng is supposed to be Unicode Hex U+014A, namely Å
>>
>> But my mailer displays it as a sort of lower case _h_, which is quite
>> wrong, and so do most of the many, many fonts on my machine; only Cardo
>> and Zapfino display it correctly.
>>
>> So if you want to see what the symbol really looks like, read my mail
>> in
>> Cardo or Zapfino :)
>>
>> Personally, I find this state of affairs both frustrating and
>> inexcusable.
>
> Personally, I don't think it's fair to say that a particular glyph form
> is wrong, unless all the people who use the character dislike the form.
I agree completely. And there are many Unicode characters whose form varies
from language to language, such as some Devanagari ligatures which have
different forms according they're used in Hindi or in Sanskrit, the Cyrillic
small letter pe, which is italicized with completely different forms in
Russia and in Serbia (http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch02.pdf,
page 7, Figure 2-2) or many CJK unified ideographs.
> Capital Eng is not defined by any script which mandates particular
> glyph styles, unlike lowercase eng.
Here are some samples of the capital and small engs in various fonts:
http://users.skynet.be/fa597525/Eng.pdf.
> Even if it were, no-one thinks it's
> wrong that there's two possible glyphs for g, but the IPA says only one
> form is correct.
And that's why there's a separate g at U+0261 LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G
(which, BTW, is distinct from U+210A SCRIPT SMALL G).
> The enlarged eng form is commonly used, is not
> confuseable for some other symbol, and is clearly associated with the
> lowercase eng form (though the N-hook form is too, by virtue of its
> similarity to N~n).
>
> (FWIW, The font I'm using, which I think is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
> (tho the Eng glyph might come from some other similar fixed-width font)
> uses a capital N-style Eng.)
Since I've reinstalled all my system a few days ago and I haven't changed
the default fonts yet, OE uses Times New Roman for CP-1252, Latin-1 and
Unicode text, and the capital eng (Å), which I type with the keys
Shift-AltGr-N, appears like an enlarged small eng.
JF
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Message: 4
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:05:41 -0500
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 21:05:42 +0100, Steven Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>--- Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Here is my hypothesis about the Proto-Semitic stops.
>> It seems that there was a three-way opposition
>> between voiceless, voiced, and glottalized stops.
>> However, there was probably not a glottalized
>> bilabial stop, as that phoneme is extremely marked
>> and thus very rare in language. So, we get the
>> following:
>>
>> Glottalized: *(p') *t' *k'
>> Voiceless: *p *t *k
>> Voiced: *b *d *g
>>
>> Later on, it seems as though *k' became *q. In
>> Arabic, *p > f and *g > j, probably via phonetic (>
>> phonemic) aspiration and then lenition. There was
>> also aspiration and lenition in Hebrew and Aramaic.
>>
>> I think it's also possible that Proto-Semitic, or
>> its ancestor at some point, had an earlier uvular
>> stop series, with at least *q and *q' (the voiced
>> uvular stop is extremely marked). These may have
>> become the phonemic glottal stop and/or (one of?)
>> the pharyngeal fricatives.
>
>Makes sense. It might explain where Arabic got the
>voiced pharyngeal fricative, which, IIRC, is very rare indeed.
I think it's rare cross-linguistically, but it's reconstructed for Proto-
Semitic itself. Most modern and historically attested Semitic languages
don't have it, though. To my knowledge, Arabic and (some of?) the South
Arabian languages are the only ones that still have it.
- Rob
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Message: 5
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:11:02 -0500
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 23:21:26 +0200, Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>On Mar 8, 2005, at 10:41 PM, Rob Haden wrote:
>> On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 20:58:23 +0100, Steven Williams
>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>> If there was */ts/, */dz/, and */s/, then we could say that */K/
>> became /S/
>> in Arabic (rather than merging with /S/). However, the South Arabian
>> languages have both /K/ and /S/. Perhaps */s/ > /S/, */ts/ > /s/, and
>> */dz/ > /z/ there. But what would cause /s/ to become /S/?
>
>Isn't /s/ becoming or has become /S/ in Portuguese?
I believe so, at least when it precedes a stop. For example, I've
heard 'estou' "I am" pronounced [StoU].
>>>> There's a class of verbs called 's-stems', with
>>>> transitive/causative, destative, or denominal
>>>> meanings. However, they don't begin with s- at all,
>>>> it seems; in Arabic they begin with '-, Akkadian
>>>> with Â-, and Hebrew with h-:
>
>>> We-eird... It also seems somewhat anomalous that
>>> switching consonants around like that could serve a
>>> concrete grammatical function. The Semitic languages
>>> look more and more like some bizarre loglanging
>>> experiment gone horribly awry...
>
>> Heh, you're telling me. :) I don't mean to sound pretentious, but I
>> wonder
>> if the traditional interpretation of written Akkadian is a little
>> incorrect. Not only does Akkadian show |Â| in the S-stems, where
>> Arabic
>> shows ?- and Hebrew h-, but it also has |Â| in the personal pronouns:
>> Âu: 'he', Âi: 'she' (cf. Arabic huwa 'he', hiya 'she'). So the
>> question
>> is, did Akkadian retain an earlier /S/ where Arabic and Hebrew did not?
>> - Rob
>
>Or maybe it's a whole different phoneme! Something like */C/, maybe...
>My notes and handouts from that class are around here *somewhere*...
>Or maybe i should just break out my Semiticonlang, instead... ;-)
Perhaps. The interesting thing is, Arabic /s/ often corresponds with
Hebrew /S/: e.g. Arabic sala:m vs. Hebrew shalom. I think the Akkadian
cognate also has /S/.
- Rob
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Message: 6
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:30:15 +0200
From: Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
On Mar 10, 2005, at 5:05 PM, Rob Haden wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 21:05:42 +0100, Steven Williams
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>> Makes sense. It might explain where Arabic got the
>> voiced pharyngeal fricative, which, IIRC, is very rare indeed.
> I think it's rare cross-linguistically, but it's reconstructed for
> Proto-
> Semitic itself. Most modern and historically attested Semitic
> languages
> don't have it, though. To my knowledge, Arabic and (some of?) the
> South
> Arabian languages are the only ones that still have it.
> - Rob
Not according to what i've seen...
Sure we're talking about the right sound?
voiced pharyngeal fricative(/approximant) = `ayin
If i remember correctly, this sound is attested in almost all Semitic
languages, except for Akkadian (which collapsed almost all of its
'gutterals', leaving only /x/).
-Stephen (Steg)
"levity is good. it relieves tension, and fear of death."
~ terminator 3
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Message: 7
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:17:38 -0500
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:30:15 +0200, Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>Not according to what i've seen...
>Sure we're talking about the right sound?
>voiced pharyngeal fricative(/approximant) = `ayin
>
>If i remember correctly, this sound is attested in almost all Semitic
>languages, except for Akkadian (which collapsed almost all of its
>'gutterals', leaving only /x/).
Whoops, you're right. I consulted the PDF file and saw that `ayin is
present in all modern and historic Semitic languages except Akkadian,
Maltese, and Eastern Aramaic.
It's interesting that, of all the Semitic languages, only Akkadian
underwent a radical collapse of most of its "gutterals". I wonder if it
actually didn't, but that it only appears so due to the inadequacies of
Sumerian cuneiform writing in representing Akkadian phonemes.
- Rob
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Message: 8
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:21:41 -0500
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 03:38:28 +0100, Steven Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>--- Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Sorry, what's the difference between laminal and
>> apical?
>
>I believe apicals are pronounced with the tip of the
>tongue, while laminals are pronounced with the broad
>surface of the tongue. English and German both have
>apical [s] and [z]; I believe some dialects of Spanish
>have a laminal [s], which gives the silibants a
>'lispy' feel. Basque, IIRC, tells between both laminal
>and apical [s] as phonemes.
>
>'Retroflex' can be an extreme case of apicality, by
>the way. In one conlang sketch, I had an apical velar
>fricative; a 'retroflex' [x], with the tip of the
>tongue approaching the velum (I have a very flexible
>tongue). Can't think of any natlangs with that
>phoneme.
Thanks for the explanation. :)
>> If there was */ts/, */dz/, and */s/, then we could
>> say that */K/ became /S/ in Arabic (rather than
>> merging with /S/).
>
>For my current conlang, I tried to get away with using
>/shiyn/ for [K], since IIRC, it was possibly
>[K]anyways at one point. Didn't 'look' right, so I
>decided to use /saad/ (using the logic that /saad/ is
>a mere variant of /siyn/, which is an easy and typical
>step to make, since I don't expect the speakers of my
>language to be expert phonologists).
>
>> However, the South Arabian languages have both /K/
>> and /S/. Perhaps */s/ > /S/, */ts/ > /s/, and
>> */dz/ > /z/ there. But what would cause /s/ to
>> become /S/?
>
>Palatalization? But in a root language like the
>Semitics, it would mean that [s] and [S] would
>alternate; it would stand to reason that other
>consonants would fall under the influence of
>palatalization as well; i.e., [z] becoming [Z] or [dZ]
>and so on.
Right; and from what I know, we don't see that.
>I feel like I'm beating a dead horse when I say that
>laminal [s] can easily become postalveolar [S]; that's
>what happened in German, at least.
>
>> I don't mean to sound pretentious, but I wonder if
>> the traditional interpretation of written Akkadian
>> is a little incorrect. Not only does Akkadian show
>> |Â| in the S-stems, where Arabic shows ?- and
>> Hebrew h-, but it also has |Â| in the personal
>> pronouns: Âu: 'he', Âi: 'she' (cf. Arabic
>> huwa 'he', hiya 'she'). So the question is, did
>> Akkadian retain an earlier /S/ where Arabic and
>> Hebrew did not?
>
>Good question. I'm going to have to look into that;
>like I don't have enough to think about already.
>Today, at work, I was trying to figure out what an
>object with negative mass would be like. I lead a very
>rich inner life :).
LOL!
>The alternation between [h] in Hebrew and [s/S] in
>Akkadian makes some sense ([s] leniting to [h] is
>pretty common in languages, IIRC), but how does Arabic
>get away with [?]?
>
>Then again, it could be that Arabic dropped [h] under
>certain circumstances (in most dialects, it's a voiced
>glottal approximant, and therefore, very weak indeed)
>and replaced it with [?], since words in Arabic cannot
>begin with an empty onset.
It seems that /h/ was dropped in morphemes.
>I heard it posited that the definite article /al-/ was
>/*hal-/ at some point in both Hebrew and Arabic, and
>the two langauges just dropped a different phomene in
>each of their respective cases. Makes some sense, at least...
Is the definite article reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, or just 'Central
Semitic' (i.e. Canaanite and Arabian)?
- Rob
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Message: 9
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:38:59 -0500
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: McGuffey Readers now available in Tatari Faran!
"Roger Mills" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Teoh-->
> > As far as domain names go, unless you have some irrational craving for
> > .org, .net, or .com, you can probably get one for free from
> > http://dyndns.org/ . They do have quite a reasonable list of suffixes
> > to choose from.
>
> I noticed that. What do all those suffixes mean, and entail, if anything?
The major global TLDs have lost their strict denotations of what kind
of organization may have them, but they still have connotations:
.org: non-profits
.com: commercial
.net: network service providers (ISPs, hosting, etc.)
.info: never had connotations in the first place
> > I'm sure there are webspace providers out
> > there with reasonable prices.
>
> I searched for "free domain names"--which somehow managed to include those
> for which you pay..., but felt more confused afterwards than before.
$10/yr for a domain (godaddy.com) and $36/yr for hosting
(virtualcobalts.com) should be a good enough deal, getting you
50 MB of web space and lots of transfer.
--
Damian
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Message: 10
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:01:43 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)
filip Ãuton yawuri:
> ANADEW: |q| is [Ng] in Fijian IIRC.
>
Yes; that's one of the few inconsistencies in the orthography devised by
Rev. Hazelwood back in the 1800s.
b = mb, d = nd; one would think g = Ng, but no, he chose q. (g is N--I
suspect maybe major Polynesian langs. were orthographized earlier, and they
may have established "g" for N)
c for /D/ is kinda odd too IMHO
Staying on-topic... You'll note I've kashified your name; it could also be
"nuton" if they first heard it from an American...
Teoh: teyo
Benct Philip Jonsson: filip, easy. yon-son, easy. Benct, all but impossible,
sorry: penget [pENgEt]?, peà [peN]? , pend(a)? of Span. pendi(t,c)o or Ital.
pendeto. Take your pick.
The recent "troll" could easily be /trol/, no meaning yet.
>though I'm also
> rather fond of the spelling pronunciation |newton| [newton] due to its
> containing the moderately-rare-in-the-natlangs-I-know diphthong [ew].
>
You could be "new toN fi liq" in Gwr, which fits nicely with their system:
Clan, new - Family, toN - given, fi liq
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Message: 11
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:18:34 -0500
From: Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Help with Japanese
"Mike Ellis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Jeffrey Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >>Aaron A wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Are you serious guys? This is the sound of snickering. It seems you
all
> >>> may have had your nose in the textbooks for too long. Breath the
> >>> reviving air of society for a few days.
> >>
> >>What are you talking about?
> >
> >Troll, of the nonconculture variety???
>
> Took about twenty seconds to discover that "Help with Japanese" is a
> six-year-old thread. I think Genius here was browsing our archives (for
> whatever reason; he's clearly WAY above our nonsense, right?) without
> noticing how old of a message he was responding to.
"It is always better to post in an existing thread than to start a new one."
-- Posting_and_You.swf
--
Damian
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Message: 12
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:41:42 -0800
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Conlang Dream
I had a dream that I was watching a program on the upcoming
baseball season so that I could bet on it (I believe). I was watching
a special on a particular player who was new on a team based in
Jamaica, I think. His parents were a man and a spider. He looked
human (normal human skin, features, etc.), except he had six arms.
He was really buff. I guess they didn't seem to think he had an
unfair advantage, 'cause they let him play.
Anyway, they were asking him questions, and he responded in
a conlang. It was written on a screen, and I realized--in the dream--
that this wasn't a real language, so I was going to read what was
their and memorize the whole thing for when I woke up, but I
only got *one* sentence in when my girlfriend woke me up to
tell me she was leaving--and then the dream was gone. Nevertheless,
that one sentence is as follows:
Mi ina uhqo. "I'm from Qo."
It's not very long, and certainly not very creative (I expect more
from my unconscious self!), but it's something. It was clear to me
that "mi" meant "I" in my dream. You can see "qo" in there, with
some kind of prefix, which probably takes care of the "from".
"Ina" I guess is some kind of copula. Like I said, not very creative.
Anyway, that just happened, so I wanted to share. Anyone else
remember any of their conlang dreams?
-David
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Message: 13
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 09:51:30 -0800
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11
[Multi-reply to conserve posting limits]
On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 03:33:14AM -0000, Christian Thalmann wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[...]
> > designing EbisÃdian grammar. For a long time I was so obsessed with
> > how to handle verbs, that I completely forgot about stative
> > statements. When I suddenly realized I needed a way to express those
> > as well, it took me a while to try to rationalize it with the
> > verb-centric system that I had developed. (This is one of the reasons
> > stative sentences in EbisÃdian are so strange---they were patched on
> > after the fact, so some ugly kludges had to be made.)
>
> I haven't studied EbisÃdian in detail, but from what you
> say now and from what I remember of your PDF grammar,
> the definitions of the cases make lots of sense to me,
> and the assignment of meanings to verbless combinations
> of case arguments no less so.
I guess they do make sense in their own way... the difficulty was more
with the overall syntax. It made sense if the sentences existed in
isolation, but when it's part of a larger prose, it seems to be unable
to 'flow' as fluidly as I'd like it to.
[...]
> > EbisÃdian uses another (some may consider 'crazy') way of expressing
> > position: the combination of the conveyant (the thing being owned)
> > with the receptive (the owner). This is actually adapted from Greek,
> > where the dative case is used for the owner. The receptive case does
> > behave somewhat like a dative. One way to understand this is that two
> > people are sitting at a table deciding to whom object X on the table
> > belongs. The result of the decision would be the transferring of X to
> > the owner, so the owner would be in the receptive. Hence the
> > conveyant-receptive paradigm.
>
> That use of the dative seems intuitive to the point of being
> boring to me, as a native speaker ("natblab"? ;o) of a lang
> that routinely parses "it is to me" as "it belongs to me".
Right, except that the receptive isn't quite the same as the dative.
:-)
> I think you need to be less apologetic and more proud about
> your grammar. The vocabulary and the concepts it describes
> are a wholly different matter, of course. You have every
> right to apologize for those. :))
lol... :-) Which is probably why I think Tatari Faran would be much
more palatable to, uh, mere earthlings. ;-) Tatari Faran is
essentially EbisÃdian's case system (and vocabulary, for that matter)
done right.
[...]
> > fia nei kuini bibi sei bunari kei dakat.
> > Fia RCP acquire doll CVY woman ORG COMPL
> > Fia acquires a doll from the woman.
> >
> > fia nei kuini bibi sei dakat.
> > Fia RCP acquire doll CVY COMPL
> > Fia acquires a doll. / Fia has a doll.
>
> Apart from the seemingly unnecessarily large predicate
> (what is that complement good for anyway?), I see
> nothing wrong with that. And the syllable count
> awareness is just a freaky little obsession of mine. ;)
[...]
Well, although I've chosen to write the case clitic separately from
the noun itself, it really should be thought of as part of the noun.
As for the complement... I'm starting to feel like I'm repeating
myself, so perhaps I should just point to the (hopefully lucid)
explanation contained in:
http://conlang.eusebeia.dyndns.org/fara/tutorial.pdf
On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 03:03:04PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
[...]
> > On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 11:47:53PM +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Speaking of discoveries: when translating the Fukhian grammar from
> > > German into English, I was surprised to see that by my current
> > > analysis, Fukhian does not have verbs. Just nouns and adjectives. Or
> > > better: nouns and verbs syntactically behave so similarly that, when
> > > not knowing the meaning, it is impossible to tell from a sentence
> > > whether a stem is a verb stem or a noun stem. That's because:
> > [...]
>
> Just another comment: after having written this, I doubted again about
> these findings and checked the original grammar (the German version).
> But indeed, there's no distinction between noun stems and verb stems,
> although throughout the grammar, these terms are used.
That's an interesting existential question: if X and Y look the same,
has the same properties, and essentially behaves the same way, are
they the same thing? :-)
[...]
> That's about the kind of stuff I noticed in Fukhian, too. In Fukhian,
> you can attach case endings to 'verb' stems and you can use the plain
> noun stem as a predicate (there are not verb affixes, only clitics).
> This led to my new analysis.
Cool. I should rethink the verb/noun distinction in Tatari Faran.
Right now, it's starting to acquire a personality of its own, and is
starting to scream at me that the distinction may not be as clearcut
as I'd made it out to be.
> The basic structure of a Fukhian sentence is:
>
> N-<case>-<verbal_clitics> N-<case> N-<case> ... N-<case>.
>
> The order of the N-<case> is free, however the focus changes depending
> on order. The grammar says that 'any constituent can be made the verb
> by fronting it'.
>
> E.g.:
[...]
> Thus for an X, an unknown stem, cannot predict whether it's a verb
> stem or a noun stem. The copulaless sentences look the same (and
> after your description, it must be about the same in Ebisedian):
In EbisÃdian, there's a clear distinction between verbs and nouns.
It's Tatari Faran where this distinction seems a bit blurry.
[...]
> Funny enough, however, adjectives are a separate category. Still
> adjective stems can directly be used as verbs (but not vice versa...):
>
> dal mis
> dal mis-0
> big man-NOM
> 'The man is big.'
>
> I now see that Fukhian is also polysynthetic, isn't it? Very strange!
I like it! The use of clitics to mark verbs/aspect/tense is very cool.
> I should start an investigation project about good ol' Fukhian. :-)
:-)
[...]
> > Fluency, after all, is one of my goals in conlanging... even if I
> > never actually attain to it. :-P
>
> This is a difference: it's not a goal for me. However, becoming able
> to at least pronounce the langs is becoming a more and more important
> goal for me, especially after listening to the impressive sound
> samples that have recently be posted here.
Would fluency become a goal for you if, by some crazy circumstances,
there would be conlang meetings where people actually conversed in
their conlangs? ;-)
[...]
> > However, if there is no originative NP, the meaning becomes "to have".
> > E.g.:
> >
> > fia nei kuini bibi sei bunari kei dakat.
> > Fia RCP acquire doll CVY woman ORG COMPL
> > Fia acquires a doll from the woman.
> >
> > fia nei kuini bibi sei dakat.
> > Fia RCP acquire doll CVY COMPL
> > Fia acquires a doll. / Fia has a doll.
>
> This is a bit strange to me: the aspect is totally different in
> 'acquire' and 'have'. No perfect aspect marker necessary to derive
> 'have got' from 'get'?
Tense/aspect marking is optional in Tatari Faran. If you *really*
wanted to draw a distinction, you could have _kuini kana ... dakat_
for "I acquire a doll (now)" vs. _kuini nara ... dakat_ for "I have a
doll (I acquired it in the past)".
[...]
> > =-O When I conlang, I do have the aspiration (if not the ability) to
> > be able to compose sentences on the fly.
>
> No, I don't have that. I would feel too limited in conlanging with
> this constraint. :-)
:-) For me, I feel that it would be too limiting if I had to resort to
software to compose sentences for me, esp. if I hope to someday be
able to converse in my conlang!
[...]
> > Tatari Faran has quite a number of sandhi rules which I sometimes
> > get wrong. But I'm learning.
>
> Hehe. ;-) Even in Da MÃtz se Basa, I make serious mistakes, although
> it's very close to my L1. That's a language that has no Lisp
> grammar yet...
[...]
Heh. I like how you conlang by creating Lisp grammars. Does that mean
you can do automatic translation between your conlangs? (That'd be
awesome.) Perhaps the Universal Translator *is* possible after all...!
;-)
T
--
Windows: the ultimate triumph of marketing over technology. -- Adrian von
Bidder
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Message: 14
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:17:32 -0800
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Help with Japanese
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:18:34 -0500, Damian Yerrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> "It is always better to post in an existing thread than to start a new one."
> -- Posting_and_You.swf
Well, i've seen that extended out only as far as fairly recent
threads, not things from years ago.
Besides, he didnt' even quote anything at all, so there were no
reference points to understand what the hell he was "snickering" over.
--
And they don't give the answers at the end of the test
So you can't simply stand there and hope for the best
So wake me up at the border when we reach Mexico
I'll tell you a secret I don't even know...
King of the Jailhouse - Aimee Mann
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Message: 15
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 13:51:06 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Conlang Dream
tevit piter-son yawuri:
> I had a dream that I was watching a program on the upcoming
> baseball season so that I could bet on it (I believe). I was watching
> a special on a particular player who was new on a team based in
> Jamaica, I think. His parents were a man and a spider. He looked
> human (normal human skin, features, etc.), except he had six arms.
Now that's really weird.......(Have you looked at ~thought about Shiva
lately?)
(snip dream)
>
> Anyway, that just happened, so I wanted to share. Anyone else
> remember any of their conlang dreams?
>
One amusing one, way back in Grad School days--
I was the Official Linguist on a First Contact mission to a civilized
planet...In one episode, I was in a crowded bookstore (like a college
bookstore) trying, with great difficulty, to buy a notebook and
pencil...don't recall what if anything was said.
Cut to me wandering down a street. Suddenly a street-cleaning truck came
along, spraying out a huge plume of liquid (as in old movies with similar
trucks spraying the streets of Paris in the wee hours). Somehow I had the
idea it might be spraying acid, so I ducked into a doorway. A native came
along and said "[s@'bu]", which I knew meant "it's just water".
Lo and behold, 10 or so years later: Kash savu 'water' (it's now sawu
[saw]).
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Message: 16
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 11:07:03 -0800
From: "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Name mangling (Was: Re: First Sound Recording of Asha'ille!)
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:31:14AM +0100, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> >It's variously pronounced [t_hjo:], [t_hjoh], [tjA~], or [tsaN],
> >depending on the language and the mangling scheme. :-) But definitely
> >not [to~:].
>
> Blame my bad memory. Then anyway it's _Cang_ /ts\6N/ in Sohlob.
I guess it would be.
> May one ask what H.S. stands for?
[...]
Again, depending on language, [hwej(4) [EMAIL PROTECTED](1)] (Mandarin, tone
numbers in parentheses), or [hwej [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Hokkien), or [hwi [EMAIL
PROTECTED] (my
dad's version of Hokkien :-P), or [hwi "SeN] (highschool Manglish).
On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 10:35:39AM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[...]
> Quoting "H. S. Teoh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
[...]
> > It's variously pronounced [t_hjo:], [t_hjoh], [tjA~], or [tsaN],
> > depending on the language and the mangling scheme. :-) But definitely
> > not [to~:].
>
> Well, how do *you* pronounce it?
Depends on the language. :-) Actually, I don't have my "own"
pronunciation... I just pronounce it the way other people do.
[...]
> The first two would respectively:
>
> Tshà [tSo:] (Tairezazh)
> Teo [tSo] / Teosh [tSoh], Meghean
Now *that's* very interesting... 'cos that sounds almost exactly like
how the Korean equivalent of my name (which is spelled _Cho_) would be
pronounced [dZo:].
[...]
> while [tjA~] ought:
>
> TshÃn [tSA:n]
> TeaÃh [tSaG~]
> Chang [tSaN]
>
> and [tsaN]:
>
> Tsan [tsan] (or, if you prefer, Tsang [tsaNg])
[...]
lol... this would have hilarious consequences in Tatari Faran, esp. if
it appears in a relative clause - the relative conveyant prefix is i-,
but _itsan_ itself happens to be an actual noun meaning "cinder cone".
T
--
"I'm not childish; I'm just in touch with the child within!"
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Message: 17
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:29:59 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Eng again (was: Name mangling)
On Thursday, March 10, 2005, at 05:40 , Muke Tever wrote:
> Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Mar 9, 2005, at 9:07 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>> Joe suggested eng, but, AFAIK, it doesn't have an uppercase form, and
>>> it's riskier in electronic form than is Ã.
>>>
>> It is riskier, but it also has an uppercase form!
>
> It actually has _two_ uppercase forms: one that looks like a large
> lowercase
> eng, and one that looks like a capital N with the same hook as eng.
Yes, you're right! - I was mistaken in saying that the latter was _the_
uppercase eng. I discover that in fact in the 'African Alphabet' by the
International Institute of Languages & cultures in London in 1930, the
former version of the uppercase eng was used.
On Wednesday, March 9, 2005, at 08:03 , Steg Belsky wrote:
[snip]
> It is riskier, but it also has an uppercase form!
> See:
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/014a/index.htm
I have seen - both uppercase forms appear on that page. But neither of
them look like the weird h-like symbol most of the fonts on my Mac produce!
It strikes me that it would have been better if unicode had codes
separately for the two different versions. but i still do not see why most
fonts cannot be designed to produce either one or the other shape properly.
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: 18
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 12:28:48 -0800
From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Fwd: Floral script.
I'd sent the following to the Neographies group, but I thought you all
might like to see it too:
____________________________
I've become a big fan of clever artistic scripts. A while ago, I'd
posted leaf. Anyway, I was inspired by the Ayeri vine script, as well as
my own leaf script, and came up with something that's a lot more
complex (than leaf), graphically:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v377/Doobieous/language/barryjames.jpg
Apologies for the poor quality.
The above is my first and middle names in the preliminary script. I
simplified the pronunciation of my name (from something like /bErij
dZEjmz/ to /beri dZems/) I actually added in symbols for all of the
vowels in my idiolect of English as well as the consonants, so it
should represent what I say more or less accurately.
The script is actually read bottom to top, in order for it to look
like it's growing from the "ground". It is possible to turn it 90
degrees so it may be read left to right, but it would be more of a
border then. The overall look is that of a plant sprouting flowers
along its leafy stem. Each glyph is essentially stacked on one
another in a way to facilitate esthetics. The flowers are similar,
yes, so it is important to render they calyxes properly (as those help
determine the right vowel). There is also a "null" vowel, because
words ending in consonants can look "incomplete", depending on the
form of the final consonant. For those which are like "m", one may
omit the null vowel glyph. I've also made it rather featural in design
(similar shapes for related sounds). I could've mixed it up with lots
of different glyph forms, but well, my hand tires out after a while.
It is, like leaf, not something meant to be a practical. It is
strictly an ornamental script, much like Ayeri vine script is.
Oh, and I will post a chart of the various glyphs. But, later. :)
--
And they don't give the answers at the end of the test
So you can't simply stand there and hope for the best
So wake me up at the border when we reach Mexico
I'll tell you a secret I don't even know...
King of the Jailhouse - Aimee Mann
--
And they don't give the answers at the end of the test
So you can't simply stand there and hope for the best
So wake me up at the border when we reach Mexico
I'll tell you a secret I don't even know...
King of the Jailhouse - Aimee Mann
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 19
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 15:21:48 -0800
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: poem of the day
A friend of mine emailed me this poem... enjoy...
Writing
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writers nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
Howard Nemerov
--
Hanuman Zhang
> Verbing weirds language.
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Message: 20
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:44:50 EST
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: aspects / nasal consonants / meanings
In a message dated 3/10/2005 12:27:14 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Are there languages where adverbs inflect or agree with something?
According to RMW Dixon in _Australian Languages_, in some languages, manner
adverbs agree with the subject of the sentence in case (i.e., the adverb is
marked as ergative or absolutive), and in others, the adverbs agree with the
verb
in transitivity.
Doug
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Message: 21
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:53:19 EST
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Piraha Article
A posting on Language Log
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001971.html
informs me that
"Dan Everett wrote to say that his paper "Cultural Constraints on Grammar"
will be published in Current Anthropology as a main article, for which the
journal will solicit 15 commentaries."
People interested in the discussion we had about Piraha might want to buy
that issue.
According to its website, Current Anthropology isn't all that expensive as
academic journals go ($50/year, $15 for a single issue):
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/order1.html
Doug
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Message: 22
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:55:56 -0500
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Proto-Semitic (was Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
I have a couple more speculations on Proto-Semitic.
First off, I wonder if the Arabic indefinite ending -n and the Akkadian
singular ending -m are related. Perhaps also the Hebrew plural in -im, but
that is problematic, as the other two languages have it for singular. So
my theory is that word-final -m in Arabic became -n, hardly a rare sound
change. Presumably, in Proto-Semitic, it was a 'singulative' marker or
somesuch.
Another speculation is on the personal pronouns. The 1st and 2nd-person
singulars are:
1sg *ana:ku
2sgm *anta(:)
2sgf *anti(:)
The interesting thing is there's a preposition *ana 'to, for, at'. What
I'm thinking is that the 1/2sg pronouns are rather transparently from
dative expressions, such as French 'moi'. So, we'd have **ana-aku >
*ana:ku 'as for me', **ana-ta(:) > *anta 'as for you (m.)', and **ana-ti(:)
> *anti(:) 'as for you (f.)'. Seems rather sound to me.
- Rob
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Message: 23
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 02:09:38 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: aspects / nasal consonants / meanings
Hi!
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:21:31 -0500, # 1 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Are there natlangs that dont distingish verbs like "to eat" and "to drink"
> > and link them in a single word?
>
> There are certainly some which draw the distinction differently: for
> example, in English, you generally "eat" soup, while in Japanese, you
> "drink" it AFAIK.
Well, that may be a difference in habit instead of in language. :-P If
I eat a soup like a Japanese, I drink it, too. :-)))
However, I think Japanese uses 'to swallow' (or something like that)
for both 'to drink' and 'to eat' in a high level of politeness. I
couldn't find a confirming web-page right now, maybe someone here can
confirm this.
>...
> > or that distinct more types of drinking and eating with suffixes or
> > independant words for "water", "fruit", "medication/drug", "blood",
> > "meat"...
>
> I wonder this, too.
>
> I know conlang examples for both questions (one verb for everything,
> and three verbs for food/soup or stew/liquids), but you did ask for
> natlangs.
But would you 'eat' a drug? You'd 'take' or 'swallow' a pill, in
English, right. And you'd probably 'suck' blood, I suppose. :-)
For meat, it would be interesting if there was a verb different from
that for 'bread', indeed.
'm-eat' %->
'I ead bread', 'I uit fruit', but 'I eat meat'?? :-)))
**Henrik
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