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There are 23 messages in this issue. Topics in this digest: 1. Re: ADMIN: Pascal set to NOPOST for calming down From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 2. Re: ADMIN: Pascal set to NOPOST for calming down From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 3. Re: History of constructed languages From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 4. Re: Advanced English to become official! From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 5. Re: Advanced English to become official! From: Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 6. Re: Advanced English to become official! From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 7. Re: Advanced English to become official! From: Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 8. Re: whistling s's From: JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 9. Baronh: lang of the Abh: Any Details? From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 10. Re: whistling s's From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 11. Re: Advanced English to become official! From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 12. Re: Fluency and spelling (was: Advanced English to become official!) From: JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 13. Re: History of constructed languages From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 14. Re: kinship systems From: Kevin Athey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 15. Re: History of constructed languages From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 16. Re: kinship systems From: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 17. Re: kinship systems From: Joseph Bridwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 18. Re: whistling s's From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 19. Re: whistling s's From: Christopher Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 20. Re: History of constructed languages From: Muke Tever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 21. Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become official!) From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 22. Re: TECH: Sound Change program From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 23. Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become official!) From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 1 Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 20:50:26 -0400 From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: ADMIN: Pascal set to NOPOST for calming down *bursts into laughter!* I'm sorry... I have been deleting this thread, but I can only imagine. S. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henrik Theiling" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 11:54 AM Subject: ADMIN: Pascal set to NOPOST for calming down > Hi! > > After having warned him with no effect, I just used my strange powers > to put Pascal A. Kramm to NOPOST until he has calmed down (and at > least for 24h). > > Bye, > Henrik > ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 2 Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 18:20:19 -0700 From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: ADMIN: Pascal set to NOPOST for calming down On Apr 4, 2005 9:11 AM, Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ---------------------- Information from the mail header > ----------------------- > Sender: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Poster: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: ADMIN: Pascal set to NOPOST for calming down > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Henrik Theiling wrote: > > >Hi! > > > >After having warned him with no effect, I just used my strange powers > >to put Pascal A. Kramm to NOPOST until he has calmed down (and at > >least for 24h). > > > > > > Well, I should probably apologise for starting a mini-flame-war. I > probably should have phrased things better. > > So, sorry, everybody! > > Joe > Probably not. Anything coming from any Anglophone is likely to set Pascal off. I learned in an email exchange he has a HUGE chip on his shoulder. Don't think it's your fault. He just hasn't learned to play nice witht he big kids. -- Kiwasatra ay tepan ura nga garu kucaku songa majenyora bilat maacaku lawan ku saal Tal sora inumyara nga sepotyal ngaruan ura nga puka ku matambiryay ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 3 Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 21:30:35 -0400 From: Sally Caves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: History of constructed languages ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Friday, April 1, 2005, at 07:58 , David J. Peterson wrote: > >> Ray wrote: >> >> << >> Yes, certainly - in Dante's 'Divine Comedy' there is a fragment of a >> diabolic language. >> >> >> >> Hey, I'm reading that. I'm up to Canto 29 of Purgatory. Where >> is this language? Did I miss it? > > Inferno - > Canto VII, line 1: Papè Satàn, papè Satàn aleppe! > Canto XXXI, line 67: Raphèl may améch zabì almì! > > (Note: à = a-grave; è = e-grave; ì = i-grave) And few can decipher these utterances. Some say that pape and aleppe are distorted Greek--papai, "ye gods"; I'm less certain about aleppe; and other commentators have suggested that Nimrod's remarks are a terribly distorted (or fake) Hebrew. But distorted or "pretend" Hebrew is legion throughout the middle ages and in Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and makes its way into incantations, conjurations, Christian Cabala, and so forth. Also, look to Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantegruel for extended passages of made up languge. There is also the comic gibberish in Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well," Act IV, scene I. Referred to as "chough's language," and used to fool the pompous Parolles. So while these examples don't answer Mark's original query in the terms that he set it out, invented language is all over the place and has ancient origins. My special project: Hildegard? Not a fiction, though. No fictional setting. But over a thousand invented words. > ========================================= > On Friday, April 1, 2005, at 10:14 , Thomas Wier wrote: > >> From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>> Anyway, I'm far from an expert, and I'd like to know what the first >>> constructed language for media use might've been. I'm not talking here >>> about >>> Esperanto or Volapuek etc., but a fictional languages for use in >>> fiction. >> >> I think it's fair to say that conlanging as a fictional enterprise >> is something new in the 20th century. > > That is not how I understand Umberto Eco's accounts of Gabriel de Foigny's > "La Terre ausrale connue" or Denis Vairasse's "L'Histoire des Sevarambes". Agree with Ray. It depends on what you call "fiction" and whether you limit it only to the last two centuries. If Dante isn't fiction, then you can't say that his distorted or fallen language of the Inferno is a "fictional language." Nor can you say the same thing about John Dee and his "angelic language" (provided by Edward Kelley, I believe, and incorrectly referred to as "Enochian"), nor can you say that the Helene Smith's "Martian" is fictional because it was "made up" in a mediumistic trance. But it has all the earmarks of something fictional and recognizable to us, though primitive--it is a calque of French, but it has a conworld, it has a messenger between us and that world, there are drawings made and an alphabet... what's the difference between inspiration and imagination, or vision and creativity? Some of what I used to come up with in Teonaht was fairly visionary and automatic when I was young. It has since become very rationalized. >> Conlanging in some form goes >> way back. I believe I posted some years ago about my discovery >> that the brother of one of the Hellenistic Successors (_diadokhoi_) > > Even earlier, there is a fragment of made-up language in one of > Aristophane's comedies (I must look it out). The Birds. Lots of utterances imitative of birdsong. The Frogs: the famous Brek kek kek kek koax koax. >> ...........Jesse brought up the potentially earlier example of >> _Gulliver's Travels_, and IIRC Thomas More's _Utopia_ might contain >> some similarly poorly developed constructed language materials (if >> only lexemes). But all of these were to the best of my knowledge very >> cursory, and don't represent fictional languages in the sense of > > I don't know enough about More & Utopia to comment, The preface provided in the 1516 edition has a quatrain of Utopian with a Latin translation and some angular looking characters. I have examined it. It's a perfect calque of the Latin translation, so it's clear More wrote out the Latin first and he (or someone else, perhaps Giles) adapted the language and the alphabet to it. > but certainly in the > case of Gulliver's travels, the fragments from Dante & the Aristophanes > line, I agree these don't represent fully developed fictional languages. > But Foigny certainly got beyond that; he did provide a sort of dictionary > and some grammatical rules at least. In A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis. There are lots of other Voyage Accounts with examples of invented languages. But for any invention that seems to have some kind of system to it, even if extremely paltry, More's Utopia should at least be mentioned. Sally ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 4 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 05:11:02 -0400 From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official! On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 11:16:31 -0400, Pascal A. Kramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >"Problem is, Pascal's German, so it's bound to be imperfect." -> that's a >rather crude and very unpolite sweeping stake about all Germans being >retarded (or otherwise being mentally incapable) and thus it's impossible >that they can come up with something really good. Joe's critique was not meant to be crude or unpolite. However, I'd say it was inconsiderate. The critique of Pascal's attempt is justified: It really reminds of the stereotype German accent. But I strongly disagree that any English spelling by a German is bound to be imperfect. The system of English phonology can be mastered very well by foreigners. There's plenty of material, and with an RP-ish accent (few phonemic mergers) and RP dictionaries at hand, you have a good start. >About being a native speaker or not - that doesn't say ANYTHING about the >proficiency of the person in question! It's very well possible that a >non-native speaker is better than a native one. Not in the fluency and not in the language intuition, that is. However, someone who learns English as a second language will be less biassed by the traditional English spelling than a native speaker who isn't interested in linguistics (none on this list), simply because he already knows another spelling system (most probably a more regular one). I'd even affirm that someone who's learned a language at school will probably make less orthography errors than an avarage native speaker not interested in language matters (though the native speaker will hardly ever make wording errors which are most abundant in foreigners' language). This is a result of how the rules are learnt: Foreigners consciously learn the spelling rules at the same instant they learn the language, whereas native speakers don't need any explicit rule knowledge. Spelling is taught to native speakers at a very early age before the mind develops the ability of dealing with an explicit rule, so many of those who aren't interested in language won't ever learn the spelling rules but write intuitively. Take for instance the Spanish accent mark: The rules are easy to learn, and most foreigners will place all the accents correctly. Many native speakers, however, who have learnt to write a couple of words with accent mark in the first school years, won't ever know the rules and will place the accent marks more or less at random for their entire lifes. The same with the silent final _s_ in French: Foreigners have learnt the rules and will place them correctly, whereas many native speaker just place them intuitively and thus often wrongly. In cases like these, many non-native speakers are better than many native ones (and of course, there's also plenty of similar cases in English). [EMAIL PROTECTED]: j. 'mach' wust ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 5 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 20:51:30 +0900 From: Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official! On Apr 5, 2005 6:11 PM, J. 'Mach' Wust <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'd even affirm that someone who's learned a language at school will > probably make less orthography errors than an avarage native speaker not > interested in language matters (though the native speaker will hardly ever > make wording errors which are most abundant in foreigners' language). This > is a result of how the rules are learnt: Foreigners consciously learn the > spelling rules at the same instant they learn the language, whereas native > speakers don't need any explicit rule knowledge. Spelling is taught to > native speakers at a very early age before the mind develops the ability of > dealing with an explicit rule, so many of those who aren't interested in > language won't ever learn the spelling rules but write intuitively. > (Good Spanish and French examples) > In cases like these, many non-native speakers are better than many native > ones (and of course, there's also plenty of similar cases in English). I learned English as a foreign language. Not only I had to learn the orthography at the same time I learned the language, I had to learn the Roman alphabet too, as my language doesn't use the Roman alphabet at all. As a result, although I can understand in my head that _it's_ and _its_, _there_ and _their_ sound exactly the same, I cannot really confuse them -- they are written differently, after all! I think I have never got them wrong in my entire English usage. But I saw that even those native English speakers who are very good at spelling use it the other way around, and it surprised me to see that. Seo Sanghyeon ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 6 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 14:13:57 +0200 From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official! Hi! Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Apr 5, 2005 6:11 PM, J. 'Mach' Wust <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I'd even affirm that someone who's learned a language at school will > > probably make less orthography errors than an avarage native speaker not > > interested in language matters (though the native speaker will hardly ever > > make wording errors which are most abundant in foreigners' language). >... > As a result, although I can understand in my head that _it's_ and _its_, > _there_ and _their_ sound exactly the same, I cannot really confuse them -- > they are written differently, after all! I think I have never got them wrong > in my entire English usage. But I saw that even those native English speakers > who are very good at spelling use it the other way around, and it surprised > me to see that. Hmm, I started to develop the ability to make any mistakes, it seems. :-) Earlier on, when I had just learned English, I would not mix up "it's" and "its", but now, I also do that. The less I have to think about the language when writing, the more the purely phonetic representation influences the orthography, it seems. I think German's orthography has a little less sources for mixing things up, but those it does have are evenly likely to come out wrong for me. :-) The thing I dislike my speech center (or whatever center generates written text) most for is picking up bad spellings from advertisements, newspapers and any other public language exposition *unconsciously*, poisoning the algorithms, and reproduce mistakes without informing my higher brain functions about it. I can get really angry at myself about this since I really dislike the stupidly wrong stuff I read everywhere. To prevent these mistakes, I need to consciously reread and correct those intrusive and viruslike mistakes 'manually'... **Henrik ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 7 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 22:14:23 +0900 From: Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official! On Apr 5, 2005 9:13 PM, Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hmm, I started to develop the ability to make any mistakes, it > seems. :-) Earlier on, when I had just learned English, I would not > mix up "it's" and "its", but now, I also do that. Well, good for you! I guess you reached the another stage of English fluency then. :-) Has anyone developed the ability to make any orthographic mistakes from similar sounding words *in your conlang*? I guess not... Seo Sanghyeon ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 8 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 06:55:44 -0700 From: JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: whistling s's Combining a couple of responses... --- "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have a sort of lisp that actually comes out as a high pitched > whistle every so often. It's quite odd to hear when it happens. It > used to occur a lot more when I was younger. That's the sound. I know I've heard it as a sort of lisp in a movie (a cartoon, maybe? I don't remember which). I had my whole family trying to do it when I was at my parents' this weekend. ========================================================== --- Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yes! > Another conlang with whistles! > My Semiticonlang includes both voiced and voiceless whistled sibilants. > When i brought it up a while ago on the list, we came to the conclusion > that the whistled s/sh sound is probably /s_a_qp\)/ or /s_a_q/ > depending on if you're accentuating the whistle by using your lips at > the same time. Thanks. I was trying to write up a phonology and got stuck on that one. I hadn't tried voiced before... > -Stephen (Steg) > "your whistling sounds like scary alien bees!" > ~ why not to attempt /z_a_q/ in public ... but yes, scary alien bees ;-) Now I want to add that to my conlang. Someone told me my voiceless one sounded like a squeaky dog toy. --JC -- Watch the Reply-To... ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 9 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 16:58:34 +0200 From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Baronh: lang of the Abh: Any Details? Hi! Recently I came across a conlang used in the anime 'Crest of the Stars'. An alien race (who originate from earth but where genetically engineered), the Abh, speak that language. It's a conconlang: conhistory is that it's an artificially purified ancient Japanese that evolved after the race had left earth. The language is listed at langmaker: http://www.langmaker.com/db/mdl_baronh.htm Unfortunately, the original grammar is in Japanese and there is not much about it on the web. Some interesting grammar notes are here: http://dadh-baronr.s5.xrea.com/intl/en/index.html http://dadh-baronr.s5.xrea.com/intl/en/grammar.html Does anyone of you know more about the language? Especially grammar and conhistoric development? Bye, Henrik ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 10 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 15:55:47 +0100 From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: whistling s's JC wrote: > One of my conlangs has a sound that's like a high pitched, whistled s or sh. > Of > the admittedly small set of people I was bugging with this the other day, I'm > the only one who can do it, but if I say s or sh and sort of curl my tongue > tip > up, I get the whistle. > > Phonology is not my strong point, as you can probably tell :-) Is there a > common notation for this sort of thing? As an adjunct to this, does anybody know how to describe the (in)famous Irish "whistled-t"? It's quite similar to this, only softer and not quite so much curled as raised. My phonology-foo isn't quite strong enough for this one. K. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 11 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 10:24:30 -0700 From: "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Advanced English to become official! This reminds me of instances in my Spanish classes. I found it highly Ironic that the native speakers in my classes were not held to the same standards as the non-native speakers. Apparently they were given a pass about their spelling and accenting of Spanish, while those of us who've learned it as a second language are not given any such break. Most of the frequent mistakes were mixing up b and v, putting accents randomly. In Mexico, I saw a lot more errors from middle school students: - Frequent mixup of B and V with a preference for B - Use of LL where Y is to be expected: llo - yo - Reduction of "que" to "k" (I know, this isn't really orthographic as much as a slangy abbreviation), or to "ke" There were a few others I've forgotten. On Apr 5, 2005 9:13 PM, Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hmm, I started to develop the ability to make any mistakes, it > > seems. :-) Earlier on, when I had just learned English, I would not > > mix up "it's" and "its", but now, I also do that. Well, at least you'll appear to be a native speaker :) On Apr 5, 2005 6:14 AM, Sanghyeon Seo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Has anyone developed the ability to make any orthographic mistakes > from similar sounding words *in your conlang*? I guess not... > Well, if i were fluent in mine (or even memorized more than a couple of words from the lexicon), who knows? -- Kiwasatra ay tepan ura nga garu kucaku songa majenyora bilat maacaku lawan ku saal Tal sora inumyara nga sepotyal ngaruan ura nga puka ku matambiryay ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 12 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 10:56:04 -0700 From: JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Fluency and spelling (was: Advanced English to become official!) --- "B. Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In Mexico, I saw a lot more errors from middle school students: > > - Frequent mixup of B and V with a preference for B > - Use of LL where Y is to be expected: llo - yo > - Reduction of "que" to "k" (I know, this isn't really orthographic as > much as a slangy abbreviation), or to "ke" > > There were a few others I've forgotten. > > > On Apr 5, 2005 9:13 PM, Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Hmm, I started to develop the ability to make any mistakes, it > > > seems. :-) Earlier on, when I had just learned English, I would not > > > mix up "it's" and "its", but now, I also do that. > > > Well, at least you'll appear to be a native speaker :) I read Spanish well enough to notice quirky problems, but I don't speak it well enough to have developed them. I do think it comes with fluency. And any mistakes in my conlangs would have to be chalked up to incompetence rather than fluency ;-) In English, while I catch its/it's or they're/their/there almost instantly when I'm reading, sometimes my fingers will type or write the wrong one. I usually catch it right away, but I don't always until I reread it. Different circuits for reading and writing, I guess. When I read, I just read; I don't hear the words in my head. But when I write I do, so maybe there's an extra layer there. And since this email is about these things, I probably didn't catch one of them here... JC -- Watch the Reply-To... ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 13 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 19:09:51 +0100 From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: History of constructed languages On Tuesday, April 5, 2005, at 02:30 , Sally Caves wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Ray Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [snip] >> Inferno - >> Canto VII, line 1: Papè Satàn, papè Satàn aleppe! >> Canto XXXI, line 67: Raphèl may améch zabì almì! >> >> (Note: à = a-grave; è = e-grave; ì = i-grave) > > And few can decipher these utterances. Yes - but they do not agree with one another :) > Some say that pape and aleppe are > distorted Greek--papai, "ye gods"; I'm less certain about aleppe; _papaî_ is an exclamation in Classical Greek, showing either pain (whether mental or physical), surprise or scorn. It is found in the works of Aiskhylos (Aeschylus), Aristophanes, Herodotos and Plato. In Dante's time it would have been pronounced /pa'pe/ but I doubt very much that the word had survived in spoken Greek. Whether Dante knew the word or not depends upon how likely he was to know about the Greek Classics. As for _aleppe_, those who adopt a Greek decipherment take the word as _alhpte_ (where h = 'eta') = 'not to laid hold off, incomprehensible, not to be chosen' [masc. sing. vocative]. There are a few problems with this: 1. the word is pretty rare in Greek; 2. in Dante's time it would have been pronounced /'alipte/, which is at odds with the medial -e- in Dante's word (Dante would not know about later reconstructions of pronunciations of different ancient Greek dialects); 3. there is no obvious reason to change -pt- to -pp-. And at least one commentator has seen these words as distorted French: "Paix, paix! Satan! Paix, paix! Satan! allez!" > and other > commentators have suggested that Nimrod's remarks are a terribly distorted > (or fake) Hebrew. Yes, I have seen no even vaguely convincing explanation of Canto XXXI, 67, other than that they are a charicature of Hebrew. According to Eco, Dante appears not have known Hebrew but had a vague idea what it sounded like. > But distorted or "pretend" Hebrew is legion throughout > the middle ages and in Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and makes its way > into > incantations, conjurations, Christian Cabala, and so forth. Yep - if it is distorted anything, then distorted Hebrew seems to me far more likely than distorted Greek or French. > Also, look to Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantegruel for extended passages > of > made up languge. Yes - I'd forgotten about that :) > There is also the comic gibberish in Shakespeare's "All's > Well That Ends Well," Act IV, scene I. Referred to as "chough's language, > " > and used to fool the pompous Parolles. So while these examples don't > answer > Mark's original query in the terms that he set it out, invented language > is > all over the place and has ancient origins. I agree. > >> ========================================= >> On Friday, April 1, 2005, at 10:14 , Thomas Wier wrote: >> >>> From: Mark Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>> Anyway, I'm far from an expert, and I'd like to know what the first >>>> constructed language for media use might've been. I'm not talking here >>>> about >>>> Esperanto or Volapuek etc., but a fictional languages for use in >>>> fiction. >>> >>> I think it's fair to say that conlanging as a fictional enterprise >>> is something new in the 20th century. >> >> That is not how I understand Umberto Eco's accounts of Gabriel de Foigny' >> s >> "La Terre ausrale connue" or Denis Vairasse's "L'Histoire des Sevarambes" >> . > > Agree with Ray. Thanks :) > It depends on what you call "fiction" and whether you limit > it only to the last two centuries. That seems very limiting to me and I suspect to you). If Apuleius' "Golden Ass" is not fiction, I don't know what is! Even earlier we have Petronius' "Sauturae" which, tho not preserved in full, is surely a romance or novel - indeed, it seems that a tradition of writing fictional romances was already established in Hellenistic Greek. > If Dante isn't fiction, then you can't > say that his distorted or fallen language of the Inferno is a "fictional > language." Well it's fictional in the sense of being made up. [snip] >> Even earlier, there is a fragment of made-up language in one of >> Aristophane's comedies (I must look it out). > > The Birds. Lots of utterances imitative of birdsong. The Frogs: the > famous > Brek kek kek kek koax koax. No, no - these are essentially onomatopoeia. I was thinking of a sentence a slave is supposed to utter in a non-Greek language. I thought it came in the Archarnians, but I may have dis-remembered. [snip] >> I don't know enough about More & Utopia to comment, > > The preface provided in the 1516 edition has a quatrain of Utopian with a > Latin translation and some angular looking characters. I have examined > it. > It's a perfect calque of the Latin translation, so it's clear More wrote > out > the Latin first and he (or someone else, perhaps Giles) adapted the > language > and the alphabet to it. I see. > >> but certainly in the >> case of Gulliver's travels, the fragments from Dante & the Aristophanes >> line, I agree these don't represent fully developed fictional languages. >> But Foigny certainly got beyond that; he did provide a sort of dictionary >> and some grammatical rules at least. > > In A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis. There are lots of other > Voyage Accounts with examples of invented languages. But for any > invention > that seems to have some kind of system to it, even if extremely paltry, > More's Utopia should at least be mentioned. OK. 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" ] ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 14 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 13:08:23 -0500 From: Kevin Athey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: kinship systems >From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >This sounds familiar; I know some Indonesian langs. have various terms for >same-sex and opposite-sex _siblings_ as well as older/younger, but offhand, >your system sounds different. Kinship systems confuse me....:-((( > >Check out: >http://www.umanitoba.ca/anthropology/tutor/kinterms/termsys.html Been there, but thanks. Actually, I went back and took another look, and I noticed they had a language up where fathers and mothers use different terms for their children. It's not the same system, but it's encouraging. > > The system I'm thinking of would be something like this: > > A: son, but only of a female ego (a man cannot have a B) > > B: daughter, but only of a female (a man cannot have a B) > >Do you possibly mean "brother/sister" or "sibling" not son/daughter??? No. I haven't decided how siblings work yet. The aspect I was wondering about (with respect to naturalism) was the differentiation by sex of ego of offspring terms. I suppose given this a similar differentiation of siblings would make sense. > > C: son of a male ego, son of the ego's sister > > D: daughter of a male ego, daughter of the ego's sister > > E: son or daughter of the ego's brother or the ego's in-laws > >Those sound rather odd to me...But hey, it's a conworld, no?!! I want it odd, but I don't want it impossible. Something you might find in some little out of the way hunter-gatherer community on Earth, or something that could eventually evolve from more common modern languages, given a few millenia. I don't really have a conworld for this, though. Not yet. > > Similarly: > > F: mother > > G: father, mother's brother, (also probably step-father) > > H: mother's sister, (also probably step-mother) > > I: father's brother, mother's sister's husband > > J: father's sister, father's brother's husband > >J:...FaBroHus.....eh?? 'tain't legal, except in Ontario, Vermont, Mass. and >Holland!!!! But aside from that (typo?), these sound more common. Heh. Indeed. Although, were the consociety down with that (and I don't know that they aren't) that could well be the term for it. Either that or I. _________________________________________________________________ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee® Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963 ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 15 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 20:42:36 +0200 From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: History of constructed languages Quoting Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > [snip] > >> Even earlier, there is a fragment of made-up language in one of > >> Aristophane's comedies (I must look it out). > > > > The Birds. Lots of utterances imitative of birdsong. The Frogs: the > > famous > > Brek kek kek kek koax koax. > > No, no - these are essentially onomatopoeia. I was thinking of a sentence > a slave is supposed to utter in a non-Greek language. I thought it came in > the Archarnians, but I may have dis-remembered. Is it known it *is* made up, rather than a fragment, more-or-less distorted, of some actual non-Greek language? Andreas ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 16 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 16:54:41 -0400 From: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: kinship systems I don't think it's attested, but as far as naturalism goes I could see the sort of system you On Apr 5, 2005 2:08 PM, Kevin Athey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > No. I haven't decided how siblings work yet. The aspect I was wondering > about (with respect to naturalism) was the differentiation by sex of ego of > offspring terms. > I want it odd, but I don't want it impossible. Something you might find in > some little out of the way hunter-gatherer community on Earth, or something > that could eventually evolve from more common modern languages, given a few > millenia. I don't think it's attested, but as far as naturalism goes I could see the sort of system you describe arising from a system that makes a strong distinction between potential and taboo mates. Here's an example of what I'm thinking, beginning with a very simple Hawaiian-type system. po - father, uncle ma - mother, aunt boro - brother, male cousin bara - sister, female cousin so - son, nephew data - daughter, niece These bare roots would only be used for same-sex relatives and maybe for other people's relatives. po ami (my father/uncle, said by a male) po aJose (Jose's father/uncle) po aSara (Sara's father/uncle) But Sara, on the other hand, must distinguish between male relatives she might marry and ones she might not. Let's suppose this society has the simplest restriction: no marrying a nuclear relative. Sara must distinguish between taboo mates (suffix -m) and permissable ones (suffix -i). So: borom ami (my brother, said by Sarah) boroi ami (my male cousin, said by Sarah) baram ami (my sister, said by Jose) barai ami (my female cousin, said by Jose) (Maybe also a suffix, in a small tribe, for relatives that you have actually married. -im, perhaps, because they are both marriageable and now, since you've married them, nuclear. "baraim" = "my cousin-wife") This makes "son" or "daughter" different depending on whether it's a male or female saying it. Jose's dad says "so ami" but his mom says "som ami". Now, these aren't separate roots, but given a couple centuries of sound changes they could become so. And perhaps subsequently spread from just meaning one's own relatives to everyone's relatives ("borom aSara" = "Sara's brother"). Such a system could be as complicated as one wants; I just chose a Hawaiian system because it meant less typing for me. -- Patrick Littell PHIL205: MWF 2:00-3:00, M 6:00-9:00 Voice Mail: ext 744 Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00 ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 17 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 20:56:55 -0000 From: Joseph Bridwell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: kinship systems Mine are mundane. Thule: 01. mother's child, father's child 02. younger sibling, child of same mother 03. same age sibling, child of same mother 04. older sibling, child of same mother 04. father 05. father's sibling 06. father's mother 07. mother 08. mother's sibling, mother's mother's child 09. mother's sister's child 10. mother's mother 11. mother's mother's sister Bez: 1. rearing parent 2. non-rearing parent 4. member of same clutch 5. member of older clutch of same rearing parent 6. member of younger clutch of same rearing parent Nen: 1. mother 2. mother's reciprocal clan 3. sibling, child of same mother 4. self's reciprocal clan Note: clan is based on reciprocal debt, and can change Trayih: 1. clutch rearing-mother 2. member of same clutch |n1:l3 1. hive, queen 2. skill group 3. unit in skill group Note: unit can change after maturity, skill-group can change but only rarely after maturity ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 18 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 23:23:30 +0100 From: Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: whistling s's On Apr 5, 2005 3:55 PM, Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > JC wrote: > As an adjunct to this, does anybody know how to describe the (in)famous > Irish "whistled-t"? It's quite similar to this, only softer and not > quite so much curled as raised. What is this "whistled-t" of which you speak? I've probably heard it, but the description doesn't bring anything to mind immediately... > K. s. -- ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 19 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 18:30:18 -0400 From: Christopher Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: whistling s's On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 13:48:04 -0700, JC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > if I say s or sh and sort of curl my tongue tip >up, I get the whistle. That might be as simple as [s`] -- the voiceless retroflex fricative. I like that sound. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 20 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 18:20:10 -0600 From: Muke Tever <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: History of constructed languages Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Quoting Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > >> [snip] >> >> Even earlier, there is a fragment of made-up language in one of >> >> Aristophane's comedies (I must look it out). >> > >> > The Birds. Lots of utterances imitative of birdsong. The Frogs: the >> > famous >> > Brek kek kek kek koax koax. >> >> No, no - these are essentially onomatopoeia. I was thinking of a sentence >> a slave is supposed to utter in a non-Greek language. I thought it came in >> the Archarnians, but I may have dis-remembered. > > Is it known it *is* made up, rather than a fragment, more-or-less distorted, > of > some actual non-Greek language? I _do_ remember this. Hmm. Let me look it up. It was in Acharnians; Pseudartabas has the line: "Jartaman exarx 'anapissona satra." (or: exarxan apissona?) The English version at Perseus bears a footnote "Jargon, no doubt meaningless in all languages." http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Aristoph.+Ach.+100 *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 21 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 20:40:45 -0400 From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become official!) On Mon, 04 Apr 2005 10:17:37 -0400, Christopher Wright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Schwa is a reduced vowel; Schwa is a mid central vowel. In English, a short schwa is the realisation of several reduced vowels. > in spectrograms, > you always tell it because it's extremely short Not always so. /@:/ exists in the Real World, including in Sinhalese. > Are you using different definitions for [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [V]? I'm not > certain that > English has a phonemic schwa, though you'd probably want it for some > syllabic consonants at least. Eh? Generally in English one is left with a choice *between* schwa and syllabic consonants, depending on which dialect you take to be canon. I don't understand this part. Paul ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 22 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 21:06:36 -0400 From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: TECH: Sound Change program On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 12:24:17 -0400, Stephen Mulraney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mar 25, 2005 7:22 PM, Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> ----- Original Message ----- > > First, it all sounds wonderful. I hope it works as planned! > >> From: Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> >> > Paul Bennett skrev: >> > > I think I like single-character variable names, to be honest. >> > >> > 2) you run out of *meaningful* single letter abbreviations even >> > sooner. >> >> Yes. > > I think single-letter var names would be terribly restrictive too. > Especially when you consider, > as you mentioned earlier, that you may want the variables to change > over time, e.g. if the > vowel inventory changes, you might need "V_time0=a,i,u" and > "V_time1=a,e,i,o,u". Of course, > if you implemented the wonderful ability to redefine variables > throughout the input file, it would > make this a bit easier. That's entirely the plan, expressed via features. > However, it would still be unnecessarily > confusing (e.g V for all vowels, > F for fronts vowel, B for back vowels, where V, Vfront and Vback or > whatever would help keep > users sane while editing complex files). What I've devised allows you to combine variables and features (frontness, or whatever). At a given point in the sound change definition file, you can put (e.g.) i=V[+front][+close][-round] and later on, something like k > c / $V[+front] At least, that's the plan. I'm already overdue on handing the assignment back, so I'm going to go without variables, and just use the existing regular-expression syntax that's in place in the language. However, I'm fascinated enough that I will almost certainly finish this project "properly". > Some positive remarks: unicode support sounds brilliant. Sounds brilliant to me, too, but when I tried to use a UTF-8 corpus of Latin with macrons, the file reader class barfed hugely. I think I tried UTF-16 with the same nasty results, IIRC. > Trying to > find suitable chars from > the feeble pool of alphanumerics plus the chars that taliesin listed > had me tearing my hair > out when working with the previously existing programs. And what's > worse, after spending > uncountable hours on writing the GMPs in the right format, it was nigh > unreadable and > undebuggable, and now, a year or two later, the whole mess is utterly > impenetrable. A simple > feature like unicode support (without ignoring case of alpha chars!) Without? > plus the ability to give > sensible var names would make writing maintainable files vastly easier. Variable names with features I think is the way to go. > But the thing that really has me excited is the mention of possible > featural, umm, features. Aha. That'll teach me to read the entire message before hitting "Reply". I shall choose not to censor myself, though. >> > If V is "vowel" then you want the varnames for e.g. >> > "rounded vowel" and "front vowel" to be VR and VF. >> >> Yes, although with features, that could be V[+round] and V[+front]. I >> think that's the notation I prefer reading. > > But there's likely to be a need for variables that don't have a > featural description, too. Not everyone > will want to use a strict featural approach. For that matter, in the > past I've used these kind of programs to implement things other than > phonological changes: flipping between orthographical systems is quite > a natural use, too, but it would be a pain to try to bludgeon such an > algorithm into a featural mold. Features will be entirely ad-hoc, and absolutely voluntary. If you want i=X[+shlrdu][-qwerty] d=X[+shlrdu][+foo] you will be able to have it (with |i| unmarked as to fooness, and |d| unmarked as to qwertyhood), and if you want a,i,u=V b,d,g,k,p,t=C then you will be able to have that, too. > Ooh! Feature request!!! :). Don't worry, it's easy: the ability to > produce output which is correctly formatted as input to a further run > of the program. That not only saves time writing awkward little sed > scripts or whatnot, but also makes it very easy to general related > langs, like: Eh? The program reads a corpus file and a sound change file, applies the sound changes in the order they're written in the sound change file (stopping at the specified year), and outputs the changed results, either to stdout or a Text Box (depending on whether you're doing the GUI thing). I suppose I could also include a "Copy Output To Input" button in the GUI. > A = ancestor lang, X, Y, Z child langs, and B=common-X-Y-Z (not > necessarily a fully developed lang, but containing all the changes > from A common to X, Y and Z). Have soundchange files A_to_B.sc and > then one of B_to_X.sc, B_to_Y.sc, or B_to_Z.sc. The run the > appropriate combination of sc files to get whatever child you like. Yep, yep. > Another approach to this is the one used in Geoff's Sound Change > Applier, where your preface each line in the soundchange file with > "X", "Y", "Z", "XY", "XYZ", or whatever; indicating the list of > children langs that the line affects. But this requires more > complexity in the parser. Not feasible at this stage. I'm thinking about XMLifying the Sound Change format, despite my hatred for XML, because I think it would be a workable way to store several child languages with eachother. More thinking is required. > By the way, what platform will it be for? Personally, I'm easy(*), but > a unix text mode version would be the answer to all my prayers :) > > * Well, once it's windows or unix :) It shall be Java, with GUI completely optional. Thus, hopefully, if you've got it, I'll run on it. (sufficiently wimpy devices need not apply). > But it all sounds great. I await with trembling fingers. As do I, sir. As do I. Like I say, the drop-dead date for new function has long since passed (for now), but depending on what my workload is like this summer I will keep working on it until it is perfect. Paul ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 23 Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 20:57:26 -0400 From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: YAEPT: OMFG I'm a mutant!!! (was Re: Advanced English to become official!) On Apr 5, 2005 8:40 PM, Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Schwa is a mid central vowel. In English, a short schwa is the realisation > of several reduced vowels. Isn't it the other way around? In English, unstressed vowels often reduce to /@/, but /@/ has many phonetic realizations, of which [EMAIL PROTECTED] is only one. Others in my 'lect include [1], [U] (the name of the current month has a [U] in its second syllable IMD), syllabification of following consonants, etc. Heck, I would not be surprised to find out that there were English dialects which lack [EMAIL PROTECTED] completely, having only other realizations of what we think of as /@/. -- Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------