There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa
From: Jim Henry
2a. Re: Two different kinds of plural?
From: Tony Harris
2b. Re: Two different kinds of plural?
From: Chris Peters
3a. Re: I Ching + finnegans wake + McLuhan
From: Alex Fink
3b. Re: I Ching + finnegans wake + McLuhan
From: Samuel Stutter
4a. Re: 30-Day Conlang
From: Miles Forster
Messages
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1a. Re: Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Nov 4, 2010 3:37 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 4:43 PM, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Could it be the book is Catford's A practical introduction to phonetics?
Just added to my Amazon wishlist. Amazon's "customers who bought this
also bought..." lists Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit;
this might suggest that conlangers are disproportionately represented
among people buying linguistics books on Amazon, or maybe that there
are a lot more of us than we think, or maybe that Amazon's sample
sizes for some books are too small to draw statistically sigificant
conclusions from.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (7)
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2a. Re: Two different kinds of plural?
Posted by: "Tony Harris" t...@alurhsa.org
Date: Thu Nov 4, 2010 4:23 pm ((PDT))
Not a natlang, but Alurhsa has this. Sálek (book), sálekó (books, as in
more than one book), sálekár (books that form a collection).
Same with tree: bhelk, bhelkó (more than one tree), bhelkár (trees in a
stand, a collection of trees, a wood).
Interestingly the -ár words are treated as singular, not plural, in
Alurhsa as far as verb/pronoun agreement.
On 11/04/2010 05:34 PM, Philip Newton wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 18:49, Gary Shannon<fizi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> My 30-day conlang seems to be developing two different kinds of
>> plural. The first is the usual "more than one" and the second has a
>> sort of mass noun type implication and is grammatically like a
>> singular. For example "hair" which in the singular means a single
>> strand of hair, in the plural_1 means several strands of hair, and in
>> plural_2 means "hair" as a mass substance. So you might say "Many
>> hair-Plural_1", but "Much hair-Plural_2".
>>
>> Another example might be the word for "mountain" which in plural_1
>> means several mountains, but in plural_2 might mean "mountain range".
>> Same with tree/trees/forest, plank/planks/lumber, or "1 item of
>> trash"/"several items of trash"/"lots of trash (mass)".
>>
>> Does anything like that exist in any natlang? Does that sound reasonable?
> I think Romansh has something, if not like that, then at least
> similar: some nouns form not only a regular plural but also a form in
> -a which is morphologically feminine singular and which is a
> collective, I think - so for "il pez" (peak) you have not only "ils
> pezs" (peaks) but also "la pezza" which is a sort of collective
> "mountain range" or something like that. Or "il crap" (stone) gives
> "ils craps" (stones) and "la crappa" (a mass of stone, a rocky area).
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
Messages in this topic (9)
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2b. Re: Two different kinds of plural?
Posted by: "Chris Peters" beta_leo...@hotmail.com
Date: Thu Nov 4, 2010 9:22 pm ((PDT))
My on-hold "Ricadh" project had this. It started specifically with pronouns --
independently I came up with an inclusive/exclusive first-person plural system
-- different words for "we" based on whether or not the listener was included
in the speaker's group. Once I discovered that feature already existed in a
number of natlangs (notably Quechua), I expanded it into a more generic
pluralizing system.
"na" = "I"
"w- " is an exclusive plural prefix, therefore:
"wna" is "we", a group which includes the speaker but not the listener
"ta-" is inclusive, therefore:
"tana" is "we", a group that includes both speaker and listener.
Which I expanded to include all nouns:
"vihle" = "bird"
"tavihle" = all birds, as a general concept
"wvihle" = flock, or a smaller-yet-still-complete grouping.
:Chris
Messages in this topic (9)
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3a. Re: I Ching + finnegans wake + McLuhan
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Nov 4, 2010 5:09 pm ((PDT))
On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:15:58 +0100, Lars Finsen <lars.fin...@ortygia.no> wrote:
>Anyhow I do think it's interesting that the number of amino acids
>involved in standard natural protein synthesis is similar to the
>number of letters in many of the commonest alphabets. This says
>something profound about the nature of communication dynamics, in my
>opinion.
I disagree. Shannon's theorem says that given a string over one alphabet
you can recode it into any other alphabet with arbitrarily close to the
optimum efficiency, given by the ratio of the channel rates; there really
are no preferred alphabet sizes. To my eye it can only be coincidence that
the number of amino acids bopping around early cells is about the size of a
phoneme inventory.
If instead, for instance, it were the case that the presence of lots of
pairs of potential contrasts in a phonology turned out to be anticorrelated,
so that phonologies really had a preferred size more strongly than just is
entailed by how common each feature is, thàt sort of thing I'd deem to have
something interesting to say, about human perception and the language
faculty if not about communication tout ensemble. Still falls short of
profound, to me.
Alex
Messages in this topic (20)
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3b. Re: I Ching + finnegans wake + McLuhan
Posted by: "Samuel Stutter" sam.stut...@student.manchester.ac.uk
Date: Fri Nov 5, 2010 2:12 am ((PDT))
21 amino acids, right?
26 letters in contemporary Roman
38 letters in Armenian
22 letters in Hebrew
85 in Cherokee Syllabary
24 in Greek
33 in Russian
Rough average = 38
A quick sample of alphabets (even if we discount Cherokee) gives a number in
excess of 21 - if there was a connection we would expect there to be
orthographic alphabets with numbers less than 21.
Is there anything particularly profound about the number 38? Because wikipedia
isn't helping on this front.
On 5 Nov 2010, at 00:06, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:15:58 +0100, Lars Finsen <lars.fin...@ortygia.no> wrote:
>
>> Anyhow I do think it's interesting that the number of amino acids
>> involved in standard natural protein synthesis is similar to the
>> number of letters in many of the commonest alphabets. This says
>> something profound about the nature of communication dynamics, in my
>> opinion.
>
> I disagree. Shannon's theorem says that given a string over one alphabet
> you can recode it into any other alphabet with arbitrarily close to the
> optimum efficiency, given by the ratio of the channel rates; there really
> are no preferred alphabet sizes. To my eye it can only be coincidence that
> the number of amino acids bopping around early cells is about the size of a
> phoneme inventory.
>
> If instead, for instance, it were the case that the presence of lots of
> pairs of potential contrasts in a phonology turned out to be anticorrelated,
> so that phonologies really had a preferred size more strongly than just is
> entailed by how common each feature is, thàt sort of thing I'd deem to have
> something interesting to say, about human perception and the language
> faculty if not about communication tout ensemble. Still falls short of
> profound, to me.
>
> Alex
Messages in this topic (20)
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4a. Re: 30-Day Conlang
Posted by: "Miles Forster" m...@plasmatix.com
Date: Fri Nov 5, 2010 5:51 am ((PDT))
You write "Consonant cluster "KH" is a voiceless uvular fricative
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_uvular_fricative> (?), and "YH"
is a voiceless palatal fricative
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palatal_fricative> (ç). For
example: yhaku khanu (hatchet people) would be rendered ??ku ç?nu in IPA"
Shouldn't it be the other way round? i.e. yhaku khanu = [ç?ku ??nu] ?
Btw, I like the consonant cluster [?t] in txytavo. That word is kinda
awesome.
Messages in this topic (2)
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