There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Reading and Writing
From: Padraic Brown
1b. Re: Reading and Writing
From: Roger Mills
2a. Re: LangFam-Making Program
From: Arthaey Angosii
2b. Re: LangFam-Making Program
From: Aidan Grey
3a. Re: Deini font in Ubuntu?
From: Arthaey Angosii
3b. Re: Deini font in Ubuntu?
From: Rebecca Bettencourt
4a. Re: An irregular verb system
From: Roger Mills
4b. Re: An irregular verb system
From: Nikolay Ivankov
5a. Re: CALS export (was WALS export)
From: taliesin the storyteller
Messages
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1a. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 4:59 pm ((PDT))
From: Nikolay Ivankov lukevil...@gmail.com
>> As for Lucarian, "read" and "write" are orcare, to call out or read aloud
>> and ziccuccere, to engrave. Apparently, there is no word for "read silently".
>
> As far as I know, people started reading silently only in late antiquity,
I recall reading that in ancient times, folks (at least Romans and possibly
Greeks -- but I don't know about others, like Sumerians, Chinese, Indians,
etc.) read aloud, but I didn't know an end date for the practice. I would
suspect that modern Loucarian speakers don't actually read aloud (except,
perhaps, for those not-so-literate who have to sound out by letters and
syllables, carefully crafting each word as delicately as any megalithic mason);
in general they probably read silently, but have kept a very old meaning of the
word.
Now, the Telerani have to read aloud, because as I said perhaps 90 to 95% of
the people are non-literate. This means that when they need to write a letter
or some other document, they hire a marketplace scribe to write for them. When
they need to have a document or letter read to them, they hire a scribe who
reads it back. Traditionally, the scribes are only paid when they write --
reading something, especially a legal document, is a free service.
> and this became possible because there were invented the books as we know
> them, that is, with pages.
I think books as we know them -- codices -- date back to early Christian times,
as all (or certainly most of) the ancient mathoms of scriptures have been in
codex/book form (Nag Hamadi, etc). While I agree that they're more convenient
than scrolls, would this convenience necessarily lead to silent reading? Why
would they not just continue reading the codices aloud?
> They were (and are) much easier to handle then
> the scrolls, and therefore the way of reading has also changed: before that
> it was habitual for people to actually _listen_ to a scroll read by a
> servant rather then reading them by themselves. (I've read about that in:
> Helmut Schneider, "Geschichte der Antike Technik" (The History of
> Technics in Antiquity)).
Okay -- that's very interesting indeed! I had thought that silent reading came
along with monks quietly studying. I can certainly appreciate how having a
slave read to one would be a practice that would die out as the Empire faded
away into medievaldom, though.
> Sorry for offtopic.
Not at all offtopic! Any bit of curious cultural trivia like this can help us
who also create cultures along with out languages to expand what we know about
them.
> Kolya
Padraic
Messages in this topic (22)
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1b. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 8:08 pm ((PDT))
It turns out that the Kash word for 'write' _uri_ is borrowed from very old Gwr
(Proto Bau Da Gwr *uris (modern BDG lwih), but what it might have meant there
originally I haven't determined yet. (Actually I cheated-- created the Gwr form
long after the Kash one :-((( but still, it would figure.
Kash "read" _nolit_ must also be an old borrowing from Gwr, but the same
comment as above applies.
I haven't checked Prevli, but since they don't read/write their own language, I
imagine they've borrowed from Kash (within the last 2000 years)
BTW in Malay/Indonesian, "surat" is 'write' and appears to have spread all over
the area, even to the Philippines. (Could it possibly be < Arabaic?) A hint of
an earlier meaning-- in one language I know of the reflex means 'to remember'.
'To read', where it appears, is a Sanskrit borrowing < vacya IIRC which means
'cause to speak' IIRC.
Ml/Indo also use 'tulis' for 'write', but it hasn't spread; nor is the original
meaning evident.
Messages in this topic (22)
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2a. Re: LangFam-Making Program
Posted by: "Arthaey Angosii" arth...@gmail.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 5:17 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 10:18 AM, Nathan Unanymous <nathanms...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems I didn't expain too good. Most sound change appliers evolve words in
> files of one word per line. What I dream of is a grammar editor that applies
> sound changes to words in the language, so it updates every word in the
> grammar (and the dictionary) whenever the sound-changes are edited. Though
> a GUI is far-fetched, realistically I would think of a program that looks
> for, e.g.,
> <span class="lang"> and changes stuff inside that.
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 11:36 AM, J. Burke <rtoen...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I asked for this, like, years ago; no one was interested at the time. But it
> is a worthy project.
I've added this to the list of planned features of the conlang
documentation project I'm writing. Having a grammar document whose
example words & sentences stay up-to-date would definitely be awesome.
However, I can't promise any specific timeframe for when that feature
will be written. I work on the project when I feel like it and have
the free time, so it could be next week or next year.
--
AA
http://conlang.arthaey.com
Messages in this topic (8)
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2b. Re: LangFam-Making Program
Posted by: "Aidan Grey" taalenma...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 9:01 pm ((PDT))
Actually, IPA-Zounds can do this. It's possible to specify families to which a
rule applies. You'd still have to run the vocab list through as many times as
there are langs in the family, but you won't have to fiddle lots and lots, as
you can include all the laws for all langs in the family at once.
----- Original Message ----
> From: Nikolay Ivankov <lukevil...@gmail.com>
> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> Sent: Sun, May 1, 2011 12:50:36 PM
> Subject: Re: LangFam-Making Program
>
> On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 8:36 PM, J. Burke <rtoen...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > I asked for this, like, years ago; no one was interested at the time. But
> > it is a worthy project.
> >
> >
> > --- On Sun, 5/1/11, Nathan Unanymous <nathanms...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > From: Nathan Unanymous <nathanms...@gmail.com>
> > > Subject: LangFam-Making Program
> > > To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> > > Date: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 1:16 AM
> > > Wanted: programmers who are better
> > > than me (probably a lot).
> > >
> > > I've been working on a quick overview of a language family,
> > > and have
> > > accomplished the evolution mainly via SCAs. Often, when
> > > adding a new
> > > word to the mother-tongue and not liking it's descendant, I
> > > will want
> > > to change the sound laws. But when that happens, it forces
> > > me to
> > > change a bunch of other words AND the grammar AND daughter
> > > language
> > > grammar.
> > >
> > > So I had an idea of making a program which automatically
> > > applies sound
> > > changes to vocab-lists grammars.
> > > However, after 30 minutes of fooling around, I realized
> > > that my meager
> > > programming skills couldn't fulfill that task (I'm only an
> > > amateur who
> > > has only learned via online manuals and for-dummies
> > > books).
> > >
> > > That's why I'm asking if any of you can do something
> > > collaboratively.
> > > I can do C++, Java (including swing), JavaScript, and Perl,
> > > and am
> > > willing to learn something else.
> > >
> >
>
Messages in this topic (8)
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3a. Re: Deini font in Ubuntu?
Posted by: "Arthaey Angosii" arth...@gmail.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 5:56 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Rebecca Bettencourt <beckie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When the CSUR stopped updating, I created the UCSUR for tentative
> reservations:
> http://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/
In fact, I used your updated site to pick the codepoints for my second
conlang's font. Thank you for the resource!
Would you be able to reserve block EA00-EA9F for the Lhenazi
syllabary? The font is documented here:
http://www.arthaey.com/conlang/lhenazi/writing/font.html
--
AA
http://conlang.arthaey.com
Messages in this topic (13)
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3b. Re: Deini font in Ubuntu?
Posted by: "Rebecca Bettencourt" beckie...@gmail.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 6:13 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 5:54 PM, Arthaey Angosii <arth...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Would you be able to reserve block EA00-EA9F for the Lhenazi
> syllabary? The font is documented here:
> http://www.arthaey.com/conlang/lhenazi/writing/font.html
Of course! You got it! ^_^
-- Rebecca Bettencourt
Messages in this topic (13)
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4a. Re: An irregular verb system
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 8:12 pm ((PDT))
--- On Sun, 5/1/11, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nathan Unanymous <nathanms...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> > What's a good Basque source?
> >
> I don't know yet how good it is, but Rudolf P.G. de Rijk's
> "Standard Basque:
> a progressive grammar", vol. 1, looks promising.
>
I have (somewhere) a 1950s printing of Azkue, Gramática Vasca, but from what
I've read in Trask's _History of Basque_ (another source you might check)--
Azkue was trying to create some kind of standardized language from the various
dialects, so it might not represent anything that is actually spoken anywhere.
Messages in this topic (7)
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4b. Re: An irregular verb system
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" lukevil...@gmail.com
Date: Sun May 1, 2011 11:53 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Nathan Unanymous <nathanms...@gmail.com>wrote:
> What's a good Basque source?
>
I don't know if it can help, but there is a very nice introductory course.
However, it is in Russian. I should also say that there are actually more
synthetic verbs in Basque, but not much more, and they are very common ones:
to be present, to go/leave, to come, to know, to have, maybe a bit more.
(AFAIK The verb _ukan_ is used in Basque only for analytic verb conjugation.
An introductory course in English is available here
http://www.basquecourse.site50.net/ . Maybe it can help.
Messages in this topic (7)
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5a. Re: CALS export (was WALS export)
Posted by: "taliesin the storyteller" taliesin-conl...@nvg.org
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 4:49 am ((PDT))
On 2011-05-01 16:25, Lee wrote:
> I'm actually looking for a WALS-like export of CALS data.
I can whip up a one-off dump in JSON-format very quickly, csv will need
to be programmed.
The ability to download a dump at will is a planned feature, but there
needs to be a bit of data-washing first (like removing sensitive
information like passwords). Furthermore, there's (at least) two
possible uses for a dump: backups and just using the language-data.
Which do you need?
t.
Messages in this topic (3)
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