There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: An irregular verb system
From: Daniel Prohaska
2a. Re: LangFam-Making Program
From: J. Burke
2b. Re: LangFam-Making Program
From: Daniel Nielsen
2c. Re: LangFam-Making Program
From: Nathan Unanymous
2d. Re: LangFam-Making Program
From: Daniel Nielsen
3a. Re: Potentially amusing experiment
From: Philip Newton
4a. Re: Reading and Writing
From: BPJ
4b. Re: Reading and Writing
From: Tony Harris
4c. Re: Reading and Writing
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
5a. Learning Sumerian
From: Justin Gagnon
5b. Re: Learning Sumerian
From: Paul Bennett
5c. Re: Learning Sumerian
From: Matthew Boutilier
5d. Re: Learning Sumerian
From: Justin Gagnon
6.1. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
From: And Rosta
7a. Re: Topic: preverbal/postverbal goodness
From: Philip Newton
Messages
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1a. Re: An irregular verb system
Posted by: "Daniel Prohaska" dan...@ryan-prohaska.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 5:22 am ((PDT))
I canât help you with Basque sources, but If I were to construct an irregular
verb system I would go about it diachronically. Construct a regular verbal
system of a given proto-language, then âageâ this language and make a
ânewâ regular system, e.g. periphrastic constructions that are then
assimilated to form a new synthesis. This is then the new productive verbal
system. For common and frequently used verb parts, use the old system, maybe
with some analogical âmix-upsâ with the new systemâ¦
Just an ideaâ¦
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: Nikolay Ivankov
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2011 8:36 AM
On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Nathan Unanymous <nathanms...@gmail.com>wrote:
> What's a good Basque source?
Messages in this topic (8)
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2a. Re: LangFam-Making Program
Posted by: "J. Burke" rtoen...@yahoo.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 7:36 am ((PDT))
I worked with Jamie a bit in 08-09 getting Zounds up to par for what I needed
it to do; but we were unable to make it usable for me in time for me to do the
Central Mountain SCAs with it. I ended up using Mark Rosenfelder's Sounds
(with many work-arounds), plus ASCA to do orthographic conversion. As I
recall, there were simply too many bugs, and I needed something that was
rock-solid and 100% consistent; and at the time, Sounds fit the bill. But the
changes he's made to Zounds at my behest may help others avoid the very
time-consuming kind of SCA work I had to do for CM.
--- On Sun, 5/1/11, Aidan Grey <taalenma...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Aidan Grey <taalenma...@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: LangFam-Making Program
> To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
> Date: Sunday, May 1, 2011, 11:58 PM
> 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 (12)
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2b. Re: LangFam-Making Program
Posted by: "Daniel Nielsen" niel...@uah.edu
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 10:15 am ((PDT))
I'd possibly be interested, if time allows, although it doesn't have much
use in my particular conlang project, and you'd likely have to walk me
through most of the liguistic side of it (which is part of the reason I'm
interested, since it feels like I need to learn more about sound evolution).
Don't stop your search by any means on my account, but I'd like to learn
more of what would be involved, and what your vision for this would be. BTW,
I'd likely only be interested in doing a standalone lib or program, since I
don't really want to learn the intricacies of other language-related APIs,
unless that is really the optimal way to proceed.
Messages in this topic (12)
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2c. Re: LangFam-Making Program
Posted by: "Nathan Unanymous" nathanms...@gmail.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 11:30 am ((PDT))
It isn't really a plain old sound change applier that I want (there are already
plenty of those), but one that interacts with documents. So instead of a one-
per-line list, a new grammar generated automatically from an old (with other
types of changes incorporated, of course).
I'm thinking HTML as the easiest way to go, though once people sign up it can
be
discussed more thoroughly.
Messages in this topic (12)
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2d. Re: LangFam-Making Program
Posted by: "Daniel Nielsen" niel...@uah.edu
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 1:56 pm ((PDT))
Okay; I can't really commit to anything that will take very much time on my
part. I'd be adding code in C++, because that's what all my important code
exists in, and I don't want to change it or not make use of my other code
that could be used for this project. By HTML did you mean as the user
interface? I don't mean to get too detailed on-list here. Anyway, you can
email me later if you like. Back to your regularly scheduled program..
Messages in this topic (12)
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3a. Re: Potentially amusing experiment
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 11:16 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 23:20, Roger Mills <romi...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Thu, 4/21/11, Eugene Oh <un.do...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What would be
>> the optimal languages to dump on this island, I wonder?
>
> Well, let's see, just picking at random:
> 1.Chinese (preferably a non-std. dialect thereof);
How about Amoy Min? Eight tones and a really weird (to me) system of
tone sandhi sure to obscure to any longnose what's actually going on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoy_dialect#Tone_sandhi
> 2.Ainu;
> 3.Navajo;
> 4.Maori;
> 5.some Australian lang.;
> 6,7. one or more Papuan langs. (provided they don't know Tok Pisin);
> 8.Chamorro (Guam);
> 9.Romanian;
> 10.Czech;
> 11.modern Greek;
Or maybe even Albanian instead of #9 or #11, from the "It's
Indo-European, Jim, but not as we know it" department.
> 12.Bengali;
> 13.Berber;
> 14.Swahili or maybe Xhosa
> 15.Toda (a Dravidian lang.);
> 16.Tibetan;
> 17. Lakota Sioux
> 18. Mickosukee (Seminole)
> 19. Aleut
> 20. a Salishan lang.
> 21. Aymara
> 22. Guaraní or some other Tupi-Guarani lang.
> 23. one of the Chilean native langs. Mapudungun?
> 24. one of the Mexican native langs., Tarahumara? (Uto-Aztecan?)
> 25. there must be at least 1 other S.American lang. unrelated to anything else
Pirahã? Not only is it a fun oddball language (small phonology! tones!
multiple modes, e.g. whistling! possibly no embedding, numbers, or
basic colour terms!), but IIRC it's only related to Mura, which has
pretty much died out. *wikipedia* WP calls it a language isolate,
since all other languages known or suspected to be related have indeed
died out.
> 26. Maya
> 27. Kazak or Uzbek?
I was going to say "pity there aren't any native speakers of the
latter any more", but then I realised I was thinking about Ubykh. Now
that would also be a fun language to have around, what with its
humongous consonant inventory. (Its vowel inventory, by contrast, is
much more modest - some analyses even posit only one phonemic vowel,
I'm told! My favourite source says three phonemic vowels, though.)
> 28. Georgian or some other Caucasian lang.
> 29.For good measure, maybe a fluent Klingon speaker :-)))
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (16)
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4a. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 12:46 pm ((PDT))
2011-05-01 15:56, Nikolay Ivankov skrev:
> As far as I know, people started reading silently only in late antiquity,
> and this became possible because there were invented the books as we know
> them, that is, with pages.
Actually it was another invention of late antiquity which
made silent reading possible: spaces between the words.
ITWASMUCHHARDERTOREADWHENTHEYWROTELIKETHIS!
/bpj
Messages in this topic (25)
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4b. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "Tony Harris" t...@alurhsa.org
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 12:49 pm ((PDT))
There are languages like Thai that still don't really use spaces between
words. I wonder how that does with silent reading?
If nobody's up on that, I can ask my daughter who speaks Thai...
On 5/2/11 3:43 PM, BPJ wrote:
> 2011-05-01 15:56, Nikolay Ivankov skrev:
>> As far as I know, people started reading silently only in late
>> antiquity,
>> and this became possible because there were invented the books as we
>> know
>> them, that is, with pages.
>
> Actually it was another invention of late antiquity which
> made silent reading possible: spaces between the words.
>
> ITWASMUCHHARDERTOREADWHENTHEYWROTELIKETHIS!
>
> /bpj
Messages in this topic (25)
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4c. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 1:10 pm ((PDT))
Hallo!
On Mon, 2 May 2011 15:46:46 -0400, Tony Harris wrote:
> There are languages like Thai that still don't really use spaces between
> words. I wonder how that does with silent reading?
Certainly, spacing makes reading (and thus also silent reading)
easier, but I don't see how spacing is *necessary* for silent
reading. I doubt that the commuters in Bangkok's suburban trains
read out their morning papers aloud!
At any rate, I had no problem reading BPJ's example of scriptio
continua silently. Slower than normal text, but still silently.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (25)
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5a. Learning Sumerian
Posted by: "Justin Gagnon" jmgagno...@gmail.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 1:26 pm ((PDT))
Does anyone know of any good free online resources for learning sumerian or any
well reconstructed form of the language?
-Justin
Messages in this topic (4)
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5b. Re: Learning Sumerian
Posted by: "Paul Bennett" paul.w.benn...@gmail.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 1:43 pm ((PDT))
On Mon, 02 May 2011 16:24:37 -0400, Justin Gagnon <jmgagno...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Does anyone know of any good free online resources for learning sumerian
> or any well reconstructed form of the language?
You could do worse than looking at the PDFs at
http://home.comcast.net/~foxvog/
Also, well worth spending the money on is a copy of
http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0890031975
--
Paul
Messages in this topic (4)
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5c. Re: Learning Sumerian
Posted by: "Matthew Boutilier" mbout...@nd.edu
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 3:03 pm ((PDT))
>
> You could do worse than looking at the PDFs at
> http://home.comcast.net/~foxvog/
>
> Also, well worth spending the money on is a copy of
> http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0890031975
>
yes! i was going to recommend both of these. the hayes book is the
standard introduction, at least for the english-speaking world, and those
foxvog PDFs are super helpful. AFAIK there isn't too much else out there,
except that i found the following to be pretty basic but still a nice
general intro to the grammar:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sumerian/Grammar
matt
On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Paul Bennett <paul.w.benn...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Mon, 02 May 2011 16:24:37 -0400, Justin Gagnon <jmgagno...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of any good free online resources for learning sumerian
>> or any well reconstructed form of the language?
>>
>
> You could do worse than looking at the PDFs at
> http://home.comcast.net/~foxvog/
>
> Also, well worth spending the money on is a copy of
> http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0890031975
>
>
>
> --
> Paul
>
Messages in this topic (4)
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5d. Re: Learning Sumerian
Posted by: "Justin Gagnon" jmgagno...@gmail.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 3:08 pm ((PDT))
Yes, these are all great resources. Thank you Daniel and Paul
-Justin
On May 2, 2011, at 5:50 PM, Matthew Boutilier wrote:
>>
>> You could do worse than looking at the PDFs at
>> http://home.comcast.net/~foxvog/
>>
>> Also, well worth spending the money on is a copy of
>> http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0890031975
>>
>
> yes! i was going to recommend both of these. the hayes book is the
> standard introduction, at least for the english-speaking world, and those
> foxvog PDFs are super helpful. AFAIK there isn't too much else out there,
> except that i found the following to be pretty basic but still a nice
> general intro to the grammar:
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sumerian/Grammar
>
> matt
>
> On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Paul Bennett <paul.w.benn...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 02 May 2011 16:24:37 -0400, Justin Gagnon <jmgagno...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone know of any good free online resources for learning sumerian
>>> or any well reconstructed form of the language?
>>>
>>
>> You could do worse than looking at the PDFs at
>> http://home.comcast.net/~foxvog/
>>
>> Also, well worth spending the money on is a copy of
>> http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0890031975
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Paul
>>
Messages in this topic (4)
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6.1. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Mon May 2, 2011 7:14 pm ((PDT))
Logan Kearsley, On 30/04/2011 23:42:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 1:53 PM, And Rosta<and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> How come you need parenthesization or counting? For Polish or Reverse Polish
>> notation, for instance, you don't need either.
>
> Oh, yes you do. It's just that you're used to all arithmetic operators
> being unary or binary, so you don't notice the counting. Polish
> notation doesn't require parenthesization only because you know
> exactly how many arguments each operator requires, and you can count
> them off. But LISP, which superficially uses Polish notation, doesn't
> define the length of the argument list, and hence requires parentheses
> to mark it off. Without parentheses, whenever you hit a nested
> operator, you have to save the current count of where you are in the
> argument list and be able to come back to it later when you're done
> with the nested expression.
I see what you mean. But if you had originally mentioned predicate logic
notation's reliance on counting in response to my having mentioned the claim
that natlangs can't count beyond two, I should refine/clarify the claim.
Phenomena that can be modelled using ordered lists of potentially unlimited
cardinality are okay. what's not okay is rules that refer to the nth item in
such and such a structure (where n > 2).
>>> But just as you argue that nobody actually
>>> speaks formalized Lojban, they would not actually be speaking formal
>>> Fith.
>>
>> This I disagree with.
>
> I don't understand why. It seems to me that all of the arguments
> against Lojban apply equally to Fith.
The rules of Fith grammar serve to take phonological words as input and yield
predicate-argument structure as output. By contrast, Lojban's grammar assigns
meaningless baroque structures to sequences of phonological words: the baroque
structures are unlike anything found in natlangs, and they have no relationship
to meaning; the so-called grammar is not really linguistic at all.
>>> And in comprehension they would crippled by the fact that
>>> stylistically normal Fith necessarily taxes your brain to an extent
>>> that is avoided in stylistically normal natlangs.
>>
>> I'm happy to accept that what is stylistically normal for Fith spoken by
>> Fithians would be very different from what would be stylistically normal for
>> Fith spoken by humans. Similar differences would be observable between
>> stylistic norms of natlangs spoken by Fithians and natlangs spoken by
>> humans.
>
> But the reasons are entirely different- simple lack of skill with a
> particular language vs. lack of the neurological machinery required to
> develop that skill.
No, I meant that Fithians would be much better than humans at speaking not only
Fith but also natlangs, because of their superior neurological machinery. My
general point being that the essential differences are in the memory capacities
of the two species, not in the grammars of their languages.
>> I expect you're right that natlang utterances can be parsed with a shallow
>> stack. (I don't know of research on this, being ignorant of the literature;
>> but it would make a good dissertation project.)
>>
>> But were you finding that Palno equivalents of natlang sentences couldn't be
>> parsed with an equally shallow stack? I'd find that somewhat surprising
>> (though I'm going by gut feeling rather than careful empirical
>> investigation).
>
> Yes. Not without additional rules to allow for re-ordering to take
> advantage of optimization techniques, and additional rules introducing
> additional levels of abstraction (I'm pretty sure this is why all
> natlangs that I know of, although they vary somewhat in syntactic
> classes, all have more than 2 of them). The same concepts could be
> broken up into multiple simple sentences with shallow trees, but
> sentences with analogous structure require far more tree complexity in
> Palno than in English.
What are "levels of abstraction" and "analogous structure"?
Could you give an example of a Palno sentence that tequires a much deeper
parsing stack than its English equivalent?
>> The point I was making to Logan was that supposed weirdnesses allowed by
>> Fith grammar are also allowed by English grammar, as evidenced by the
>> sentence I gave. The fact that speakers are unlikely to use the sentence
>> merely confirms my argument that the supposed weirdnesses of Fith exist not
>> in Fith but rather in Fithian brains, and would show up in Fithians' English
>> too.
>
> Now, I don't see how this same argument doesn't apply to Lojban. If
> you propose that current Lojban speakers aren't actually speaking
> formally-defined Lojban, but a pidgin / subset language that happens
> to produce correct Lojban sentences but is processed by human speakers
> differently from how it's formally specified, can't we imagine some
> alien population with brains that are built to parse and produce
> actual Lojban instead, even if it's just the computers that are
> supposed to be able to parse Lojban unambiguously? Then that puts Fith
> and Lojban in exactly the same situation.
Fithian mental abilities differ from human abilities in degree but not in kind,
and the basic mechanism of Fith grammar is familiar from human language.
You could have aliens or computers that do parse Lojban using the formal
grammar, but such a process would be superfluous since that process is separate
from the (unformalized) rules that translate phonological strings into logical
forms. I'm not sure that the unnaturalness of lojban's formal grammar is due to
unprocessability; it may just be its nonlinguisticality.
I've seen similarly baroque and nonlinguistic formal grammars of English too,
btw. They deal only with phonological words, ignore meaning, and focus only on
surface combinatorics. The 'problem' with Lojban's formal grammar is due to a
failure of understanding about language more than toweirdnesses unique to
Lojban.
--And.
Messages in this topic (75)
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7a. Re: Topic: preverbal/postverbal goodness
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 12:32 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 03:59, A. Mendes <andrewtmen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So Korean and Japanese with case markings, and Hebrew and Russian with
> prepositions/(and/or case?). Mean!
And Turkish does something like "My car exists" for "I have a car",
and "Does your car exist?" for "Do you have a car?".
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (18)
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