There are 5 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Cases and Declensions: Fortunatian
From: Adam Walker
2.1. Re: constructed language famillies
From: Adam Walker
3.1. Re: Translations needed
From: Roger Mills
4a. Why Brithenig ain't an engelang (was: Conlang classification)
From: R A Brown
5. THEORY: Case vs Adpositions
From: Arthaey Angosii
Messages
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1a. Re: Cases and Declensions: Fortunatian
Posted by: "Adam Walker" carra...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Aug 24, 2012 7:37 am ((PDT))
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 10:40 PM, Anthony Miles <mamercu...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I'm sure many of you remember Fortunatian:
Wow! I was just thinking about Fortunatian and the fact that I hadn't
heard anything about it or the Isles in ages just this morning while
getting ready for work. Then lo and behold! Unbelievable!
Adam
Messages in this topic (2)
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2.1. Re: constructed language famillies
Posted by: "Adam Walker" carra...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Aug 24, 2012 7:40 am ((PDT))
Nice etymology! I love things like that.
Adam
On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 8:17 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhieme...@web.de>wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> On Friday 24 August 2012 06:03:20 Anthony Miles wrote:
>
> > I prefer to work on sound changes by hand (and in my head!); that way,
> > mistakes in transcription can become borrowings or semantic distinctions.
>
> I also prefer working on sound changes by hand an in my head.
> Indeed, mistakes that happen that way sometimes make for
> interesting points to explore. For instance, I goofed the
> Old Albic word for 'to ask', which I originally meant to be
> a cognate of PIE *preḱ-, which would have to have been
> _pracha_. But I got it wrong and arrived at _phraga_ (under
> the influence of German _fragen_, no doubt), and used that in
> the recent translation relay. Instead of changing it (I
> realized that error only after I had sent the torch), I came
> up with an alternative etymology. I decided that _phraga_ is
> a derivation of _ga_ 'to go' with the prefix _phra-_ 'forward'.
> So I got _phraga_ 'to go forth, to explore, to ask'.
>
> --
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
> http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
> "Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
>
Messages in this topic (47)
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3.1. Re: Translations needed
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Aug 24, 2012 8:14 am ((PDT))
IMO this is just a matter of which translation one prefers. A literal "to see
is to believe" is perfectly proper in English, along with the more common
'seeing is believing'. Cf. "To know him is to love him"--- whicdh would sound a
little odd as "knowing him is loving him"--but Span. would have 'conocerlo es
amarlo'.
--- On Fri, 8/24/12, Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Translations needed
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Date: Friday, August 24, 2012, 9:46 AM
>> From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:conl...@listserv.brown.edu] On
>> Behalf Of Douglas Koller:
>>> Please give an example where an infinitive would be used as a gerund
>>> and not be merely a dependent infinitive.
>>> Charlie
>> Ver es creer. (?)
> Duh! You're right. My mistake.
> Charlie
No, this is just an example of where English uses its gerund, Spanish
uses its infinitive. There isn't a formal equivalence between the two.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (29)
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4a. Why Brithenig ain't an engelang (was: Conlang classification)
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Fri Aug 24, 2012 8:37 am ((PDT))
On 24/08/2012 08:25, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> On 24 August 2012 02:19, And Rosta wrote:
[snip]
>> Not at all. Naturalism is engelangy, because it is
>> objectively evaluable, and Brithenig is a good example
>> of a conlang that is entirely naturalistic and
>> entirely engelinguistic.
>>
>>
> I disagree.
As indeed do I.
> Naturalism isn't objectively evaluable, because we have
> no idea how much it encompasses.
[rest of paragraph snipped}
Indeed not, for the reasons Christophe gives in the
paragraph I've snipped.
[snip]
> To be an engelang, a conlang must have a *measurable*
> way to check whether it achieves the goals it sets to
> achieve.
Exactly!
> You can't have such a yardstick when the goal itself is
> not strictly well-defined. That doesn't mean that you
> can't have a conlang with fuzzy goals, just that with
> such a conlang the only way to decide whether it achieves
> its goals or not will be personal opinion, which by
> definition moves the conlang in the artlang group.
Précisement!
> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought
> that Brithenig's goal was to "discover what might have
> happened if Latin had displaced Welsh as the main spoken
> language in Wales",
No, not just Wales. In Andrew's own words: "to create a
Romance language that might have evolved if Latin speakers
had been a sufficient number to displace Old Celtic as the
spoken language of the people in Great Britain."
> as fuzzy a goal as there can be.
But a fuzzy goal. For one reason our knowledge of British
romance is scanty and there is no agreement on the form it
took. IIRC Andrew was relying on the 12 distinct features
identified by Kenneth Jackson. But not all scholars would
agree on all these. A.S Gratwick argued that British Vulgar
Latin was more archaic than its continental counterparts;
this has been countered by D MacManus who takes a different
view etc.
> "To apply Welsh diachrony to Latin" was never a goal,
> just a method to reach that goal
Nor, as i have argued, is this what Andrew actually did. He
states that Brithenig differs from the continental Romance
languages " by having sound-changes similar to those that
affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed
from Old Celtic, and from English throughout its
`pseudo-history'."
That is, he applies a _similar_ diachrony to Welsh, not the
same, to a supposed British Vulgar Latin. Indeed, it would
not have been possible to subject any form of Vulgar Latin
to Welsh diachrony because the phonology of Brittonic
(ancient British) was not that of any likely form of Vulgar
Latin.
Andrew was applying some similar to, but not the same as,
Welsh diachrony, i.e. something a bit fuzzy, to a possible
British Vulgar Latin, i.e. something quite a bit fuzzy.
While "words borrowed from Old Celtic" (which we also BTW
find in French) is measurable to some degree, how on earth
are we to evaluate words borrowed "from English throughout
its _pseudo-history_"? Brithenig presupposes a very
different history for the development of the Saxon language
in England, and assumptions about this must necessarily be
subjective and somewhat arbitrary, i.e. very fuzzy.
How on earth is one to measure in any sense meaningful to an
engineer something a bit fuzzy applied to something even
fuzzier with an admixture of some very fuzzy elements?
> (and it's a matter of personal opinion whether this is
> the only method available, or in any case the best one).
>
It is indeed.
[snip]
> To sum it all up, whether a conlang is an engelang or an
> artlang is purely a question of how well defined its
> goals are. However strictly mechanical the design method
> of the conlang is, if its goals are open to personal
> interpretation, it will not be an engelang. And I say
> that as an engineer myself.
Quite so.
> Anyway, my two Eurocents...
...and a very valuable 2 eurocents worth IMO.
=========================================================
On 24/08/2012 14:54, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
[snip]
>
> On Friday 24 August 2012 09:52:34 R A Brown wrote:
>
>> On 24/08/2012 01:29, George Corley wrote: [...]
>>> Really? I don't actually find the model all that
>>> convincing. There is no reason to believe that a
>>> Latin dialect spoken in Welsh territory would follow
>>> precisely the same sound changes as Welsh.
>>
>> There is not. Indeed, one would IMO have expected a
>> British Romancelang to have been influenced also by
>> sister Romancelangs, especially the one adjacent to
>> it.
>
> Yes. A British Romance language would probably show an
> affinity to French in some regards,
Certainly to northern Gallic Romance. This is something I
have argued many times before.
> and preserve a few archaisms due to its geographically
> marginal position in the Romania. The sound changes
> Andrew used for Brithenig are fine, but there is no a
> priori reason to assume that such a Romance language
> would parallel the development of Welsh to such a degree
> (well, the parallelism of Brithenig is actually not that
> perfect).
It is not perfectly parallel as And seems to suggest. But
there there is no a_priori reason to assume it would be so
close to Welsh, and ......
> Also, there is no a priori reason to assume that just
> because it is spoken in Britain and no doubt rests on a
> British Celtic substratum, it would evolve initial
> mutations. After all, English didn't!
No, it didn't ;)
Also, there is a_priori reason to suppose that if a British
Romance had developed initial consonant mutations, it would
have evolved just the same three mutations (soft, nasal &
sprirant) as Welsh, rather than the four (soft, hard,
spirant, mixed) of Cornish & Breton. Personally I think it
very unlikely that a British Romance language would have
adopted the _modern_ (not medieval) Welsh spelling of _f_ =
/v/ and _ff_ = /f/!
> But this artistic licence made Brithenig a more
> interesting conlang than it would be if it was an
> "orthodox" Romance language similar to French or
> Spanish! The initial mutations, for instance, are
> something that sets Brithenig aside from the Romance
> natlangs we know.
Not 100%. In Italian some prepositions trigger the
gemination of initial consonant of the following word, while
others do not. The difference is that this is not shown in
writing. I believe the Tuscan dialect shows initial
mutation in speech also. I would not rule out some form of
consonant mutation in British Celtic, but not a copy of Welsh.
[snip]
>>
On 24/08/2012 02:00, And Rosta wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>>> But the design goal, of applying Welsh diachrony to
>>> Latin, is an objective one in that one can
>>> objectively evaluate the success of a given solution
>>> to it, and alternate solutions will converge.
>>
>> If Brithenig was nothing more than applying Welsh
>> diachrony to Latin, then your statement would be true.
>> But it ain't.
>
> Indeed not. That would not work easily, because the
> phonologies of Latin and Roman-era British Celtic
> weren't the same
I think this point has now been well made :)
[snip]!
>
>> If you merely took Latin and applied Welsh diachrony,
>> you would not finish up with Brithenig, otherwise the
>> phonology of Brithenig and modern Welsh would be
>> identical. They are not.
>
> Indeed not. Similar, yes, but not identical. If you
> compare Latin loanwords in Welsh to the corresponding
> Brithenig words, you will find that they are often not
> the same.
Excellent point!
>> Also Brithenig made fairly arbitrary choices such as
>> deriving 3rd person pronouns from _ipse_ (cf Italian
>> _esso_) rather then _ille_. There were also
>> consideration on how much of Welsh syntax would appear
>> in Brithenig. There were, in short, a whole lot of
>> personal _subjective_ decisions made by the author.
>
> There were!
>
>> There is no way IMO (and I corresponded with Andrew in
>> the latter stages of Brithenig's development) that
>> Brithenig can be evaluated in any meaningful way in
>> the same way that one would engelang.
>
> Indeed not!
AMEN!
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]
Messages in this topic (20)
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5. THEORY: Case vs Adpositions
Posted by: "Arthaey Angosii" arth...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Aug 24, 2012 9:23 am ((PDT))
Based on my readings & this list's archived discussions, it seems
commonly accepted that there is a "grey area between the case and the
adposition / suffix"[1]. My question is, *why* do some grammars treat
all the postpositional suffixes like their
nominative/accusative/dative/etc case cousins?
Is there a good linguistic reason for not separating them into two
similarly-surfaced sections of a grammar? Once you have 20+ "cases"
that are predominantly locational, shouldn't you just admit that the
language has locational suffixes that attach to nouns in the same
manner as your cases? What does "case" even mean? :P
[1]: Nihil Sum, 2002-08-03
--
AA
http://conlang.arthaey.com
Messages in this topic (1)
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