There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
1.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Elena ``of Valhalla''
1.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Michael Everson
2.1. Re: Fwd: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: BPJ
3.1. "Wedging" Foreign Names (was: writing (almost) entirely in lower-cas
From: R A Brown
3.2. Re: "Wedging" Foreign Names
From: Aodhán Aannestad
4. Online Translator for Conlangs
From: David Peterson
5a. New toy conlang sketch
From: H. S. Teoh
5b. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: George Corley
5c. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: H. S. Teoh
5d. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: Douglas Koller
5e. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: Aodhán Aannestad
5f. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: H. S. Teoh
5g. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: Alex Fink
6. Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
From: Herman Miller
Messages
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1.1. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 8:18 am ((PDT))
On 26 Jun 2013, at 11:24, Elena ``of Valhalla'' <[email protected]>
wrote:
> I suspect that this is also my brain telling me that emails are a bit closer
> to conversation than other written material, expecially when answering
> inline-quoted messages: the first paragraph after an inline quote is the one
> that I capitalize less often.
Really? Your brain tells you that? Sounds like folk etymology to me. ;-)
I suspect it's that in some contexts you don't think it's worth bothering to
spell. Or it has to do with how you were trained to type. I don't understand
this sort of thing, really. Any more than I understand misspelt txt mssngng.
> Returning to one of the original subjects of the thread, romanization of
> conlangs that have no capital distinction in their native scripts, IMHO an
> early reason to adopt a romanization is not helping the reader but helping
> the writer: entering latin characters on a computer
> is much easier than writing a custom font + keyboard map / entry method for a
> conscript.
>
> In this case, I believe it is quite natural to choose romanization
> conventions that follow a bit more closely the ones of a native script, and
> capitalization sounds like the first english convention to lose.
In the real world, however, this doesn't happen. Nobody really romanizes
Ethiopic or Hangul script caselessly. Capitals are inserted for personal and
place-names. Same with Syllabics used in Inuit languages; in fact, there are
both Syllabic and Latin orthographies for Inuktitut and the latter use
capitalization in the expected way.
Ultimately I find the "oh, I find it much more aesthetic to eschew capitals" to
be really unconvincing. It's more like "oh, see, I can buck tradition and it's
cooler to do that" -- though it's not. That's my view of it. I'm sure those who
hold those views think otherwise. But it doesn't make their texts more
attractive. The dreadful Cambridge-style casing of Hobbitus Ille really ruined
that book for me. It draws attention to itself. It draws my attention away from
the content. Bad idea.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (33)
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1.2. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Elena ``of Valhalla''" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 9:52 am ((PDT))
On 2013-06-26 at 16:18:37 +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
> On 26 Jun 2013, at 11:24, Elena ``of Valhalla'' <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > I suspect that this is also my brain telling me that emails are a bit
> > closer to conversation than other written material, expecially when
> > answering inline-quoted messages: the first paragraph after an inline quote
> > is the one that I capitalize less often.
>
> Really? Your brain tells you that? Sounds like folk etymology to me. ;-)
the fact that my brains tells me something does not make it true, of
course :)
> I suspect it's that in some contexts you don't think it's worth bothering to
> spell. Or it has to do with how you were trained to type. I don't understand
> this sort of thing, really. Any more than I understand misspelt txt mssngng.
the point is that paragraph-initial capitals are the only thing
that suffer from it: I correct any other spelling error that
I catch, the ones left are either genuine ignorance of something
that is not my first language, or cases of selective blindness.
> > Returning to one of the original subjects of the thread, romanization of
> > conlangs that have no capital distinction in their native scripts, IMHO an
> > early reason to adopt a romanization is not helping the reader but helping
> > the writer: entering latin characters on a computer
> > is much easier than writing a custom font + keyboard map / entry method for
> > a conscript.
> >
> > In this case, I believe it is quite natural to choose romanization
> > conventions that follow a bit more closely the ones of a native script, and
> > capitalization sounds like the first english convention to lose.
>
> In the real world, however, this doesn't happen. Nobody really romanizes
> Ethiopic or Hangul script caselessly. Capitals are inserted for personal and
> place-names. Same with Syllabics used in Inuit languages; in fact, there are
> both Syllabic and Latin orthographies for Inuktitut and the latter use
> capitalization in the expected way.
These are cases where people are writing for somebody else to read,
so helping the reader is considerate and useful; when I write more than
a sentence in my own conlang the only reader I can realistically
expect is future me, and I know I'm not really bothered by the lack
of capitalization.
--
Elena ``of Valhalla''
Messages in this topic (33)
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1.3. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Michael Everson" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 12:41 pm ((PDT))
On 26 Jun 2013, at 17:52, Elena ``of Valhalla'' <[email protected]>
wrote:
>> Really? Your brain tells you that? Sounds like folk etymology to me. ;-)
>
> the fact that my brains tells me something does not make it true, of course :)
People use this kind or rhetoric rather freely. I guess I was musing on that.
>> In the real world, however, this doesn't happen. Nobody really romanizes
>> Ethiopic or Hangul script caselessly. Capitals are inserted for personal and
>> place-names. Same with Syllabics used in Inuit languages; in fact, there are
>> both Syllabic and Latin orthographies for Inuktitut and the latter use
>> capitalization in the expected way.
>
> These are cases where people are writing for somebody else to read, so
> helping the reader is considerate and useful; when I write more than a
> sentence in my own conlang the only reader I can realistically expect is
> future me, and I know I'm not really bothered by the lack
> of capitalization.
So you're a while away from Alice then� ;-)
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (33)
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2.1. Re: Fwd: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 8:34 am ((PDT))
2013-06-25 20:50, George Corley skrev:
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 1:24 PM, BPJ <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm not. I'm just strongly opinionated, as you are WRT
>> capitalization. In both cases the people who design
>> orthographies/**transliterations/**transcriptions do what pleases
>> *them* best. It ain't their concern to please you or me, nor
>> should it be. Most people are able to muster good arguments for
>> doing things the way they do, even when that's the opposite way
>> from one's own preference. Orthographic nitpicking serves one
>> purpose only: to put down those who don't adhere to the 'rules',
>> which seldom are about preserving the expression of grammatical,
>> phonological or semantic distinctions, and often go against that
>> single valid concern[^1]. And I make money out of that idiocy!
>>
>
> We all have different preferences, but I do very much think it's valuable
> to use capitalization at the beginning of sentences and for proper nouns.
> That seems to be close to the minimum use for it, and they are both
> important signals for readers used to reading languages written in Latin
> script. To me, using capitalization is a "consider the audience" type of
> question -- your audience will benefit from using some capitalization
> standards. Of course, anyone is perfectly free to make an aesthetic choice
> contrary to that. I guess part of my issue is that, to me, the romanization
> is such a utilitarian thing that I really don't think too hard about the
> aesthetics of it, just the utilitarian concerns of elegance and
> accessibility. A long time ago I put down my general thoughts on how
> romanizations should be evaluated and thoughtfully constructed here:
> http://www.gacorley.com/blog/2011/11/14/design-parameters-for-romanization.html
I'm not myself opposed to capitalization. I use it except when
texting and I apply it to my conlangs even where their supposed
native scripts have nothing corresponding, but I *am* opposed to
normativism and prescriptivism, and thus to chastising others for
their orthographical and punctuational choices on such grounds.
I'll never buy that the problem is with the people who 'can't
spell', rather than with the prescriptivists upholding a too
complicated norm. Yet I work as an editor...
>
>
>> [^1]: A thousand years ago people in this part of the world made
>> just dandy with a phonologically underspecified, caseless
>> script precisely because it preserved all relevant
>> grammatical distinctions!
>>
>
> Not sure where you are precisely, but many writing systems are still that
> way. A few also dispense with white space, which Roman script itself didn't
> have for a good long time. But modern readers of Roman script are used to
> white space and punctuation and capitalization
> ANDTHEYFINDTEXTLIKETHISQUITEDIFFICULTTOREAD evenmoresotextlikethis. I've
> heard arguments that even for contemporaries, Roman script was harder to
> read without whitespace than it would have been with it -- there are claims
> that very few people were able to read silently when there wasn't some sort
> of word separation.
>
I live on the west coast of Sweden and I mean the Scandinavian
Younger Fuþark/viking age and early medieval runic alphabet.
Its inventor(s) reduced the number of graphemes from 24 to 16 at
a time when the number of phonemes in the language had actually
increased, which deeply bothered and confused scholars around a
century ago and earlier. Clearly, they thought, texts must have
become so ambiguous as to be hardly decipherable! However this
was in practice not the case, and Einar Haugen in a 1969
contribution to a _Festschrift_ explained why: all phonemes which
occurred in unstressed syllables, and thus all phonemes which
occurred in inflexional endings and most derivational suffixes
could still be unambiguously represented. Moreover i-umlaut and
u-umlaut were for the most part still transparent processes, so
that using the same graphemes for the members of the pairs _u/y,
a/æ, a/ǫ_[^1] wasn't that much of a stretch for native speakers.
Thus the umlaut/non-umlaut vowel distinction not only didn't
exist in unstressed syllables, it also seemed partly conditioned
or 'fluid'. Not distinguishing voiced and voiceless stops was
also pretty manageable for native speakers, since they only
contrasted word-initially, in geminates and after nasals or
_l_;[^2] as a rule context would help native speakers
disambiguate. There remains only the problem that the distinction
between mid and high vowels was abandoned -- <u> *really* was
heavily overloaded, standing for all of _u, o, y, ø_ as well as
/œ/ to the extent it ever was a distinct phoneme --, but even
that is explainable: not only were there still visible traces of
a-umlaut, where _i_ > _e_ and _u_ > _o_, but above all _i/e_ and
_u/o_ actually had merged in unstressed syllables, and we know
from the spelling practices of early Latin-script MSS that their
allophones actually were in free variation, so it is not at all
surprising that the distinction between high and mid vowels also
seemed fluid to the script reformer(s). Bottom line: since all
grammatical distinctions could be unambiguously represented the
partial ambiguity in the spelling of the always word-initial[^3]
stressed syllables was manageable to native speakers.
Please tell me offlist if you want to read the original article, BTW.
/bpj
[^1]: _ǫ_ == /ɒ/.
[^2]: Gemination, nasals before stops and vowel length weren't
inicated at all, but these practices were not innovations.
[^3]: Almost all texts use·dots·between·words. No doubt failing
to do so increased ambiguity to unacceptable levels even
for native speakers. BTW that was the norm also among the
Romans, except for careless, mass copied texts and the
like.
Messages in this topic (33)
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3.1. "Wedging" Foreign Names (was: writing (almost) entirely in lower-cas
Posted by: "R A Brown" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:52 am ((PDT))
On 26/06/2013 05:06, Aodhán Aannestad wrote:
> And a further question ( :P ) - for people with IE-esque
> conlangs where case morphology is largely inalienable
> from nouns, are foreign names uninflectable or are they
> wedged somehow into the case system? (cf Latin vs.
> Ancient Greek - Latin tries to jam them in (hence
> 'Confucius', 'Gustavus', etc.), while Greek just leaves
> them alone (Ισραήλ and so on).)
Sorry - this is simply untrue.
Israel is _Israēl_ in Latin. Some writers, it is true,
stick on 3rd declension endings for oblique forms, but
others leave it as an indeclinable noun.
Israel was originally a name given to Jacob, who is
indeclinable in both Greek (Ἰακώβ) and Latin (Iacōb) - no
"wedging" there.
The names _Confucius_ and Gustavus_ are *not* Classical
Latin, and making a comparison between 'modern' Latin and
ancient Greek is simply nonsense. In any case, the later
Greek names, just like the later Latin names, are "wedged"
into the the case system: Κομφούκιος (Komphoúkios),
Γουσταῦος (Goustaûos - Katharevousa accentuation).
If Aodhan cares to read Herodotos, he will discover that
Persian names are being "wedged" into the case system all
over the place. A few examples:
Dārayava(h)uš --> Δαρεῖος (Dareîos), gen. Δαρείου (Dareíou)
Xšayaṛšā ---> Ξέρξης (Xérxēs), gen. Ξἐρξου (Xérxou)
Kambūǰiya --> Καμβύσης (Kambýsēs), gen. Καμβὐσου (Kambýsou)
etc.
The Greeks also did the same sort "wedging" with Egyptian
names, e.g.(with the Egyptian forms we know only
the consonants):
ḫwfw --> Χέοψ (Khéops); genitive: Χέοπος (Khéopos)
In the Old Testament we find names "wedged", such:
Moses is Μωυσής (gen. Μωυσῆ), Isaiah becomes Ἠσαΐας (gen.
Ἠσαΐου) and so on. If you care to compare the Septuagint
and the Vulgate version of the Old Testament, you will find
more the less the _same_ names left indeclinable in the two
languages, and the same ones "wedged" into Greek or Latin.
I have known these two languages for more than half a
century and am not aware of any significant difference in
their treatment of foreign names.
An interesting name that cropped in another thread on this
list not so long ago is Joseph ~ Josephus. Both Jacob's
11th son and, centuries later, the foster father of Jesus
are indeclinable in both languages: Ἰωσήφ, Iōsēph.
But the historian Joseph ben Matityahu, better known to us
as _Josephus_, always wrote his names as Ἰώσηπος (Iōsēpos)
in Greek. Why he chose to use pi rather phi before "wedging"
it into Greek with the nominative ending -os, I do not know.
However, when this guy was given roman citizenship by the
Emperor Vespasian he came _Titus Flāvius Jōsēphus_.
This problem of whether to leave a noun indeclinable or to
"wedge" it into the language is one that any language with
declinable nouns has. It interesting seeing how Zamenhof
himself dealt with this in his translation of the Jewish
Scriptures (No - he didn't just stick -o on the end of them
all!). But I've written ling enough, methinks.
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language … began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (33)
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3.2. Re: "Wedging" Foreign Names
Posted by: "Aodhán Aannestad" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 4:57 pm ((PDT))
Ah, that was mostly just my impression - apologies for presenting it as
fact when it wasn't!
On 6/26/2013 1:52 PM, R A Brown wrote:
> On 26/06/2013 05:06, Aodhán Aannestad wrote:
>> And a further question ( :P ) - for people with IE-esque
>> conlangs where case morphology is largely inalienable
>> from nouns, are foreign names uninflectable or are they
>> wedged somehow into the case system? (cf Latin vs.
>> Ancient Greek - Latin tries to jam them in (hence
>> 'Confucius', 'Gustavus', etc.), while Greek just leaves
>> them alone (Ισραήλ and so on).)
>
> Sorry - this is simply untrue.
>
> Israel is _Israēl_ in Latin. Some writers, it is true,
> stick on 3rd declension endings for oblique forms, but
> others leave it as an indeclinable noun.
>
> Israel was originally a name given to Jacob, who is
> indeclinable in both Greek (Ἰακώβ) and Latin (Iacōb) - no
> "wedging" there.
>
> The names _Confucius_ and Gustavus_ are *not* Classical
> Latin, and making a comparison between 'modern' Latin and
> ancient Greek is simply nonsense. In any case, the later
> Greek names, just like the later Latin names, are "wedged"
> into the the case system: Κομφούκιος (Komphoúkios),
> Γουσταῦος (Goustaûos - Katharevousa accentuation).
>
> If Aodhan cares to read Herodotos, he will discover that
> Persian names are being "wedged" into the case system all
> over the place. A few examples:
> Dārayava(h)uš --> Δαρεῖος (Dareîos), gen. Δαρείου (Dareíou)
> Xšayaṛšā ---> Ξέρξης (Xérxēs), gen. Ξἐρξου (Xérxou)
> Kambūǰiya --> Καμβύσης (Kambýsēs), gen. Καμβὐσου (Kambýsou)
> etc.
>
> The Greeks also did the same sort "wedging" with Egyptian
> names, e.g.(with the Egyptian forms we know only
> the consonants):
> ḫwfw --> Χέοψ (Khéops); genitive: Χέοπος (Khéopos)
>
> In the Old Testament we find names "wedged", such:
> Moses is Μωυσής (gen. Μωυσῆ), Isaiah becomes Ἠσαΐας (gen.
> Ἠσαΐου) and so on. If you care to compare the Septuagint
> and the Vulgate version of the Old Testament, you will find
> more the less the _same_ names left indeclinable in the two
> languages, and the same ones "wedged" into Greek or Latin.
>
> I have known these two languages for more than half a
> century and am not aware of any significant difference in
> their treatment of foreign names.
>
> An interesting name that cropped in another thread on this
> list not so long ago is Joseph ~ Josephus. Both Jacob's
> 11th son and, centuries later, the foster father of Jesus
> are indeclinable in both languages: Ἰωσήφ, Iōsēph.
>
> But the historian Joseph ben Matityahu, better known to us
> as _Josephus_, always wrote his names as Ἰώσηπος (Iōsēpos)
> in Greek. Why he chose to use pi rather phi before "wedging"
> it into Greek with the nominative ending -os, I do not know.
> However, when this guy was given roman citizenship by the
> Emperor Vespasian he came _Titus Flāvius Jōsēphus_.
>
> This problem of whether to leave a noun indeclinable or to
> "wedge" it into the language is one that any language with
> declinable nouns has. It interesting seeing how Zamenhof
> himself dealt with this in his translation of the Jewish
> Scriptures (No - he didn't just stick -o on the end of them
> all!). But I've written ling enough, methinks.
>
Messages in this topic (33)
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4. Online Translator for Conlangs
Posted by: "David Peterson" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 1:27 pm ((PDT))
Joe Rocca has created a tool that allows you to create an online translator. It
gives you options for specifying two different languages that can be used for
translation without limits to the type of language. Once you've saved it, it
gives you a link for a public-facing online translator (so, for example, you
could create an English-Your Conlang translator and send the link to others).
Right now it's in its testing phase and is buggy, so Joe is looking for people
to test it and give him feedback. If you're interested, the website is below:
http://lingojam.com/
And for bugs/feature requests, use the e-mail below:
[email protected]
David Peterson
LCS President
[email protected]
www.conlang.org
Messages in this topic (1)
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5a. New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 3:56 pm ((PDT))
While the storm in the capitalization teacup blows over, I thought I'd
present some preliminary notes on a toy conlang that I've been doodling
on and off recently.
This isn't meant to be a "serious" conlang, so I'm purposely ignoring
the unlikelihood of the fact that its speakers are whimsical
stereotypical green alien beings that look like a ball with
pincer-clawed arms and webbed feet with a single eye on a stalk that
curves from their lower back above their body, and the fact that they
ride in saucer-shaped spacecrafts with a hemispherical half-dome on top
and retractable landing gear on the bottom.
In any case, here's the currently very scant lexicon:
_ipf_ [Ipf]: eye.
_ipfen_ [Ipf@n]: my eye.
_mohipf_ [mo'?Ipf]: monster.
_gruŋ_ [grUN] or [groUN]: arms.
_gruŋgen_ ['grUNg@n] or [groUNg@n]: my arms.
_tsapjak_ [ts)a'pjak]: feet/legs.
_voluŋ_ [vO'lUN]: spaceship.
_voluŋgen_ [vO'lUNg@n]: my spaceship.
_qeŋ_ [ts)ʰEN]: glass. (Not 100% sure about spelling /ts)ʰ/ as _q_ yet, though.)
_iqeŋ_ [I'ts)ʰEN]: glass dome.
>From this very scant corpus, one may draw the following conclusions:
- The language has a /pf/ consonant cluster.
- [ts)] may contrast with [ts)ʰ].
- _-en_ appears to be a 1SG possessive suffix.
- When _-en_ follows _ŋ_, a linking /g/ is inserted.
- _h_ appears to represent the glottal stop.
- _i-_ appears to be some kind of derivative prefix, perhaps describing
a thing made from a particular material?
Furthermore, I have in my notes that _mohipf_ is the plural of "eye" (to
a 1-eyed species, anything with multiple eyes is monstrous!). Which
implies that _mo(h)-_ is perhaps some kind of pluralizing prefix. Or
maybe it's _mo-_ with a linking /?/ when preceding a vowel.
I haven't worked out any syntax yet, though. And I don't have a name for
the conlang yet. Any suggestions? :-P
T
--
If creativity is stifled by rigid discipline, then it is not true creativity.
Messages in this topic (7)
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5b. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 4:52 pm ((PDT))
<q> for /ts)ʰ/? Is that Mandarin influence I see? Yeah, I can understand
the issue. I'd actually recommend against it if you want your romanization
to be accessible. Pinyin's use of <q c> is one of it's most confusing
aspects (<x> is odd too, but not entirely without precedent in other
languages), and I have a feeling it was just a compromise that was reached
because of the fact that they somehow had to represent nine distinct
sibilants in Roman script. Even then, <ts'> might have been a better choice
(I think it's been used in other schemes).
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 5:54 PM, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
> While the storm in the capitalization teacup blows over, I thought I'd
> present some preliminary notes on a toy conlang that I've been doodling
> on and off recently.
>
> This isn't meant to be a "serious" conlang, so I'm purposely ignoring
> the unlikelihood of the fact that its speakers are whimsical
> stereotypical green alien beings that look like a ball with
> pincer-clawed arms and webbed feet with a single eye on a stalk that
> curves from their lower back above their body, and the fact that they
> ride in saucer-shaped spacecrafts with a hemispherical half-dome on top
> and retractable landing gear on the bottom.
>
> In any case, here's the currently very scant lexicon:
>
> _ipf_ [Ipf]: eye.
> _ipfen_ [Ipf@n]: my eye.
> _mohipf_ [mo'?Ipf]: monster.
> _gruŋ_ [grUN] or [groUN]: arms.
> _gruŋgen_ ['grUNg@n] or [groUNg@n]: my arms.
> _tsapjak_ [ts)a'pjak]: feet/legs.
> _voluŋ_ [vO'lUN]: spaceship.
> _voluŋgen_ [vO'lUNg@n]: my spaceship.
> _qeŋ_ [ts)ʰEN]: glass. (Not 100% sure about spelling /ts)ʰ/ as _q_ yet,
> though.)
> _iqeŋ_ [I'ts)ʰEN]: glass dome.
>
> From this very scant corpus, one may draw the following conclusions:
> - The language has a /pf/ consonant cluster.
> - [ts)] may contrast with [ts)ʰ].
> - _-en_ appears to be a 1SG possessive suffix.
> - When _-en_ follows _ŋ_, a linking /g/ is inserted.
> - _h_ appears to represent the glottal stop.
> - _i-_ appears to be some kind of derivative prefix, perhaps describing
> a thing made from a particular material?
>
> Furthermore, I have in my notes that _mohipf_ is the plural of "eye" (to
> a 1-eyed species, anything with multiple eyes is monstrous!). Which
> implies that _mo(h)-_ is perhaps some kind of pluralizing prefix. Or
> maybe it's _mo-_ with a linking /?/ when preceding a vowel.
>
> I haven't worked out any syntax yet, though. And I don't have a name for
> the conlang yet. Any suggestions? :-P
>
>
> T
>
> --
> If creativity is stifled by rigid discipline, then it is not true
> creativity.
>
Messages in this topic (7)
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5c. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 5:19 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 06:52:38PM -0500, George Corley wrote:
> <q> for /ts)ʰ/? Is that Mandarin influence I see? Yeah, I can
> understand the issue. I'd actually recommend against it if you want
> your romanization to be accessible. Pinyin's use of <q c> is one of
> it's most confusing aspects (<x> is odd too, but not entirely without
> precedent in other languages), and I have a feeling it was just a
> compromise that was reached because of the fact that they somehow had
> to represent nine distinct sibilants in Roman script.
Yeah, it's a Pinyin influence. And I agree that <q> for /ts)ʰ/ is really
counterintuitive. It's one of the things I really don't like about
Pinyin, along with <x>. I think I brought that up here before, but got
shot down with "it's not English, it's just an arbitrary glyph -> sound
assignment, so just get used to it already". *shrug*
Personally, I prefer the old Taiwanese transcription scheme. But then it
doesn't really represent Mandarin's series of sibilants very well
either.
> Even then, <ts'> might have been a better choice (I think it's been
> used in other schemes).
I would go for that, except that the apostrophe is already overused for
too many things, so I'd like to avoid it if possible. But I'll keep
<ts'> in mind; at least for now, it looks to be a far better alternative
than <q>.
I was considering using /h/ as an aspiration marker, but then it's
already being used for /?/, and besides, <tsh> suggests [tS)] more than
[ts)ʰ].
T
--
"A one-question geek test. If you get the joke, you're a geek:
Seen on a California license plate on a VW Beetle: 'FEATURE'..."
-- Joshua D. Wachs - Natural Intelligence, Inc.
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
5d. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 8:01 pm ((PDT))
> Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:18:09 -0700
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: New toy conlang sketch
> To: [email protected]
> Personally, I prefer the old Taiwanese transcription scheme. But then it
> doesn't really represent Mandarin's series of sibilants very well
> either.
Don't . get . me . started. :D
Kou
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
5e. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "Aodhán Aannestad" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 8:44 pm ((PDT))
Is the -en suffix also 1st person subject on verbs?
On 6/26/2013 5:54 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> While the storm in the capitalization teacup blows over, I thought I'd
> present some preliminary notes on a toy conlang that I've been doodling
> on and off recently.
>
> This isn't meant to be a "serious" conlang, so I'm purposely ignoring
> the unlikelihood of the fact that its speakers are whimsical
> stereotypical green alien beings that look like a ball with
> pincer-clawed arms and webbed feet with a single eye on a stalk that
> curves from their lower back above their body, and the fact that they
> ride in saucer-shaped spacecrafts with a hemispherical half-dome on top
> and retractable landing gear on the bottom.
>
> In any case, here's the currently very scant lexicon:
>
> _ipf_ [Ipf]: eye.
> _ipfen_ [Ipf@n]: my eye.
> _mohipf_ [mo'?Ipf]: monster.
> _gruŋ_ [grUN] or [groUN]: arms.
> _gruŋgen_ ['grUNg@n] or [groUNg@n]: my arms.
> _tsapjak_ [ts)a'pjak]: feet/legs.
> _voluŋ_ [vO'lUN]: spaceship.
> _voluŋgen_ [vO'lUNg@n]: my spaceship.
> _qeŋ_ [ts)ʰEN]: glass. (Not 100% sure about spelling /ts)ʰ/ as _q_ yet,
> though.)
> _iqeŋ_ [I'ts)ʰEN]: glass dome.
>
> >From this very scant corpus, one may draw the following conclusions:
> - The language has a /pf/ consonant cluster.
> - [ts)] may contrast with [ts)ʰ].
> - _-en_ appears to be a 1SG possessive suffix.
> - When _-en_ follows _ŋ_, a linking /g/ is inserted.
> - _h_ appears to represent the glottal stop.
> - _i-_ appears to be some kind of derivative prefix, perhaps describing
> a thing made from a particular material?
>
> Furthermore, I have in my notes that _mohipf_ is the plural of "eye" (to
> a 1-eyed species, anything with multiple eyes is monstrous!). Which
> implies that _mo(h)-_ is perhaps some kind of pluralizing prefix. Or
> maybe it's _mo-_ with a linking /?/ when preceding a vowel.
>
> I haven't worked out any syntax yet, though. And I don't have a name for
> the conlang yet. Any suggestions? :-P
>
>
> T
>
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
5f. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 10:31 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 10:44:47PM -0500, Aodhán Aannestad wrote:
> Is the -en suffix also 1st person subject on verbs?
Unfortunately, I haven't got that far yet. :-P The current lexicon
(which is listed in full in my original post as quoted below) doesn't
have any verbs yet.
I do have some vague preliminary ideas about how the grammar might work,
but it's still too early to say anything concrete about it. I'm kinda
experimenting with letting the grammar develop from the corpus, rather
than first setting out the grammar then inventing some words to fit into
the blanks, as I have done with my two other conlangs.
--T
> On 6/26/2013 5:54 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >While the storm in the capitalization teacup blows over, I thought I'd
> >present some preliminary notes on a toy conlang that I've been doodling
> >on and off recently.
> >
> >This isn't meant to be a "serious" conlang, so I'm purposely ignoring
> >the unlikelihood of the fact that its speakers are whimsical
> >stereotypical green alien beings that look like a ball with
> >pincer-clawed arms and webbed feet with a single eye on a stalk that
> >curves from their lower back above their body, and the fact that they
> >ride in saucer-shaped spacecrafts with a hemispherical half-dome on top
> >and retractable landing gear on the bottom.
> >
> >In any case, here's the currently very scant lexicon:
> >
> >_ipf_ [Ipf]: eye.
> >_ipfen_ [Ipf@n]: my eye.
> >_mohipf_ [mo'?Ipf]: monster.
> >_gruŋ_ [grUN] or [groUN]: arms.
> >_gruŋgen_ ['grUNg@n] or [groUNg@n]: my arms.
> >_tsapjak_ [ts)a'pjak]: feet/legs.
> >_voluŋ_ [vO'lUN]: spaceship.
> >_voluŋgen_ [vO'lUNg@n]: my spaceship.
> >_qeŋ_ [ts)ʰEN]: glass. (Not 100% sure about spelling /ts)ʰ/ as _q_ yet,
> >though.)
> >_iqeŋ_ [I'ts)ʰEN]: glass dome.
> >
> >>From this very scant corpus, one may draw the following conclusions:
> >- The language has a /pf/ consonant cluster.
> >- [ts)] may contrast with [ts)ʰ].
> >- _-en_ appears to be a 1SG possessive suffix.
> >- When _-en_ follows _ŋ_, a linking /g/ is inserted.
> >- _h_ appears to represent the glottal stop.
> >- _i-_ appears to be some kind of derivative prefix, perhaps describing
> > a thing made from a particular material?
> >
> >Furthermore, I have in my notes that _mohipf_ is the plural of "eye" (to
> >a 1-eyed species, anything with multiple eyes is monstrous!). Which
> >implies that _mo(h)-_ is perhaps some kind of pluralizing prefix. Or
> >maybe it's _mo-_ with a linking /?/ when preceding a vowel.
> >
> >I haven't worked out any syntax yet, though. And I don't have a name for
> >the conlang yet. Any suggestions? :-P
> >
> >
> >T
> >
--
The most powerful one-line C program: #include "/dev/tty" -- IOCCC
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
5g. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:32 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, 26 Jun 2013 17:18:09 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 06:52:38PM -0500, George Corley wrote:
>> <q> for /ts)ʰ/? Is that Mandarin influence I see? Yeah, I can
>> understand the issue. I'd actually recommend against it if you want
>> your romanization to be accessible. Pinyin's use of <q c> is one of
>> it's most confusing aspects
I agree about <q>. But <c> cannot be faulted IMO; there is a venerable
tradition going back to medieval French and Spanish and kept alive nowadays
especially in eastern Europe of <c> denoting a dental affricate.
In fact the use of Pinyin <q> has nothing to do with its value as a Roman
letter; it's actually a trans-script borrowing of Cyrillic <ч>! That might be
innocuous from an internal perspective, but it's certainly a poor choice in a
world where Roman has other established uses.
(At any rate, it's not on my top two list:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=CONLANG;a5af83c1.1210B )
>> Even then, <ts'> might have been a better choice (I think it's been
>> used in other schemes).
>
>I would go for that, except that the apostrophe is already overused for
>too many things, so I'd like to avoid it if possible. But I'll keep
><ts'> in mind; at least for now, it looks to be a far better alternative
>than <q>.
Well, to me, the biggest (likely) problem with your use of <q> [ts)_h], that
no-one's made explicit yet, is its relation to <ts> [ts)]. Having a letter for
the aspirate when you just use a cluster for the simplex is really strange,
though slightly less so if [+aspirated] is the unmarked member of the
opposition, and significantly less so if /ts)_h/ is somehow one-of-a-kind in
the inventory. Are there other aspirate vs. plain contrasts, and if so how do
you romanise them?
>I was considering using /h/ as an aspiration marker, but then it's
>already being used for /?/, and besides, <tsh> suggests [tS)] more than
>[ts)ʰ].
Eh, I don't much like the correspondence <sh> [S], so this wouldn't worry me
personally.
On Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:54:48 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
[...]
>From this very scant corpus, one may draw the following conclusions:
>- The language has a /pf/ consonant cluster.
You sure it's not an affricate, i.e. unitary? Esp. given that you trancribe
/ts)/ as unitary.
>- When _-en_ follows _ŋ_, a linking /g/ is inserted.
Hah, somewhat like (most dialects of?) English, morphophonologically. So, in
reference to the thread about /N/, probably your aliens' /N/ was [Ng] not too
long ago?
>_gruŋ_ [grUN] or [groUN]: arms.
>_voluŋ_ [vO'lUN]: spaceship.
Interesting that <u> can vary to [oU] in the first but not the second.
>_mohipf_ [mo'?Ipf]: monster.
>_voluŋ_ [vO'lUN]: spaceship.
Also interesting that unstressed <o> has two different values here.
must run,
Alex
Messages in this topic (7)
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________________________________________________________________________
6. Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jun 26, 2013 7:50 pm ((PDT))
Here's a variation on an idea Alex Fink was talking about back in 2009
("Unambiguous prosody for trees"). The nice thing is that in the simple
cases, it looks like something that might be found in a reasonable
spoken language. I'll illustrate with names of birds from English.
First, the simple part: adding adjectives to noun phrases. Adjectives
get one inflection (a tone, suffix, or whatever), and the head of the
noun phrase gets a different inflection. I'll label them as A and N. You
can string any number of adjectives together, and they group with the
noun one by one to make longer phrases.
black-A bird-N
(black bird)
blackbird
rusty-A black-A bird-N
(rusty (black bird))
Rusty Blackbird
Japan-A green-A wood-A pecker-N
(Japanese (green (wood-pecker)))
Japanese Green Woodpecker
Basically the phrase can be extended indefinitely by replacing N with
the sequence A N. But what if you want to expand an A into a more
complex sequence? You need a new kind of phrase which I'll call a
"descriptive phrase". Start with a phrase like "red tail" (A N), then
change the N to a new inflection, D. English does something like this in
names like "Red-tailed Hawk", where the adjective "red" and the noun
"tail" are combined to make a new adjective "red-tailed".
red-A tail-D hawk-N
((red tail) hawk)
Red-tailed Hawk
red-A wing-D black-A bird-N
((red wing) (black bird))
Red-winged Blackbird
north-A rough-A wing-D swallow-N
(north ((rough wing) swallow))
Northern Rough-winged Swallow
Note that in a sequence like A A D, only the last A combines with the D.
Since A D reduces to A, A A D N is equivalent to A A N. If you want more
than one A to combine with a D, you need another inflection, what I'll
call the combining form (C). Imagine for instance that English doesn't
have a word for "nape", but instead uses the phrase "neck-A back-N" for
"back of the neck". So to make a compound adjective "red-naped" you'll
need this construction:
red-A neck-C back-D sap-A sucker-N
((red (neck back)) (sap sucker))
Red-naped Sapsucker
Note how "neck-A back-N" becomes "neck-C back-D" when used as the second
part of a descriptive phrase.
So far we've got:
N -> A N
A -> A D
D -> C D
Now here's the cool part. To expand a C, the left-hand side is inflected
like a C, and the right-hand side is like an N.
C -> C N
I can't come up with an actual bird name that illustrates this, but
here's the simplest case that requires this construction.
A C N D N
A (C N) D N = A C D N
A ((C N) D) N = A D N
(A ((C N) D)) N = A N
Here's a few other examples to illustrate how it works.
(A ((A ((C N) D)) N))
((A ((C (A N)) D)) N)
((A (C ((C N) D))) N)
((A ((C N) (C D))) N)
((A ((C N) D)) (A N))
(((A ((C N) D)) D) N)
((A (((C N) N) D)) N)
(((A D) ((C N) D)) N)
So with just four relatively simple rules you can represent arbitrarily
complex trees, and at least the first two or three of the rules look
like something that might work in a reasonable spoken language.
Messages in this topic (1)
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