There are 13 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: "Kitchen sink conlang" and other such terms
From: Jim Henry
1b. Re: "Kitchen sink conlang" and other such terms
From: Henrik Theiling
2a. Re: Art is when someone says 'Now' -- or is it?
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
2b. Re: Art is when someone says 'Now' -- or is it?
From: David J. Peterson
3a. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
From: Alex Fink
3b. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
From: Jim Henry
3c. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
From: Alex Fink
4. archives of this list 1991-94
From: Rick Harrison
5a. Re: Nutrition and pleasurable sense data
From: Jim Henry
6.1. Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)
From: Jan van Steenbergen
6.2. Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)
From: ROGER MILLS
7a. Re: "In spite of"
From: caeruleancentaur
8. Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix i
From: Eldin Raigmore
Messages
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1a. Re: "Kitchen sink conlang" and other such terms
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 1:39 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 4:06 PM, David J. Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Jeff:
> <<
> The term "kitchen sink conlang" (or KSC, not to be confused with KFC) seems
> to be used mainly on ZBB; it could have originated there. If so, the
> earliest
>>>
> I don't think so. I knew the term before the ZBB existed, and
> I'm sure I heard it here. Check out these messages from 2000:
> Jim Grossman:
> Item #27951 (27 Jun 2000 12:34) - help with starting out
> help you focus your efforts, and limit the temptation to throw absolutely
> everything including the kitchen sink into your grammar.
This first one is relevant; the other one refers to a case in
Romanian that covers a passel of disparate theta roles, not
a conlang with a passel of disparate features.
Searching archives.conlang.info for "kitchen sink"
turns up a number of uses of this term in one form
or another (mostly "kitchen sink language"
rather than "kitchen sink conlang" which was what I
searched for originally). I haven't found any earlier
than 2000, but the archives only go back to 1998.
(John Cowan used to have most of the 1991-1998
archives on his web page, but they're gone now. Does
anyone have them elsewhere?)
These messages seem particularly relevant in discussing
what is and isn't a kitchen sink conlang, one re: Ithkuil,
the other re Tech:
http://archives.conlang.info/qu/jhaulgia/zonqhialthuan.html
http://archives.conlang.info/fhae/woetu/koenfualfhuen.html
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (8)
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1b. Re: "Kitchen sink conlang" and other such terms
Posted by: "Henrik Theiling" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2008 2:54 am ((PDT))
Hi!
Jim Henry writes:
>...
> (John Cowan used to have most of the 1991-1998
> archives on his web page, but they're gone now. Does
> anyone have them elsewhere?)
>...
I have private copies that are long on my list for adding to the
archives.conlang.info pages. With them gone from John's page,
it might be an even better idea to include them now. So I will
try to get to that sooner rather than later.
**Henrik
Messages in this topic (8)
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2a. Re: Art is when someone says 'Now' -- or is it?
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 1:52 pm ((PDT))
Hallo!
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 16:24:42 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>
> I agree with pretty much everything you said here, and
> won't quote or comment in detail on much of it, except:
>
>
> >> Is there any equivalent in other art forms to the state Brithenig is
> >> in?
>
> > I don't know. Perhaps a role-playing game: there is a world and
> > a set of rules set out in book form, but the actual narratives
> > result from people playing it. (Of course, the players can
>
> Hmm. Is that any indicator of a general similarity between
> roleplaying and conlanging that's closer than the resemblances
> between either of them and other art forms? It's generally seemed
> to me that roleplaying is most similar to fiction writing, on the
> one hand, and theater, on the other hand; but here's an aspect
> in which it's more similar to conlanging than either of those.
Yes. Roleplaying is more akin to fiction writing and theater than
to conlanging. The comparison I drew was based on the notion that
in both roleplaying and conlanging, you work with a set of rules
that are codified in the beginning and from there on you engage in
an open-ended creative activity guided by those rules.
> This reminds me that a friend once asked me if I thought
> we could adapt Glossotechnia in such as way as to combine
> it with a role-playing game. We still haven't figured out a way
> to do it yet. The languages created by the players in Glossotechnia
> games tend to lack concultural context; maybe it would be
> interesting to add optional cards and rules covering
> the language/culture interaction....? And then the players could,
> in addition to working on coining words to translate their
> challenge sentences, also be roleplaying as persons living
> in the as-yet-underspecified conculture that speaks the
> language being created by the game?
I also have no idea how this could work. The main use of conlangs
in role-playing games is as part of the setting, and that in praxi
mainly for the purpose of arriving at consistent naming schemes for
characters, places, etc. It is, however, impractical to have
players actually speak the languages of their characters :)
> [...]
>
> The first version of gzb phonology, in March 1998, was pretty kitchen-sinky;
> all the phonemes I knew how to pronounce and a few more I could barely
> manage, and phonotactics that allowed zillions of consonant clusters.
I once made up a consonant inventory with more than 300 phonemes,
just for fun; I never used it in an actual conlang, though, because
the thing was just too unwieldy. The phoneme inventory of what was
to become Old Albic never was even nearly that large.
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Messages in this topic (5)
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2b. Re: Art is when someone says 'Now' -- or is it?
Posted by: "David J. Peterson" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 2:54 pm ((PDT))
Jim:
<<
Novelists, for instance, occasionally do second editions of their
novels (James Branch Cabell, J.R.R. Tolkien); but I've never heard of
one saying something equivalent to this, like "I may keep making
slight additions to the worldbuilding detail until I die, but the plot
and characters aren't going to change". That doesn't mean that
conlanging is a better or worse kind of artform than literature (let's
not open that can of worms again) but it may tell us something about
how they differ.
>>
The notion of something being "finished" is defined by the
audience and the method of publication. If you branch out
into the world of television or serial novels, "finished" is roughly
equivalent to the notion of "canon".
So, for example, one doesn't have to go very far to find an
unfinished book: Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. The
book is "finished", in the ultimate sense, because Walt Whitman
is dead, but he published it several times throughout his life--
not because he said at what point, "Yes! This is finished!",
and then later decided, "Oh, wait, I need to change it..." No,
his idea was that Leaves of Grass was *his* book. As he
produced new poetry, he'd add it to Leaves of Grass, and
when there was enough new material, he'd add it to the
new additions. The idea is that this was his forum. He
even removed or changed the order of poems from time
to time. Kind of similar to another Walt--Disney, this time--
and his idea (never really realized) for Fantasia: That it
would be put out every few years with new pieces, together
with some old ones, but that people would go out to the
movie theater for the Fantasia experience.
Most of these projects never live up to the artist's ideal
(like the Who's Lifehouse) precisely because of the confines
of publication and audience. Publishers publish finished
works, because they've not known any other way to do
it. Even with series, it's a series of *finished* works. The
costs of producing the equivalent of Leaves of Grass with
a series of novels would be astronomical--and off-putting
to the consumer, who wouldn't want to repurchase a novel
they already read with twenty or so pages of new material--
and possibly twenty fewer pages than was in their original
edition.
With the web, a project like this might be possible, since
publication is a free. I always thought it would be ballsy
of one of these marketeer fantasy writers to write a live
novel. Consumers don't pay for a finished novel: They
pay a *subscription*, not unlike many online video games
nowadays, to literally *watch* the author as s/he types.
This will include the creation of new material as well as
editing and revising. The project can end when a normal
novel would end, or it need not: the author could just
keep on writing, since an endpoint isn't needed for the
audience to enjoy the work. I imagine the technology
would be extraordinary for this (the author's computer
would have to be linked to a live server and updated
by the second), but given how rabid genre fiction fans
are, I bet it'd be profitable, if the right person did it.
So, these projects have existed in the past. Most of them,
though, are bound by constraints that conlangers don't
have. Take television, for instance. In a television series
like The Simpsons, *everything* that happens in the show
goes into a book they call the show's bible. This contains
every fact about every character, every reference, everything
they've ever done, etc., so that when writers create new
episodes, they can make sure they don't do anything
redundant, or contradict anything that happened in an
earlier episode. In a sense, then, a show is bound by its
history if it hopes to retain its fan base (or unless it specifically
forgets its history, as a show like Aqua Teen Hunger
Force). Fans gets upset if writers don't remember
what happened in some episode back in the first season,
and will often point it out.
With conlangs, publishing is, essentially, the web. And
since few if any will notice that the definition for a given
word changed, we can keep tinkering forever without
constraints. If grammars and dictionaries for conlangs
became marketable entities, they would become canon.
It's much harder to change a definition if it's been published
in a print volume owned by thousands of people than
if the dictionary exists only on your computer and/or
website. If such a thing did happen, conlangs would
suddenly feel like bounded projects--if anything, similar
to a card game or fiction series. In the game Magic,
they produce series of cards, each of which have specific
effects. They're essentially bounded by the rules the
cards from the very first edition play by. They can add
rules, and make the early cards not as exciting since
they're effect is dwarfed by new cards, etc., but they
must still function. Think of Klingon. Okrand could
publish a new dictionary with new words, but do you
really think he could change a significant part of the
grammar, or maybe suggest that new word for "language"
be tlhIS, not Hol? How would all the Trek fans worldwide
react? I honestly think his change would have no
effect--they'd stick with what was already established.
In a sense, the language's history has more power at
this point than its creator.
To sum up: I don't think what we've stumbled on here
is an inherent difference between artforms by any means.
Rather, it's a byproduct of the artform's status in the world,
and could easily change if its status in the world changed.
-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
Messages in this topic (5)
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3a. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 2:28 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 12:58:47 +0200, Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Does anyone have an affix in their conlang that corresponds more or
> less directly to the English prefix 'out-' as in transitive verbs as
> 'outperform', 'outsell', etc.?
>
> It would be a nice feature if a language had this a the only way to
> form comparisons, especially languages where advectives are verbs. So
> you would say ,Jim outtalls John'. ANADEW?
Lojban comes to mind as doing something similar. I recall that the
idiomatic way to form comparatives is by what in standard terminology are I
suppose predicate-predicate compounds, the first with the sense 'be Adj' and
the second either _zmadu_ 'exceed' or, what is it, _mleca_ 'be less than'.
Here we go:
http://jbotcan.org/cllc/c12/s15.html
So you could take an example like (15.3) there,
mi citmau do lo nanca be li xa
I am-younger-than you by-years the-number six.
I am six years younger than you.
and gloss _citmau_ as _cit-mau_ young-outdo.
Mind, I don't actually know Lojban.
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 20:14:05 +0200, M. Czapp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>*HIJACK: Is there a better linguistic term for the ease with which you can
>change whether a word is a noun, adjective or a verb? The best example for
>weak typing (easy/implicite changes) might be Esperanto, German is of the
>languages I know the one with the most problematic 'typecasts.
Talk of casting tends to make me leery, for the way it seems to make the
background assumption that given any two data types there should be exactly
one function between them of such paramouncy that it makes sense to elevate
it above all others and crown it the Cast between those two types. For some
type-pairs I buy this (smaller to larger floating point types, say); mostly not.
This seems as much to be true of lexical categories as computerish data
types. So in Esperanto the "casts" to adjectives are in fact ambiguous
between roughly "pertaining to X" and "having lots of X" or perhaps other
things yet: _suna_ 'solar' or 'sunny'; _denta_ 'dental' or 'toothy'. Not
to mention the whole _broso_ vs. _kombo, kombilo_ thing ('brush'; 'act of
combing', 'comb'). Basically, you simply need to specify more for a
derivational operation than e.g. "converts nouns to verbs".
Anyway, to get back to your original question, I don't know of any such
terminology pertaining to changing word class in particular. One could just
talk of the general propensity for derivation -- some langs might be rich in
productive derivational morphology, others poor.
At the extreme, I suppose, you might have a language where one of these
categories (e.g. verbs, or adjectives, I think I've read of cases of both)
is a _closed class_, i.e. you can simply never make any more of them,
whether by derivation or borrowing or some other means.
Alex
Messages in this topic (7)
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3b. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 2:54 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Alex Fink <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 20:14:05 +0200, M. Czapp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>*HIJACK: Is there a better linguistic term for the ease with which you can
>>change whether a word is a noun, adjective or a verb? The best example for
>>weak typing (easy/implicite changes) might be Esperanto, German is of the
>>languages I know the one with the most problematic 'typecasts.
> This seems as much to be true of lexical categories as computerish data
> types. So in Esperanto the "casts" to adjectives are in fact ambiguous
> between roughly "pertaining to X" and "having lots of X" or perhaps other
> things yet: _suna_ 'solar' or 'sunny'; _denta_ 'dental' or 'toothy'.
Or "made of X" or "resembling, savoring of X" (though there's also
the more specific "-eca" for that), or "for the benefit of X"
or "suitable for X" or "originating from X"... Issues like these
were why I came up with the set of adjective-deriving suffixes I did
for gzb. Though in practice E-o adjectives derived from substantial
roots are not
often ambiguous in context, I think. Still, for practical use I prefer a
language where the derivations are a little too vague and occasionally
ambiguous to one where you can't derive words easily and you have
to memorize apparently unrelated words for closely related concepts.
I think the derivations in the other direction, from adjective to noun
or verb to noun, are much less problematic (at least w.r.t. Esperanto);
you can be pretty confident that the basic meaning of such a
nominalization will be "quality X in the abstract, x-ness" or
"an instance/act of doing X" -- though in some cases 120 years
of unregulated usage have given some such nominalizations
additional conventional meanings.
> Not
> to mention the whole _broso_ vs. _kombo, kombilo_ thing ('brush'; 'act of
> combing', 'comb'). Basically, you simply need to specify more for a
> derivational operation than e.g. "converts nouns to verbs".
Indeed it helps reduce ambiguity to do so, though given how well
Esperanto (and even Toki Pona) work in practice, I'd hesitate to
say you *need* to do so. I would strongly recommend doing so
in an auxlang or engelang; in an alien lang or more or less
naturalistic artlang, do whatever you like.
> Anyway, to get back to your original question, I don't know of any such
> terminology pertaining to changing word class in particular. One could just
> talk of the general propensity for derivation -- some langs might be rich in
> productive derivational morphology, others poor.
And of those that have productive derivational morphology, some
tend strongly toward zero-derivation (English and Toki Pona,
for instance), some mark the derivations vaguely
(most of the derivational affixes being semantically broad;
Volapuk is more extreme about this than
Esperanto, and my understanding is that Ido's derivation system
is supposedly one of the areas where it improves on Esperanto,
but it's still vaguer than an ideal engelang) and some do so with
rather more semantic precision (Ithkuil; my gzb, I hope).
> At the extreme, I suppose, you might have a language where one of these
> categories (e.g. verbs, or adjectives, I think I've read of cases of both)
> is a _closed class_, i.e. you can simply never make any more of them,
> whether by derivation or borrowing or some other means.
That is interesting. What cases have you read of each? There
was talk here about Basque verbs recently, a certain subclass of which
are a closed class as I understand it, but it has an open class of
verbs as well, doesn't it?
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article
Messages in this topic (7)
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3c. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 3:18 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 17:53:52 -0400, Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Alex Fink <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Though in practice E-o adjectives derived from substantial
>roots are not
>often ambiguous in context, I think. Still, for practical use I prefer a
>language where the derivations are a little too vague and occasionally
>ambiguous to one where you can't derive words easily and you have
>to memorize apparently unrelated words for closely related concepts.
[...]
>> Basically, you simply need to specify more for a
>> derivational operation than e.g. "converts nouns to verbs".
>
>Indeed it helps reduce ambiguity to do so, though given how well
>Esperanto (and even Toki Pona) work in practice, I'd hesitate to
>say you *need* to do so. I would strongly recommend doing so
>in an auxlang or engelang; in an alien lang or more or less
>naturalistic artlang, do whatever you like.
Point. In my fretting about the conversions not in general being uniform I
wasn't allowing for just accepting the unspecifiedness of the operation,
which on second thought is a very naturalistic thing to do, especially if
different e.g. nouns can have different semantics of e.g. their
adjectivisations sanctioned by usage.
>> At the extreme, I suppose, you might have a language where one of these
>> categories (e.g. verbs, or adjectives, I think I've read of cases of both)
>> is a _closed class_, i.e. you can simply never make any more of them,
>> whether by derivation or borrowing or some other means.
>
>That is interesting. What cases have you read of each? There
>was talk here about Basque verbs recently, a certain subclass of which
>are a closed class as I understand it, but it has an open class of
>verbs as well, doesn't it?
It does. I'm not actually sure why the standard analysis of Basque calls
both of these word classes verbs, aside from the fact that the class in
other languages each of them is most like is the verb. As far as I can see
you could analyse Basque as having a closed class of syntheticverbs and an
open class of periphrasticverbs. Or is there some problem with this analysis?
AFMCL I took a kinda hedging position on this question in A:jat he-Heloun
whose verbal system shows the influence of Basque on this point; I have
"s-verbs" and "p-verbs".
http://000024.org/conlang/AhH/05-11.html , heading "Verbs"
except my server is down.
I don't remember a more clear-cut case of verbs being a closed class
offhand, except that I think Australia has several. Chris Bates would
probably know one.
Adjectives, you're in luck. I've got a Tlingit grammar here
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~crippen/papers/tlingit-gram.pdf
which says in chapter 7 that the "noun-like adjectives" are a closed class,
only eleven existing. It says the "verb-like adjectives" are an open class,
but S7.2 seems to say that these aren't adjectives at all but rather stative
verbs. So I'm willing to call this an example.
Alex
Messages in this topic (7)
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4. archives of this list 1991-94
Posted by: "Rick Harrison" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 4:09 pm ((PDT))
I am assembling an online archive of Conlang traffic from 1991 thru 1994. I
expect to have it finished within a couple of days. It is at
http://www.glossopoeia.org/conlang/index.html
If you wrote anything back then which you would like to have removed from my
version of the archive, send me the date & subject of the particular
message(s) and I will delete it/them.
---
"No Web 2.0 forum comes close to matching the features that any
decent USENET client had 15 years ago. Things like real threading,
filters, kill files, etc." --'Hatta' on Slashdot, 2008.07.30
Messages in this topic (1)
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5a. Re: Nutrition and pleasurable sense data
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Aug 8, 2008 7:58 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Eldin Raigmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 09:45:17 -0400, Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>Does anyone have nutritional terminology in their conlang?
<snip heaps of fascinating organic chemistry>
>>I don't think my chemistry knowledge is up to snuff for deriving
>>all those systematically, yet.
>
> Realistically they won't be able to taste the presence or absence of
> everything
> they have to eat to survive, so I don't know that they need all those words at
> all. Deriving them all systematically may not actually be an issue (unless
> you
> just decide that it should be).
gzb is not a language for a fictional human culture; it's a personal
language I use everyday. Detailed nutritional terminology isn't
as important as basic stuff like waking, sleeping, working,
driving, etc., or terminology for things I deal with all the time
like writing software and fiction and devising conlangs; but
it would be ideal to have such terms that I can talk about
whatever nutrients I need to pay attention to in arranging my
diet or use of dietary supplements.
Whether I or any other human can taste the presence of a given
nutrient is not an issue; humans in our culture have other sources
of information for knowing what nutrients they need and what foods
or pills they can get them from. Deriving words for nutrients systematically
follows from the general design principles of gzb, being lexically
parsimonious except in areas which are most often talked about
or most conceptually central to the ethos of the language.
Nutrition isn't going to be one of the most often talked about
subjects, so words for this semantic field don't need to be
particularly short, but precisely because they won't occur
often in the corpus, they need to be perspicuous or at least
mnemonic compounds or derivations, since memorizing a root
word that I would use only once in a few weeks or months is
not a good use of mental energy.
> The vitamin humans need is ascorbic acid (Vitamin C). ("Ascorbic"
> means "without scurvy", btw.)
> I don't know if humans can even taste ascorbic acid;
I know that vitamin C pills have a very distinctive taste, if you
take them with water instead of some other liquid that masks
the taste.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (3)
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6.1. Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)
Posted by: "Jan van Steenbergen" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2008 7:27 am ((PDT))
Rick Harrison skrzypszy:
>Tuesday night I fell into a pond and nearly drowned. Since it was warm
>stagnant water, there is a remote chance that I may have been infected
>by Naegleria fowleri amoeba; if so, I could be dead within a couple of
>weeks.
I hope you are doing fine!
>If you have a personal language that you've never revealed to
>anyone else, for example: would you want to write a description of
>the language ahead of time, and make arrangements to have it
>published after passing away? How would you make such arrangements?
I can't really say I have anything of significance that is not online. Nothing
complete enough
to be published in whatever way, in any case.
It's a slightly different story with my music. Nothing of it has ever been
published, although
most of it has been performed. I haven't made any arrangements regarding this;
all I can
hope is that when I'm gone my family will take care of it and make sure that
it's being
performed every once in a while - IMO that's a much better way of commemorating
a person
than visiting a grave.
>If you have web pages that you want to stay online after you can
>no longer pay the hosting bill, what options are available? The
>Wayback Machine at archive.org doesn't catch everything and it might
>not be around forever.
I have to admit that this thought has occurred to me sometimes. Well, I suppose
my domain
at free.fr will stay around for a while. But nothing lasts forever, and there
will be a day when
it's ultimately gone. As for all my Wenedyk/RTC stuff, I would certainly hope
someone else
would make sure my work stays around for another while.
What worries me more is actually this: how is the world going to find out that
I'm dead?
Even my friends from Ill Bethisad are pretty used to me being inactive from
time to time. All
they will notice that I don't post to Conculture, don't edit the IBWiki, and
don't reply to
private mails. But it might take quite some time before people would find out
that I'm dead.
One case comes to mind here. Remember Libor Sztemon? Well, my Internet carreer
started
more or less in 2001, and one of the first things that caught my interest were
his North
Slavic conlangs. I was thrilled to find out that someone else had been
exploring the same
ideas as I had. After I had created a Langmaker profile for Vozgian, he quickly
linked to it
from his pages. Later, I wrote him several private e-mails, but never got any
reply. Only in
2004, it was Jan Havlis who posted to Slaviconlang that Libor had died in 2002
at the age of
24. His pages (with his languages and fonts) are still online; AFAIK, his
family takes good
care of them. I have copies of most of his pages on my computer. Should his
work disappear
from the net, because the host stops hosting it or something, than I'll be
ready to upload
them myself.
>The conlangers of ancient times published their ideas in books,
>which has preserved them to some degree, although some of the old
>books are scarce collectors' items, unavailable from libraries and
>never webified.
Frankly, I'm very hesitant to even give it a try. My only conlang big enough
for such a thing
would be Wenedyk. But it's still under development. I keep creating new words,
and every
once in a while I make minor modifications to the existing material. Once it
were to be
published, that would mean the language is "frozen" from that moment on. I'm
not sure if
I'm ready for that.
All that is pure theory, of course, because I can't think of a publishing house
that would be
waiting for my stuff to publish it!
>Is it arrogant to want some of your ideas to live on after you die?
Not at all! For me, it's crucial. After I'm dead, all that stays of me are two
things: the
memories people have about me, and my work. The latter would be my very tiny
imprint in
world history - one way to achieve immortality.
Jan
Messages in this topic (81)
________________________________________________________________________
6.2. Re: CHAT: facing your own mortality (as a conlanger)
Posted by: "ROGER MILLS" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2008 10:47 am ((PDT))
Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
(snipping much that is relevant, and in line with my own beliefs)
>
>It's a slightly different story with my music. Nothing of it has ever been
>published, although
>most of it has been performed. I haven't made any arrangements regarding
>this; all I can
>hope is that when I'm gone my family will take care of it and make sure
>that it's being
>performed every once in a while - IMO that's a much better way of
>commemorating a person
>than visiting a grave.
>
> >If you have web pages that you want to stay online after you can
> >no longer pay the hosting bill, what options are available? The
> >Wayback Machine at archive.org doesn't catch everything and it might
> >not be around forever.
>
>I have to admit that this thought has occurred to me sometimes. Well, I
>suppose my domain
>at free.fr will stay around for a while. But nothing lasts forever, and
>there will be a day when
>it's ultimately gone. As for all my Wenedyk/RTC stuff, I would certainly
>hope someone else
>would make sure my work stays around for another while.
>
>What worries me more is actually this: how is the world going to find out
>that I'm dead?
I plan to leave instructions with a friend, to use my computer and links to
send out notices to this list and my various alumni orgs. At my age it could
happen any time, heavens forfend!! My great-grandfather lived to 99, I'd
like to do so too, if only to see whether the world can avoid the FUBAR
state that it seems to be headed for... if not, one might want to exit
sooner.
>All that is pure theory, of course, because I can't think of a publishing
>house that would be
>waiting for my stuff to publish it!
That's probably the case with much of my research in Indonesian languages; I
have a lot that isnt organized enough to warrant publishing, but it might
give some future grad student a few ideas, or save a lot of scut work
(annotated dictionaries in Xerox copies, various semi-finished articles).
These too I think could be forwarded to a colleague, who can then save or
delete as he/she sees fit.
>
> >Is it arrogant to want some of your ideas to live on after you die?
>
>Not at all! For me, it's crucial. After I'm dead, all that stays of me are
>two things: the
>memories people have about me, and my work. The latter would be my very
>tiny imprint in
>world history - one way to achieve immortality.
As I recall, there's a prayer in Jewish liturgy (at least in the Engl.
version I've heard) that "they are not gone, they live on in the hearts and
minds of those who loved them". As for one's work, you are entirely correct.
Some of my (mercenary) relatives don't see the point of my having written
a PhD diss. that maybe 6 people in the entire world have read (it always
surprises me when I see it cited, it was never published). And who knows, in
50 years, someone may utterly refute everything I wrote!! Whenever I mention
trying to get something published in a journal, they ask, how much will you
get paid? AS IF, haha. How about 10 off-prints, big deal. The point for me
is, it's enough to have contributed to the world's body of knowledge. I do
feel that conlanging, too, is a contribution of sorts, even if most of it
flowers in obscurity.
I often think of the young Dutch linguist S. J. Esser, who did so much
excellent work in Celebes languages in the 1930s. Like many, he was interned
in a concentration camp by the Japanese, and died there in the 1940s, he may
have been 40 at the most. His work still stands and is greatly respected,
but he could have done so much more.....
One thinks too of Olivier Messiaen, who composed that magnificent "Quartet
for the End of Time" while interned during WW II. He at least survived, as
does the work.
Messages in this topic (81)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
7a. Re: "In spite of"
Posted by: "caeruleancentaur" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2008 8:58 am ((PDT))
> Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> In trying to come up with a way to render the meaning of English
> "despite" / "in spite of", ....
> How do y'all express this meaning, whether as as conjunction or
> adposition or case or whatever, in your conlang or in natlangs
> you know? I'm particularly interested in languages where it's
> derived from some more basic root rather than being an unanalyzable
> particle.
Senjecas has two classes of postpositions. I call them derivative
and non-derivative. As the name implies this latter class contains
postpositions not derived from other parts of speech, e.g., 'swa,'
apart from, beside; and 'aða,' between, among. It is a non-
productive class.
Non-derivative postpositions are derived from other parts of speech.
The classic example is the verb 'tîîrsa,' the only example of a verb
from which one of every other part of speech is derived, with the
exception of an interjection.
tîîrsa (verb) = to defy
tîîrsas (noun) = defiance, obstinancy, stubbornness
tîîrsis (adj.) = defiant, refractory, obstinate, stubborn, contrary
tíírsa (postp.) = despite, in spite of, for, in the face of,
notwithstanding, with
tíírsi (conj.) = notwithstanding that, although, even though, albeit,
while, if
tíírsu (adv.) = in spite of it, nevertheless, notwithstanding, on the
contrary
Charlie
Messages in this topic (13)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
8. Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix i
Posted by: "Eldin Raigmore" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sat Aug 9, 2008 9:45 am ((PDT))
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 17:23:19 -0400, Alex Fink <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 12:58:47 +0200, Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>wrote:
>[snip]
>On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 20:14:05 +0200, M. Czapp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>*HIJACK: Is there a better linguistic term for the ease with which you can
>>change whether a word is a noun, adjective or a verb? The best example for
>>weak typing (easy/implicite changes) might be Esperanto, German is of the
>>languages I know the one with the most problematic 'typecasts.
>
>Talk of casting tends to make me leery, for the way it seems to make the
>background assumption that given any two data types there should be
>exactly one function between them of such paramouncy that it makes sense
>to elevate it above all others and crown it the Cast between those two
>types.
I don't agree, but you might be right and/or I might be wrong.
>For some type-pairs I buy this (smaller to larger floating point types, say);
>mostly not.
Linguistically I think of those as "castes" or as "types", not as "casts".
I refer to the affixes (or other operations) which change part-of-speech
as "typecasting" affixes or operations; in programming I refer to a function
whose purpose is to change data-type as a "typecasting" function.
>This seems as much to be true of lexical categories as computerish data
>types. So in Esperanto the "casts" to adjectives are in fact ambiguous
>between roughly "pertaining to X" and "having lots of X" or perhaps other
>things yet: _suna_ 'solar' or 'sunny'; _denta_ 'dental' or 'toothy'. Not
>to mention the whole _broso_ vs. _kombo, kombilo_ thing ('brush'; 'act of
>combing', 'comb'). Basically, you simply need to specify more for a
>derivational operation than e.g. "converts nouns to verbs".
Yes. In strongly-typed computer languages there is frequently an operation
with no other function than to change the data-type.
In natlangs, though, there are usually several nouns pertaining to each verb,
so several ways of nominalizing it (action nominalization, agent
nominalization,
patient nominalization, location nominalization, time nominalization).
There are frequently also more than one ways to adjectivize it (passive
participle, active participle, maybe realis vs irrealis participle, maybe past
vs
future vs present participle, etc.)
And there may be several verbs associated with a given noun, too; to use an
N on, to change into an N, to treat as if it were an N, to give an N to, to
take
an N from, ....
Similarly, probably, for most productive operations that can change one part-
of-speech into another. (The resulting word-class is always an open one, and
usually a large one; the starting word-class is also usually a large, open
class.
Other than that the only limit seems to be there is frequently only one way to
change an adjective into an adverb (if the language has both as large open
word-classes and they are different parts-of-speech) and may be no way to
change an adverb into some one or another of the other word-classes.)
All such operations are likelier to be "derivations" than "inflections",
because
one of the differences between "derivation" and "inflection" is that
"inflection"
usually leaves the word in the same class while "derivation" frequently does
not.
>Anyway, to get back to your original question, I don't know of any such
>terminology pertaining to changing word class in particular. One could just
>talk of the general propensity for derivation -- some langs might be rich in
>productive derivational morphology, others poor.
Right; you are concerned with the existence of highly-productive word-class-
changing derivations. If there are some, "ease of changing part-of-speech" is
high; if there are none, or not enough of them, or they aren't very productive
after all (say, for instance, some of them apply to only a minority of some
part-
of-speech), then "ease of changing part-of-speech" is low.
If there's a term for this I don't remember ever hearing or seeing it.
>At the extreme, I suppose, you might have a language where one of these
>categories (e.g. verbs, or adjectives, I think I've read of cases of both)
>is a _closed class_, i.e. you can simply never make any more of them,
>whether by derivation or borrowing or some other means.
Aren't there languages with "adjectives are a small closed class"?
Aren't there languages with "verbs are a small closed class"? (Mostly in such
languages the "small closed class" is the "light verbs", and most of what would
be a verb in another language is a phrasal verb consisting of a "light verb"
plus
a "content word".)
I know there are languages with no class of adverbs distinct from their class
of
adjectives; but aren't many "semantic cases" (that is, cases other
than "syntactic cases", that show something other than the "grammatical
relations" of Subject, Object, or Indirect Object) also "adverbial cases"?
Isn't a
noun in a case other than Nominative, Accusative, Dative, or Genitive,
essentially an adverb? So, the "changing of a noun into an adverb" is likely
to
be fairly "easy" -- highly productive -- in most languages with a robust case
system, right? And Genitive, in those languages that have one, is essentially
a
way of changing a noun into an adjective, isn't it?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I'd think you'd want to take each pair of large open word-classes and ask
whether there is a derivation method that applies to almost every word in the
first one to produce a word in the second one.
Noun --> Verb
Verb --> Noun
- - - - - - - - - - -
Verb --> Adjective
Noun --> Adjective
Adjective --> Verb
Adjective --> Noun
- - - - - - - - - - -
Adjective --> Adverb
Noun --> Adverb
Verb --> Adverb
Adverb --> Verb
Adverb --> Noun
Adverb --> Adjective
Messages in this topic (1)
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