There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: YAEUT : journal vs diary
From: Lars Finsen
2. Update: Morphological Downstep (Tone)
From: David Peterson
3. Pictures for language instruction
From: Gary Shannon
4a. Re: "Best" way to write a complete description of a language
From: Roman Rausch
5. changes of liquids
From: Roman Rausch
6. Like Webster's dictionary ...
From: R A Brown
7. Corpus analysis scripts
From: Jim Henry
Messages
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1.1. Re: YAEUT : journal vs diary
Posted by: "Lars Finsen" lars.fin...@ortygia.no
Date: Fri Oct 29, 2010 10:28 am ((PDT))
Den 27. okt. 2010 kl. 15.26 skreiv BPJ:
> In Swedish there is a distinction between _införa_
> "introduce" and _föra in_ "make entries". Not so in
> Norwegian? (Would surprise me! :-)
No, it's the same here, and likewise with the nominal forms.
LEF
Messages in this topic (32)
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2. Update: Morphological Downstep (Tone)
Posted by: "David Peterson" deda...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 29, 2010 1:31 pm ((PDT))
Yesterday I posted about Mary Paster's talk on Gã, and she happened
to see my post on Conlang, and sent me a few clarifications (she tried
to send it to the Conlang-L, but wasn't a member, so I thought I'd post
it for her).
Begin forwarded message:
> From: "mimsymary" <mary.pas...@pomona.edu>
> Date: October 29, 2010 10â51â17 AM PDT
> To: David Peterson <deda...@gmail.com>
> Subject: Ga examples
>
>
> Hi David,
>
> I just tried to post the following to the list but the reply is not
> displaying -- not sure if it's being moderated since I'm not a member of
> the group, or if it got lost somewhere in the series of tubes, or if it
> just takes a while. So I thought I'd just send it directly to you.
>
> Best,
> Mary
> ***
>
> Hi David,
>
> Thanks so much for this post! And thanks again for attending the talk.
> It was great to see you.
>
> I just wanted to post a quick clarification about something in Ga that's
> different from what I said in the talk, which is that rising tones
> trigger a vowel lengthening rule that I didn't talk about. So those
> imperative forms I cited were more like phonemic transcriptions and
> would actually be pronounced with a long vowel. I think I pronounced
> them that way, but it would have been hard to discern since I didn't
> pronounce a lot of examples and I'm not a native speaker anyway.
> Basically the forms I cited would be intermediate forms after the high
> tone has been associated but before lengthening. The reason I did that
> was that I'd already shown examples of the rising tone and the diacritic
> we use for that, and I wanted the audience to instantly recognize those
> imperatives as having a rising tone rather than puzzling over what it
> means to have different tones on adjacent vowels and then having to make
> the leap to equate that with a short rising tone. I thought about
> putting the symbol on one vowel and then just putting a colon after, but
> then I worried that the audience would get preoccupied with the fact
> that there were two changes applying to the imperative forms (when
> really there's just the tone change, which then triggers the
> lengthening).
>
> This doesn't matter to the point you are making here, though, or to the
> excellent question you asked at the talk. You could still associate the
> L tone of the perfect onto the H-toned verb, resulting in a rising tone
> that would then trigger the same lengthening that occurs in the
> imperative. So, the fact that you don't associate the L tone is still
> interesting (and I am not sure that the vague answer I gave you would
> fully explain it, though I do think that must be part of the
> explanation).
>
> Anyway, I just thought I should give you the real story about this for
> the sake of full disclosure -- especially since if you run across any of
> Jie Zhang's work on the distribution of contour tones you'll see that he
> cites Ga as an example of a language where rising tones trigger
> lengthening (based on my description)!
>
> Best,
>
> Mary
-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.com/
LCS Member Since 2007
http://conlang.org/
Messages in this topic (1)
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3. Pictures for language instruction
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" fizi...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Oct 29, 2010 5:26 pm ((PDT))
For those who would like to put together lessons to teach their
conlang, here's a source I stumbled upon titled "Royalty-Free Clip Art
Collection for Foreign/Second Language Instruction". The pictures,
simple line drawings, are organized by verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.
Looks like something that might come in handy for teaching conlangs.
http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/JapanProj//FLClipart/default.html
--gary
Messages in this topic (1)
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4a. Re: "Best" way to write a complete description of a language
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" ara...@mail.ru
Date: Sat Oct 30, 2010 3:13 am ((PDT))
> Looking through grammars for some natural
> languages I studied it felt as though there was some "magical" order in
> them that made it easier to follow.
Well, going from simple to complicated is probably a good idea in general.
For most languages, this happens to be nouns -> adjectives -> verbs.
However, if a conlang has some weird details which make it stand out, I'd
appreciate them being mentioned near the beginning, while the I'm still
attentive as a reader.
In Talmit, I recently toyed around with diagrams like this one
http://sindanoorie.atspace.com/talmit_diag.gif
in order to illustrate my points. Hopefully it's actually illustrative, not
overloaded.
Messages in this topic (11)
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5. changes of liquids
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" ara...@mail.ru
Date: Sat Oct 30, 2010 4:09 am ((PDT))
What are the typical diachronic changes of liquid consonants?
I noticed a vocalization of a palatalized [l] to [j], as Italian _piazza_
from L. _platea_ and of a velarized [l] to [w] in Slavic, as Polish _Paweł_
/'pavew/. Also in Polish, it seems that palatalized [r] becomes [Z`], a
retroflex fricative, spelled _rz_ (correct me, if wrong).
I guess both [r] > [l] and [l] > [r] are quite possible developments (the
latter in Sanskrit?).
Is there anything else? Does reverse rhotacism [r] > [s] appear? Or
something like [r] > alveolar flap > [d]?
It somehow seems to me that liquids are among the most stable consonants, so
when creating a language family, one is a bit stuck with them if they appear
in the proto-language.
Messages in this topic (1)
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6. Like Webster's dictionary ...
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Sat Oct 30, 2010 4:14 am ((PDT))
...I'm Morocco bound.
I'll be in Marrakesh for the first week of November. So as
to avoid finding several hundred emails when I get back, I'm
going NOMAIL.
Happy Conlanging!
Ray.
PS - still working on the TAKE revision ;)
Messages in this topic (1)
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7. Corpus analysis scripts
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Sat Oct 30, 2010 6:29 am ((PDT))
I've updated my home page with a new script and bug fixes to an existing one:
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/conlang.htm#scripts
The new script, compare-frequencies.pl, produces tables for
side-by-side comparison of two corpora individually analyzed by
frequencies.pl.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (1)
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