There are 11 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
From: H. S. Teoh
1b. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
From: Logan Kearsley
1c. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
From: James Kane
1d. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
From: H. S. Teoh
1e. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
From: James Kane
1f. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
From: H. S. Teoh
2a. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: DM
2b. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: And Rosta
2c. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Alex Fink
2d. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
From: Sasha Fleischman
3. software vocal tract models?
From: Alex Fink
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 10:50 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 06:46:43PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> On 15 June 2013 17:07, James Kane <kane...@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> > Is there some inherent reason that this is a weird way to do it?
> > Looking around other natlangs, it seems most of them leave the
> > predicate-y part in the nominative, and so does Esperanto, which I
> > always found counter-intuitive as the rest of the language is very
> > strict in marking the accusative.
> >
> > The explanation was always that they were equal, and neither was doing
> > anything to the other; but my natural instinct (my L1 is English) is
> > that, in something like 'he is John', John comes after the verb and
> > thus is a direct object.
> >
> > I just want to know if I'm being a noob.
>
> Well, that's the way modern colloquial English does it... i.e., while
> there's no way to tell the difference with nouns, one more often hears
> things like "it's me" than "it's I", where pronouns are marked in the
> objective rather than nominative case.
Yeah, one should keep in mind that in earlier forms of modern English,
the *correct* grammatical utterance is "it is I" rather than today's "it
is me". So English itself has also treated the copula in a special way
in the past; only, analogy seems to be pushing towards preferring the
accusative nowadays.
> Russian frequently uses the instrumental case for nominal and
> adjectival predicates (though only when there is another verb in the
> sentence, not in zero-copula constructions), so marking the predicate
> is not unheard of in other languages either.
Yeah, this is one of the neat things about Russian: in verbs of being
*not* in the present tense, the predicate is in the instrumental case:
Я бы-л врач-ом.
1SG.NOM be-PAST.SG.MASC doctor-INSTR
I was a doctor.
The instrumental also occurs with verbs of becoming:
Он ста-л врач-ом.
He.NOM become-PAST.SG.MASC doctor-INSTR
He became a doctor.
It is ungrammatical to use the nominative or accusative in these cases.
It seems to me that the instrumental case here is being used in a
stative sense, or a transition into a state, as opposed to a mere simple
direct object.
> I think the "they're both equal" argument isn't very strong; if it's
> possible to identify one as the predicate and one as the subject, then
> clearly they are not both equal, if only because they have different
> syntactic roles. And while nominal predicates are sometimes used to
> indicate actual equality, they're also used to indicate subset
> relations (e.g. "John is a man" == there's a set of men, John belongs
> to that set; "John" and "man" are not equivalent).
[...]
I like this distinction! It makes me wonder if in TF such statements
should take the partitive case instead (in TF, the partitive case is
used for subset relations, among other things). Perhaps such a usage
could have developed in a local dialect! (I've been thinking about TF
dialects lately... but more on that in another post.) So instead of the
"standard TF":
tara' sa sapa'.
3SG CVY:MASC doctor
He is a doctor.
one would have:
*tara' sa sapa'-is.
3SG CVY:MASC doctor-PART
He is a doctor. (Lit. he is among the doctors.)
In English, though, the subset relation arguably already indicated by
the indefinite article _a_; e.g., compare the difference between _that
is the Sun_ vs. _that is a sun_. The latter implies the existence of
numerous suns, of which the referent of _that_ is but one member.
T
--
Любишь кататься - люби и саночки возить.
Messages in this topic (15)
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1b. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" chronosur...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 11:17 am ((PDT))
On 17 June 2013 11:49, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 06:46:43PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> [...]
>> I think the "they're both equal" argument isn't very strong; if it's
>> possible to identify one as the predicate and one as the subject, then
>> clearly they are not both equal, if only because they have different
>> syntactic roles. And while nominal predicates are sometimes used to
>> indicate actual equality, they're also used to indicate subset
>> relations (e.g. "John is a man" == there's a set of men, John belongs
>> to that set; "John" and "man" are not equivalent).
> [...]
>
> I like this distinction! It makes me wonder if in TF such statements
> should take the partitive case instead (in TF, the partitive case is
> used for subset relations, among other things). Perhaps such a usage
> could have developed in a local dialect! (I've been thinking about TF
> dialects lately... but more on that in another post.) So instead of the
> "standard TF":
>
> tara' sa sapa'.
> 3SG CVY:MASC doctor
> He is a doctor.
>
> one would have:
>
> *tara' sa sapa'-is.
> 3SG CVY:MASC doctor-PART
> He is a doctor. (Lit. he is among the doctors.)
>
> In English, though, the subset relation arguably already indicated by
> the indefinite article _a_; e.g., compare the difference between _that
> is the Sun_ vs. _that is a sun_. The latter implies the existence of
> numerous suns, of which the referent of _that_ is but one member.
Oo! You have reminded me that Russian also sometimes uses the genitive
case in partitive constructions. One could imagine a range of
interesting case choices for predicates in a situation where a
language decides to co-opt some other case for partitive constructions
and subsequently decides that predicates have the semantics of
partitives.
I kind of want to declare that nominal predicates in Celimine will be
genitive from now on for precisely that reason.
-l.
Messages in this topic (15)
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1c. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
Posted by: "James Kane" kane...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 5:03 pm ((PDT))
Wow! Thank you to everyone for your replies!
My main question of why nominal and adjectival predicates behave weirdly has
certainly been answered. I understand that these are in a completely separate
class than normal sentences, and while there is no reason why it should be in
an accusative case, there is no reason that it shouldn't be.
These predicates definitely aren't objects. I now have to decide what I'll do
in my conlang. I could leave it as is, but as there is no reason for the
predicate to be marked by the object particle, or even marked at all, I might
leave it unmarked. But since case particles precede their noun phrase, this
introduces too much ambiguity. So there could either be a special case
particle, or it could be consistently topic-fronted (for which my language
already has a particle) or make a special word order for predicate sentences,
probably VOS. I would probably do the same thing for both adjectival and
nominal predicates.
James
On 18/06/2013, at 6:17 AM, Logan Kearsley <chronosur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 June 2013 11:49, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 06:46:43PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
>> [...]
>>> I think the "they're both equal" argument isn't very strong; if it's
>>> possible to identify one as the predicate and one as the subject, then
>>> clearly they are not both equal, if only because they have different
>>> syntactic roles. And while nominal predicates are sometimes used to
>>> indicate actual equality, they're also used to indicate subset
>>> relations (e.g. "John is a man" == there's a set of men, John belongs
>>> to that set; "John" and "man" are not equivalent).
>> [...]
>>
>> I like this distinction! It makes me wonder if in TF such statements
>> should take the partitive case instead (in TF, the partitive case is
>> used for subset relations, among other things). Perhaps such a usage
>> could have developed in a local dialect! (I've been thinking about TF
>> dialects lately... but more on that in another post.) So instead of the
>> "standard TF":
>>
>> tara' sa sapa'.
>> 3SG CVY:MASC doctor
>> He is a doctor.
>>
>> one would have:
>>
>> *tara' sa sapa'-is.
>> 3SG CVY:MASC doctor-PART
>> He is a doctor. (Lit. he is among the doctors.)
>>
>> In English, though, the subset relation arguably already indicated by
>> the indefinite article _a_; e.g., compare the difference between _that
>> is the Sun_ vs. _that is a sun_. The latter implies the existence of
>> numerous suns, of which the referent of _that_ is but one member.
>
> Oo! You have reminded me that Russian also sometimes uses the genitive
> case in partitive constructions. One could imagine a range of
> interesting case choices for predicates in a situation where a
> language decides to co-opt some other case for partitive constructions
> and subsequently decides that predicates have the semantics of
> partitives.
>
> I kind of want to declare that nominal predicates in Celimine will be
> genitive from now on for precisely that reason.
>
> -l.
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
1d. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 5:51 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:03:33PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
> Wow! Thank you to everyone for your replies!
>
> My main question of why nominal and adjectival predicates behave
> weirdly has certainly been answered. I understand that these are in a
> completely separate class than normal sentences, and while there is no
> reason why it should be in an accusative case, there is no reason that
> it shouldn't be.
>
> These predicates definitely aren't objects. I now have to decide what
> I'll do in my conlang. I could leave it as is, but as there is no
> reason for the predicate to be marked by the object particle, or even
> marked at all, I might leave it unmarked. But since case particles
> precede their noun phrase, this introduces too much ambiguity. So
> there could either be a special case particle, or it could be
> consistently topic-fronted (for which my language already has a
> particle) or make a special word order for predicate sentences,
> probably VOS. I would probably do the same thing for both adjectival
> and nominal predicates.
[...]
Tatari Faran faced a similar challenge. Grammatically speaking, the
clause "A is B" is rendered as _<A> <case_particle> <B> 0_ (where the 0
stands for the omission of the usually-obligatory case particle in an
NP). However, this construction lacks a finalizer (TF verbal clauses
have obligatory final words called finalizers), thus failing the usual
pattern _<A> <case_particle> <verb> <finalizer>_. So eventually analogy
took over and the interjection _ai_ "yes" was borrowed to play the role
of finalizer in these types of clauses: _<A> <case_particle> <B> ai_ now
fits into the verbal clause pattern nicely.
I surmise analogy may also do something interesting in your conlang, if
you ask nicely. ;-)
Perhaps these predicates in your conlang originally did not have any
case particles, but, as you said yourself, the resulting ambiguity seems
to be asking for _something_ to be put in that empty spot where the case
particle has been elided. (This is quite reminiscient of the TF
situation -- the glaring lack of a finalizer seemed to be begging for
something to fill its place). This may have caused analogy to take over
and assign the accusative case to them. Or maybe some other case -- pull
a Russian and insert an instrumental case particle perhaps, or borrow a
an unrelated particle from somewhere else in the language to act as a
pseudo-case particle!
These nominal predicates seem to have all kinds of strange and
fascinating behaviours. In Russian, for example, the present tense has
zero copula, with both subject and predicate in the nominative case; but
there is an alternative construction involving the verb _являться_
(passive of _являть_ - to appear, to manifest, etc.) taking an object in
the _instrumental_ case, and with the verb _являться_ having the
idiomatic meaning of "is"! So in addition to saying something like:
Он врач.
3SG.MASC doctor.NOM
He is a doctor.
One could also say:
Он является врач-ом.
3SG.MASC is.3SG.PASSIVE doctor-INSTR
He is a doctor.
I once asked my Russian pen-pal from Moscow what the difference between
the above two sentences are, and got a very long and convoluted answer,
involving many context-dependent, semantic, practical, and
level-of-formality considerations -- typical signs of
near-but-not-quite-synonyms in natlangs. IOW, fertile ground for
conlangs to do something interesting!
T
--
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
1e. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
Posted by: "James Kane" kane...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:46 pm ((PDT))
On 6/18/13, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 12:03:33PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
>> Wow! Thank you to everyone for your replies!
>>
>> My main question of why nominal and adjectival predicates behave
>> weirdly has certainly been answered. I understand that these are in a
>> completely separate class than normal sentences, and while there is no
>> reason why it should be in an accusative case, there is no reason that
>> it shouldn't be.
>>
>> These predicates definitely aren't objects. I now have to decide what
>> I'll do in my conlang. I could leave it as is, but as there is no
>> reason for the predicate to be marked by the object particle, or even
>> marked at all, I might leave it unmarked. But since case particles
>> precede their noun phrase, this introduces too much ambiguity. So
>> there could either be a special case particle, or it could be
>> consistently topic-fronted (for which my language already has a
>> particle) or make a special word order for predicate sentences,
>> probably VOS. I would probably do the same thing for both adjectival
>> and nominal predicates.
> [...]
>
> Tatari Faran faced a similar challenge. Grammatically speaking, the
> clause "A is B" is rendered as _<A> <case_particle> <B> 0_ (where the 0
> stands for the omission of the usually-obligatory case particle in an
> NP). However, this construction lacks a finalizer (TF verbal clauses
> have obligatory final words called finalizers), thus failing the usual
> pattern _<A> <case_particle> <verb> <finalizer>_. So eventually analogy
> took over and the interjection _ai_ "yes" was borrowed to play the role
> of finalizer in these types of clauses: _<A> <case_particle> <B> ai_ now
> fits into the verbal clause pattern nicely.
>
> I surmise analogy may also do something interesting in your conlang, if
> you ask nicely. ;-)
>
> Perhaps these predicates in your conlang originally did not have any
> case particles, but, as you said yourself, the resulting ambiguity seems
> to be asking for _something_ to be put in that empty spot where the case
> particle has been elided. (This is quite reminiscient of the TF
> situation -- the glaring lack of a finalizer seemed to be begging for
> something to fill its place). This may have caused analogy to take over
> and assign the accusative case to them. Or maybe some other case -- pull
> a Russian and insert an instrumental case particle perhaps, or borrow a
> an unrelated particle from somewhere else in the language to act as a
> pseudo-case particle!
>
> These nominal predicates seem to have all kinds of strange and
> fascinating behaviours. In Russian, for example, the present tense has
> zero copula, with both subject and predicate in the nominative case; but
> there is an alternative construction involving the verb _��������_
> (passive of _������_ - to appear, to manifest, etc.) taking an object in
> the _instrumental_ case, and with the verb _��������_ having the
> idiomatic meaning of "is"! So in addition to saying something like:
>
> �� ����.
> 3SG.MASC doctor.NOM
> He is a doctor.
>
> One could also say:
>
> �� �������� ����-��.
> 3SG.MASC is.3SG.PASSIVE doctor-INSTR
> He is a doctor.
>
> I once asked my Russian pen-pal from Moscow what the difference between
> the above two sentences are, and got a very long and convoluted answer,
> involving many context-dependent, semantic, practical, and
> level-of-formality considerations -- typical signs of
> near-but-not-quite-synonyms in natlangs. IOW, fertile ground for
> conlangs to do something interesting!
>
>
> T
>
> --
> Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Now I'm even more split over all these options, they all seem so good!
But I have the perfect solution: because this language is meant to
have a whole heap of daughters, I will split it into three dialects
precursor to the three main branches, each with a different way of
doing the predicate sentences! Maybe one with the VOS order, one with
the accusative particle and one with a preposition phrase or some
other verb brought in to do the job.
I haven't started thinking about a lot of the more complex
constructions like comparative predicates - John is bigger than Andy.
I'll have to test drive all the new constructions to see how I can get
all this to work.
James
--
(This is my signature.)
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
1f. Re: Nominal and Adjectival Predicates
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 10:54 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 02:46:05PM +1200, James Kane wrote:
> On 6/18/13, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
[...]
> Now I'm even more split over all these options, they all seem so good!
> But I have the perfect solution: because this language is meant to
> have a whole heap of daughters, I will split it into three dialects
> precursor to the three main branches, each with a different way of
> doing the predicate sentences! Maybe one with the VOS order, one with
> the accusative particle and one with a preposition phrase or some
> other verb brought in to do the job.
I've been thinking about Tatari Faran dialects too. I imagine a minority
TF dialect, maybe spoken by the Northerners, that uses noun inflections
instead of case particles. These noun inflections are also employed in
"standard" TF, but only in embedded clauses. This is one part of TF
that I really like, but at the same time rather uneasy with, because it
seems so contrived. Basically, the 3 core cases in the main clause use
the usual case particles, but in embedded clauses, they switch to an
inflectional case marking in an overt gesture that this is a subordinate
clause, not part of the main clause. My initial concept of them was that
they are relics of an ancient inflectional system that got (mostly)
replaced by the case particles, but how they came to be used only in
embedded clauses and not elsewhere, is something I've yet to work out.
In any case, I imagine that these ancient inflections have survived in
the main clause in a minority TF dialect, which would make its grammar
significantly different from standard TF. It would also be an ideal
playground for experimenting with other aspects of TF grammar that
didn't "make it" into the standard language. Maybe they wouldn't have
the _A <case> B ai_ construction, but replace it with something else,
etc..
> I haven't started thinking about a lot of the more complex
> constructions like comparative predicates - John is bigger than Andy.
> I'll have to test drive all the new constructions to see how I can get
> all this to work.
[...]
Don't worry, natlangs are often surprisingly rich in detail once you
start picking them apart; there'll always be areas of grammar that you
haven't thought of to include in your conlang. TF didn't even get
intensive adjectives until very recently, when I was writing a story in
TF and suddenly realized that I didn't have a good way to say "very big"
as opposed to just "big" (!).
Now as far as comparatives are concerned, IE and IE-like languages tend
to use constructions involving genitives. IIRC Ancient Greek uses the
nominative for the thing being compared, and genitive for the standard
being compared to. Russian uses _чем_ for "than", which I find utterly
fascinating because _чем_ happens to be the instrumental case of the
inanimate indefinite/interrogative pronoun _что_. (The Russian
instrumental case seems to turn up in all kinds of interesting places
besides its basic instrumental meaning!)
In TF, I decided to spice things up a little and make good use of the
directional meaning of the originative/receptive cases, denoting source
(from X) and destination (to X), respectively. When something has less
of quality Q than X, then X is put in the originative; when something
has more of quality Q than X, then X is put in the receptive. The thing
being compared would then fill up the role of the remaining conveyant
case:
1) tara' sei teinin puru asuen na tipai.
3SG CVY:FEM smart more younger_brother RCP:MASC FIN
She is smarter than [her] younger brother.
2) tara' sei teinin sutu asuen ka tipai.
3SG CVY:FEM smart less younger_brother ORG:MASC FIN
She is less smart than [her] younger brother.
The idea is that intuitively speaking, one moves from big to small, so
that which has more of quality Q is directed towards that which has less
of Q. So when you have more of Q, the standard of comparison is on the
receiving end (hence receptive case); but when you have less of Q, then
the standard of comparison is the giving end (hence originative case).
The conveyant case is usually used for the thing undergoing motion, and
derivatively, the undergoer, the patient, that which is being compared.
It just so happens that here, it denotes both the thing undergoing the
comparison and also the thing moving to/from the standard of comparison
(depending on whether it has more or less of the quality being
compared). This fits very well into the way the san faran think about
TF's 3 core cases.
In more IE-centric terms, TF's usage could be comparable to using the
dative or accusative for positive comparisons ("more") and ablative or
genitive for negative comparisons ("less").
T
--
Valentine's Day: an occasion for florists to reach into the wallets of
nominal lovers in dire need of being reminded to profess their
hypothetical love for their long-forgotten.
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "DM" decadent.muf...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 12:40 pm ((PDT))
I also tend to find the use of capitals to be aesthetically displeasing,
and for this reason I tend not to use them in my conlangs. However, when I
write about them in an English-language document (i.e. a grammar
description of the language), I will apply capitalization in areas where
English would generally use them, such as in the name of the language or on
proper nouns. If I include an example of the language, this capitalization
will appear only in the gloss, but not in the text written in the language
itself.
On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 2:06 AM, Zach Wellstood <zwellst...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Absolutely all of łaá siri is written in a lowercase romanization because
> for some reason I found that including uppercase letters is extremely
> aesthetically displeasing.
>
> Zach
> --- Rich Harrison <r...@harrison.net> wrote:
>
>
> > I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
> > latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
> Vorlin,
> > for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC only
> used
> > uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to be
> mostly
> > lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that?
> >
> > Any others avoiding traditional capitalization
>
> What counts as "traditional" capitalisation? English? German? French?
> Mandarin?
>
> In the World, there have been no printing presses that utilise movable type
> since
> the 1360s or so --- that whole incident with the horrible Thing from the
> Outer
> Void that popped through a severely thaumically weakened printed book and
> ate the crown prince of Auntimoany rather put a damper on the whole printed
> book idea in the Eastlands. Ever since, people who wanted books have had to
> go about it the old fashioned way of hiring a scrivener to copy out the
> desired
> work. Contrary to what one might think, books are actually fairly common in
> most lands of the World. There are usually a large number of larger or
> smaller
> firms of scriveners in any good sized city. In the Uttermost West, they
> generally
> rely on slaves to do the work under a master scriptor; in the Eastlands,
> the
> scriveners have a guild. All this said, since there are no movable type
> printing
> presses, there can be no "upper" or "lower case" letters. ;))) In modern
> times,
> printing is making a comeback, in the form of presses that use whole plate
> blocks rather than movable type. These are very expensive on account of the
> plates having to be cast in bronze and then tweaked. There are also a
> couple
> experimental press devices that involve the use of high-speed imps dipping
> tiny brushes into pots of ink and dabbing same onto a piece of paper held
> within a moving framework. Whole gangs of the little blighters are strapped
> into
> a daisy-shaped wheel which is spun about its axis and simultaneously drawn
> side to side across the paper. Print quality is very low when compared to
> either
> hand written or plate printed works, but the result is acceptable for
> certain
> everyday applications. Especially if you don't the occasional splotch of
> dried
> imp vomit on your paper...
>
> Generally speaking, when some kind of Emphasis is desired or if one wishes
> to Draw the reader's Attention to a matter, one uses fancy letters in
> roughly
> the same way we'd use upper case or italics. These are just normal letters
> that
> are written with more curlicues or extra height ascenders, you see. A few
> letters
> in some alphabets have multiple forms, and one of these will generally be
> used
> only initially (or finally) and the other will be used in other positions.
> Avantimannish
> for example has an initial S and also a medial & final S.
>
> Most languages of the World, when written, often at a minimum have some
> kind
> of decorative capital or initial letter at the beginning of a section or
> paragraph,
> but no capitalisation as we know and love it.
>
> Loucarian has no separate capital letters, but will sometimes use a taller
> letter to
> indicate a personal or place name: "ine logia ‘cas al IC al mourante;
> icamet coudeyto
> inesser, al Ioudas Thomas ziccucceto inesser; quisverver descoubrere al
> entertretationem dine logia, quismet, al thanatas nan eiotangere adis
> ican..."
>
> Talarian uses a bizarre combination of syllabaries, alphabetic letters,
> cuneiform
> and hash-mark ideograms to write itself, none of which can be capitalised.
>
> Rumelian, when written on paper, uses a kind of flowing letter script (kind
> of
> like our italic), reserving its "capital letters" (i.e., the letters that
> actually look
> like our CAPTIAL letters) for inscriptions in stone.
>
> Avantimannish uses two sets of runes, one for writing on stone or engraving
> in
> wood or metal and another for writing (or printing) on paper. Neither have
> distinct capital letters, but Avantimannish does come closest to English in
> the
> way it uses its fancy, emphatic letters. Although there are no strict rules
> for
> their use, it is typical to "capitalise" the first letter of a paragraph,
> the first
> letter of a name (person, place, season or other unit of time or space),
> any
> word that one feels should be emphasised while reading, or indeed any just
> about any random word at all that a writer happens to capitalise.
>
> To answer your question as regards how *I* transliterate these languages'
> customs, I tend to use capital letters in the same places *they* would use
> whatever schemes to effect emphasis. So, when writing Avantimannish,
> I'd capitalise names and seasons and random words. When writing Loucarian,
> I'd only capitalise the occasional name. When writing Talarian, I don't
> generally
> capitalise at all.
>
> Padraic
>
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 2:31 pm ((PDT))
On Jun 17, 2013 1:10 AM, "Rich Harrison" <r...@harrison.net> wrote:
>
> I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems
to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with
that?
>
> Any others avoiding traditional capitalization?
For Livagian romanization the letters can be consistently minuscular or
consistently majuscular, and same goes for italic and roman (i.e. use
either but not within the same piece of text).
--And.
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
2c. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 7:44 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:10:56 -0400, Rich Harrison <r...@harrison.net> wrote:
>I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
>latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
>Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
>only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems to
>be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with that?
>
>Any others avoiding traditional capitalization?
In my romanizations, I used to avoid capitalisation, partly for the Klingonic
reasons that I'd work in seven-bit ASCII text files where the closest things I
could have to an eng or a gamma were "N" and "G" so capitalising anything else
risked ambiguity, and partly 'cause it seemed more scientific. But I've
relented and now use capitals in the usual English tradition.
I haven't made anything which uses Roman script natively.
Alex
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
2d. Re: writing (almost) entirely in lower-case letters
Posted by: "Sasha Fleischman" zyx...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 9:59 pm ((PDT))
For my proto-language that I'm working on, I initially didn't do
capitalization because my romanization is essentially IPA, and there's no
capital ɦ. Since I started working on the language, I've gotten rid of that
phoneme, but the lack of capitals has stuck. Also, now I'm on a different
computer, and it was easier to set up a keyboard layout which uses shift to
access the extra characters I needed than figure out a way to include caps
and non-caps versions. Also, the language isn't written, so it wouldn't
have any capitalization for me to record in my romanization.
On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 20:10:56 -0400, Rich Harrison <r...@harrison.net>
> wrote:
>
> >I would like to put together a list of conlangs and natlangs that use the
> latin/roman alphabet entirely or almost entirely in lower-case letters.
> Vorlin, for example, uses uppercase letters only on proper nouns. Sona IIRC
> only used uppercase letters for non-assimilated foreign words. Lojban seems
> to be mostly lower-case but some syllables are uppercase, what's up with
> that?
> >
> >Any others avoiding traditional capitalization?
>
> In my romanizations, I used to avoid capitalisation, partly for the
> Klingonic reasons that I'd work in seven-bit ASCII text files where the
> closest things I could have to an eng or a gamma were "N" and "G" so
> capitalising anything else risked ambiguity, and partly 'cause it seemed
> more scientific. But I've relented and now use capitals in the usual
> English tradition.
>
> I haven't made anything which uses Roman script natively.
>
> Alex
>
--
Sasha Fleischman
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3. software vocal tract models?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jun 17, 2013 9:59 pm ((PDT))
I have some ideas for a random phonology generator which would
overcome certain features I came to find limiting about the model I
used in Gleb.
I understand that software models of the vocal tract exist, that allow
you to specify the positions over time of the various articulators and
then compute what the resulting frequencies / airflows / whatever are.
I'd like to use this to actually generate the relative timings etc.
of the various articulators in the speech stream and then look for
likely articulatory and acoustically based allophonies or sound
changes to occur from there. As such it should be
- easy to call from my own code
- fast
- full-featured, in that all the different articulators are, if not
already in there, then at least easy and understandable to add.
(Certainly this last is more important to me than a corresponding
increase in precision in precisely how many hertz whatever formant
is.)
Does anyone happen to know of one like this? Or indeed anything about
what the modern state of affairs in the field is?
Alex
Messages in this topic (1)
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