There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: languedoc historical grammars
From: David McCann
1b. Re: languedoc historical grammars
From: BPJ
1c. Re: languedoc historical grammars
From: Wesley Parish
2a. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
From: Herman Miller
2b. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
From: Alex Fink
3. Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
From: Darin Arrick
4a. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: Roger Mills
4b. Re: New toy conlang sketch
From: H. S. Teoh
5.1. Re: "Wedging" Foreign Names
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
6a. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Padraic Brown
6b. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Padraic Brown
6c. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Jyri Lehtinen
6d. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Adam Walker
6e. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Alex Fink
6f. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Gleki Arxokuna
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: languedoc historical grammars
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:47 am ((PDT))
On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:46:32 +1200
Wesley Parish <wes.par...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> I just don't have much stuff on Provencal/Occitan/Languedoc -
> a modern grammar, a TY Catalan which will do for some of the
> comparative grammar work - but no Old Occitan/ Provencal/Languedoc
> grammars that I can recall, and no historical grammars.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions?
Grandgent's An Outline Of The Phonology And Morphology Of Old Provençal
is available in paperback reprint.
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: languedoc historical grammars
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 11:00 am ((PDT))
2013-06-28 17:46, David McCann skrev:
> On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:46:32 +1200
> Wesley Parish <wes.par...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
>
>> I just don't have much stuff on Provencal/Occitan/Languedoc -
>> a modern grammar, a TY Catalan which will do for some of the
>> comparative grammar work - but no Old Occitan/ Provencal/Languedoc
>> grammars that I can recall, and no historical grammars.
>>
>> Does anyone have any suggestions?
>
> Grandgent's An Outline Of The Phonology And Morphology Of Old Provençal
> is available in paperback reprint.
>
And on archive.org. Just select mediatype texts and search
Grandgent, then scroll for a while.
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
1c. Re: languedoc historical grammars
Posted by: "Wesley Parish" wes.par...@paradise.net.nz
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 5:07 pm ((PDT))
Thanks. I'm on my way!
Wesley Parish
Quoting BPJ <b...@melroch.se>:
> 2013-06-28 17:46, David McCann skrev:
> > On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:46:32 +1200
> > Wesley Parish <wes.par...@paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> >
> >> I just don't have much stuff on Provencal/Occitan/Languedoc -
> >> a modern grammar, a TY Catalan which will do for some of the
> >> comparative grammar work - but no Old Occitan/ Provencal/Languedoc
> >> grammars that I can recall, and no historical grammars.
> >>
> >> Does anyone have any suggestions?
> >
> > Grandgent's An Outline Of The Phonology And Morphology Of Old
> Provençal
> > is available in paperback reprint.
> >
>
> And on archive.org. Just select mediatype texts and search
> Grandgent, then scroll for a while.
>
"Sharpened hands are happy hands.
"Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands"
- A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
"I me. Shape middled me. I would come out into hot!"
I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
Posted by: "Herman Miller" hmil...@prismnet.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 9:02 am ((PDT))
On 6/27/2013 4:45 AM, And Rosta wrote:
> Did the Miller--Fink scheme of 2009, which I admired but never got my head
> around, also involve four inflections? I dimly recall it had two.
There were four, but I notated them as a, b, A, B. The rules were
different, but the idea is similar.
a -> a b
b -> a B
A -> A b
B -> A B
I think these rules might be a bit easier to remember, because of the
pattern of marked A's and B's, but I made an exception for a final (a
b), which is left as is without reducing it to (a). This was so the
scheme could represent both (a (a (a (a b)))) and ((((a b) b) b) b) type
sequences without preference.
The new system has no exceptions to the rules, and corresponds nicely to
parts of speech like "adjectives" and "nouns", but it's explicitly
head-final ... ultimately everything reduces to (A N), with N as the
head of a noun phrase. You could reverse all the rules to get a
head-initial syntax:
N -> N A
A -> D A
D -> D C
C -> N C
I think also that the new system looks easier to parse, but that's not
easy to evaluate without looking at lots of examples. Here's a few for
comparison:
((a (a (a b))) b)
a a A B b -> a a B b -> a b b
a c c d n -> a c d n -> a d n -> a n -> n
((a (a ((a b) b))) b)
a a A b B b -> a a A B b -> a a B b -> a b b
a c c n d n -> a c c d n -> a c d n -> a d n -> a n -> n
((a ((a b) (a b))) b)
a a b A B b -> a a B b -> a b b
a c n c d n -> a c d n -> a d n -> a n -> n
((a ((a (a b)) b)) b)
a a a B B b -> a a b B b -> a a B b -> a b b
a c a n d n -> a c n d n -> a c d n -> a d n -> a n -> n
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: Arbitrarily long and complex compounds
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 10:32 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, 26 Jun 2013 22:49:48 -0400, Herman Miller <hmil...@prismnet.com> wrote:
>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.
[...]
>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
This is beautiful, well done! I agree that it's nearly certainly an
improvement in usability over the 2009 scheme, given that (as you were pointing
out below) it has the advantage that the expansion of each category X contains
an X in it, and thus the expansions can be reasonably thought of as having
_heads_. The 2009 scheme had the one wacky rule b -> a B without this
property.
But it's not _completely_ head-final: the categories N and D are head-final,
but the categories A and C are head-initial. It's only the choice of N as the
top-level category that makes it head-final! If you had chosen A or C as the
top-level category, you'd get exactly the same system left-right reflected with
the names of the categories changed; if you had chosen D, you'd get the same
system unreflected with the names of the categories changed. So really it's
quite symmetric until you pick out N for special treatment.
Here's, accordingly, another way to look at it. Draw your binary syntax tree,
and give it a fictive parent S of which it's the right child. For each word
(i.e. leaf node) W, descend along the tree from S to W, and write down on W
*the number of times you changed direction* during the descent. (For example,
since you always begin by going right, the rightmost word always gets a 0, and
is the only word that can get a 0.) This numeric labelling is the same one
described by the following system of expansion rules, starting from a 0:
0 -> 1 0
1 -> 1 2
2 -> 3 2
3 -> 3 4
4 -> 5 4
5 -> 5 6
etcetera.
But now your new scheme is just what you get from this numeric scheme by making
these replacements:
numbers 0 mod 4 become N
numbers 1 mod 4 become A
numbers 2 mod 4 become D
numbers 3 mod 4 become C
To put all those numbers in a more linguistically palatable cloak, let's
suppose our language has nouns but no adjectives as bases, plus one
adjectivising suffix (case?) .A and one nominalizing suffix (case?) .N, the two
of which participate in suffixaufnahme with each other. Suppose noun phrases
are head-final but adjective phrases are head-initial. Then the occurring
binary expansions are these, using B to mean a base:
B -> B.A B
B.A -> B.A B.A.N
B.A.N -> B.A.N.A B.A.N
B.A.N.A -> B.A.N.A B.A.N.A.N
B.A.N.A.N -> B.A.N.A.N.A B.A.N.A.N
B.A.N.A.N.A -> B.A.N.A.N.A B.A.N.A.N.A.N
and I'm sure you're going bananas at this point lining up the suffixes.
Anyhow.
The number in my numeric scheme counts the total number of .As and .Ns. You
recover your scheme by first cancelling all copies of the string .A.N.A.N and
then making these replacements on what's left:
B becomes N
B.A becomes A
B.A.N becomes D
B.A.N.A becomes C
On Thu, 27 Jun 2013 20:59:28 -0400, Herman Miller <hmil...@prismnet.com> wrote:
>On 6/27/2013 4:45 AM, And Rosta wrote:
>> Did the Miller--Fink scheme of 2009, which I admired but never got my head
>> around, also involve four inflections? I dimly recall it had two.
>
>There were four, but I notated them as a, b, A, B.
Yup, and given the asymptotics of the Catalan numbers, four is the fewest that
can be hoped for. Trying it with only two inflections you'll find that there
are just barely too many trees on a seven-word string (132 of them) to be able
to represent them with seven bits (2^7 = 128).
>[...] but I made an exception for a final (a
>b), which is left as is without reducing it to (a). This was so the
>scheme could represent both (a (a (a (a b)))) and ((((a b) b) b) b) type
>sequences without preference.
>
>The new system has no exceptions to the rules,
Well, that exception is an artificial thing you're bolting on. It's not a
difference that exists at the level of the sets of four binary expansions,
taken alone, and this is the level at which I'd rather compare first.
That said, your current scheme is objectively more symmetric than the 2009 one.
(So there was no symmetry to rescue, exception schmexception!) Even if you
were to forget which kinds of nodes are "marked" and change all the labels, the
2009 system is not the same as its left-right reflection: since b is the only
non-headed category, it can be picked out, and then you can tell whether you're
in the original system or the reflected one by whether b is a right child or a
left child of its parents.
Alex
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3. Chat: LSA Linguistic Institute
Posted by: "Darin Arrick" darin.arr...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 9:07 am ((PDT))
I'm at the Linguistic Society of America's Linguistic Institute in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, until July 19. Is anyone else here? I'd love to get together and chat
about conlangs and linguistics.
Also, I'll be giving a presentation about conlangs on Monday, July 1, at
5:30PM, at the University of Michigan. It should be fun to talk about this to a
room full of linguists from all over the world. :)
--
Darin Arrick - darin.arr...@gmail.com
Graduate Student, MA in Linguistic Theory and Typology
University of Kentucky - Department of English - Linguistics Program
https://linguistics.as.uky.edu/users/dar224
http://uky.academia.edu/DarinArrick
Messages in this topic (1)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
4a. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 9:14 am ((PDT))
Re your variation between e.g. [e] and [E] etc...... those old Dutchmen in
Indonesia in the 19th C. came up with a pretty good way of indicating open
[E,O,A] vs. close [e,o,a] variants-- a grave accent on the open ones, and a
breve on "e" for schwa, if necessary. You might consider that, unless it turns
out that the variation is predictable.
Messages in this topic (20)
________________________________________________________________________
4b. Re: New toy conlang sketch
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 2:46 pm ((PDT))
Strange new developments have happened on my new toylang. I didn't
intend to do very much with it, it seems to be taking on a life of its
own, and it may not remain a toylang for very long! Anyway, here's the
latest update:
1) Orthography cleanup: I've cleaned up the orthography to be a little
more sensible. Underlying this is the recognition, based on new data,
that certain sounds are actually different realizations of the same
underlying phonemes, depending on context. Anyway, the following is a
summary:
CONSONANTS:
Stops:
pj [pj]
b [b]
t [T] before another stop, [t] otherwise
d [d]
k [x] before another stop, [k] otherwise
g [g]
Nasals:
m [m]
n [n]
ŋ [N]
Fricatives:
f [f]
v [v], also seems to have [A] coloring on following vowel
s [s]
sh [S]
x [x], seems to velarize preceding vowel.
Liquids:
l [K] before a stop, [l] otherwise
r [r]
Affricates:
pf [pf]
tz [ts]
ts [tsʰ]
VOWELS:
/i/ [i], [I]
/u/ [u], [U]
/e/ [E] following /x/, /t/, /k/, and after /ts)ʰ/; elsewhere [e] if
stressed, [@] if unstressed.
/a/ [A] before /x/, else [a] if stressed, [V] if unstressed.
/o/ [O] after /v/ or before /r/, else [o]
/u/ [U] before /N/ or when unstressed, else [u]
Based on the above rules, the orthography has been greatly simplified
and made more consistent. So for example, what I previously spelt as
*_aehrlu_ is now _ehrlu_, and what I previously spelt as *_daugsht_ is
now spelt _dahsht_.
I'm still unsure about treating /l/ and /r/ separately, as the current
corpus only attests /rl/. But I'll leave them separate for now until
I've reason to decide otherwise.
2) Fricativisation rules: The astute reader may have noticed above that
/t/, /k/, and /l/ fricativise before another stop. This may turn out to
be a universal rule that stops fricativise the preceding consonant (if
we consider /rl/ as unitary). The current corpus just hasn't attested
other combinations of stops yet, so only /t/, /k/, /l/ are currently
known to be affected by this rule.
Due to this phenomenon, the consonant cluster [Tt] is written as <tt>,
and is attested in the word _apfattek_ ['apfVTtEk] "your mouth", from
_apfat_ "mouth" + -tek "your".
3) All of the above aren't *that* interesting... as I mentioned, some
strange new grammar has been uncovered:
Previously, I've described -mi as a verbalising suffix, such that given
a noun like _apfat_ "mouth", _apfatmi_ ['apfaTmI] means "to eat". When a
pronominal possessive suffix is inserted, e.g.:
apfat + -en + -mi -> *apfatenmi -> apfatemi
then the result is verb-like; _apfatemi_ means "I eat". The object of
the verb thus formed is then indicated with the -u suffix, for example:
apfatemi gorlu
['apfVt@mI gOrlU]
apfat-en-mi gorl-u
mouth-1SG.POSS-V food-PAT
I eat food.
However, new data has shown that this analysis is inadequate. The
meaning of the -mi suffix seems to be not as simple as first thought:
gorltekmi gruŋgen apfatteku
['gOrKtExmI 'grUNg@n 'apfVTtEkU]
gorl-tek-mi gruŋ-en apfat-tek-u
food-2SG.POSS-??? hands-1SG.POSS mouth-2SG.POSS-PAT
I feed you your food.
I glossed -mi as ???, because it's not clear what it means here. This
sentence seems to defy the previous analysis that -mi is a verbalizer;
here it seems to marking the object of the sentence instead. We also
have the noun _gruŋgen_ "my hands" in unmarked form, when one would
expect it to have the -mi verbalizer.
I found this very confusing, so I asked my alien informant for help, and
he gave me another example sentence:
gorlmi gruŋgen apfatteku
gorl-mi gruŋ-en apfat-tek-u
food-??? hands-1SG.POSS mouth-2SG.POSS-PAT
I feed you food.
Based on this new data, I'm now re-analysing -mi as an *instrumental*
suffix, such that the above two examples actually mean "food-INSTR
I-feed to-you", that is, "I feed you *with food*". What about the
original sentences where -mi appears to be a verbalizer, then? Well, it
appears as though those examples were instances where the subject of the
sentence coincided with the possessor of the instrumental NP, and so
they got elided. IOW, the sentence:
tzapjakemi voluŋdu
tzapjak-en-mi voluŋ-du
*feet-1SG.POSS-INSTR spaceship-DAT
I walk to the spaceship.
is actually an abbreviation of:
tzapjakemi bufen voluŋdu
tzapjak-en-mi bufen-0 voluŋ-du
*feet-1SG.POSS-INSTR body-1SG.POSS-NOM spaceship-DAT
I walk to the spaceship.
by eliding the subject _bufen_ "I", because it is coreferential with the
possessor in _tzapjakemi_ "*my* feet". (_bufen_ is idiomatic for "I",
because apparently there are no standalone pronouns, so the periphrasis
"my body" is used instead of "I".)
That is, what it really means is "with-my-feet I to-the-spaceship", but
since "with-my-feet" already implies "I", we can elide the "I", thus
obtaining "with-my-feet to-the-spaceship".
Previously, I said that verbs appear to be formed by verbalising a noun
+ possessive, but couldn't say what happens when the subject and the
possessor are not coreferential. Well, with the above new analysis, we
can now understand how this is done:
Coreferential:
voluŋgemi aiherltu
voluŋ-en-mi aiherl-tu
spaceship-1SG.POSS-INSTR distant_skies-DAT
I fly *my* spaceship to the distant skies.
Non-coreferential:
voluŋtekmi gruŋgen aiherltu
voluŋ-tek-mi gruŋ-en-0 aiherl-tu
spaceship-2SG.POSS-INSTR hands-1SG.POSS-NOM distant_skies-DAT
I fly *your* spaceship to the distant skies.
The coreferential case can be seen as _voluŋgemi gruŋgen aiherltu_ with
_gruŋgen_ elided because it is coreferential with the possessor in
_voluŋgemi_.
Of course, not everything is fully explained yet. For example, why is
_gruŋ_ "hands" used in the subject _gruŋgen_, where one would expect the
usual periphrasis for "I", _bufen_ "my body"? It seems as though the
noun used for the bare pronoun periphrasis is chosen based on other
considerations, such as the fact that I use my hands to fly the
spaceship, rather than my body in general.
In any case, this "toylang" is turning out to be quite non-trivial, with
very interesting grammatical features indeed.
--T
Messages in this topic (20)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
5.1. Re: "Wedging" Foreign Names
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 12:26 pm ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Thursday 27 June 2013 21:14:47 R A Brown wrote:
> On 27/06/2013 00:57, Aodhán Aannestad wrote:
> > Ah, that was mostly just my impression - apologies for
> > presenting it as fact when it wasn't!
>
> No worries.
>
> The question "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?" is an
> interesting one.
>
> Except I would not restrict it to IE-esque conlangs. Any
> conlang with case morphology will surely have this problem.
Yep.
> Indeed, there are two problems in dealing with foreign names:
> 1. How do you put the name into the phonology of your
> conlang, whether nouns are declined or not?
> 2. If your language has a case system, do you leave them
> uninflected, or some & uninflected and other inflected (as
> in Latin & Greek), or do you assimilate them all into your
> declension systems?
>
> We had a thread on 1 above not so very long ago. But 2 is
> interesting, though, unfortunately, not one I can answer as
> I have no conlangs with a case system. ;)
I have laid out yesterday how this is done in Old Albic.
In that language, things are comparably simple because the
declension is pretty agglutinative. If your language has
articles that inflect for case, you can use them to mark
case on indeclinable foreign nouns. Old Albic does this
with finite clauses that function as adverbial phrases:
Anaphelasa Mørdindo om janom emi alarasa laras.
AOR-entertain-3SG:P-3SG:A Mørdindo.AGT the:M-OBJ boy-OBJ
the:I-INS AOR-sing-3SG:P-3SG:A song.OBJ
'Mørdindo entertained the boy by that he sang a song.'
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (37)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
6a. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 1:15 pm ((PDT))
> From: Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
>
> Consider the following sentence groups:
>
> "Tom guesses it will rain."
> "It may rain."
> "The author guesses it will rain."
>
> "Dick doubts it will rain."
> "It will hardly rain."
> "The author doubts it will rain."
>
> "Harry knows it will rain."
> "It must rain."
> "The author knows it will rain."
>
> "Harry denies that it's raining."
> "It's not raining."
> "The author denies that it's raining."
>
> It seems that the ideas of "may", "will hardly", "must", "not", etc.,
> are logically equivalent to "the author <verb>".
I don't really understand how "the author" is really any different from
Tom Dick or Harry. You're just replacing one person with another...
> Naturally, instead of
> explicitly writing "the author", the verb could simply receive a
> particular form to mean that it's an opinion of the author or a fact
> that doesn't depend on the text character's opinions. Apparently,
> English can do this with adverbs:
Or do you mean that Tom Dick and Harry are characters in a book
(and thus don't *know* the fullness of all plot and descriptive detail
of said book) and the author is The Author, creator of the story and
therefore external to it (and thus *knows* every detail of the story)?
> "Possibly, it will rain."
> "Hardly, it will rain."
> "Probably, it will rain."
> "Negatively it's raining." (I guess this one is not really said.)
>
> Do any nat or conlangs express this type of ideas by means of a
> specific conjugation of verbs such as "guess", "believe",
> "deny", "affirms", etc., instead of using "might",
> "probably", "not", "yes", etc.?
I am sure the answer to this would be "yes"! ;)
I think what you're asking about here is evidentiality:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentials
Padraic
> Leonardo
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
6b. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 4:44 pm ((PDT))
> From: Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
> Yes, I referred to the author as someone external to what is being reported,
> not
> necessarily an author of a book.
Uh. Okay. I guess I'm not getting what you mean by "author" here. Nor if it's
even important that the word chosen ìs "author"...
> In other words, I want to know if any languages get the concepts of "no" and
> "deny"
> from the same word. Or "yes" and "affirm", "may" and "guess", etc.
Okay, that seemed to come right out of left field. I suppose the answer could be
yes, I'm sure there's probably at least one language that derives those words
from the same root...
All I can say is, it ain't English! :)
Padraic
----- Original Message -----
> From: Garth Wallace <gwa...@gmail.com>
> To: Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>
> Cc:
> Sent: Friday, 28 June 2013, 17:42
> Subject: Re: Mood and author opinion
>
> On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>>> From: Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
>>
>>> "Possibly, it will rain."
>>> "Hardly, it will rain."
>>> "Probably, it will rain."
>>> "Negatively it's raining." (I guess this one is not
> really said.)
>>>
>>> Do any nat or conlangs express this type of ideas by means of a
>>> specific conjugation of verbs such as "guess",
> "believe",
>>> "deny", "affirms", etc., instead of using
> "might",
>>> "probably", "not", "yes", etc.?
>>
>> I am sure the answer to this would be "yes"! ;)
>>
>> I think what you're asking about here is evidentiality:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentials
>
> It sounds like he's still talking about modality to me, just using
> inflections rather than modal auxiliaries. The answer is still yes,
> it'd just get called a mood system AIUI. And polarity too if you
> include "negatively" (I think he means "not").
>
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
6c. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" lehtinen.j...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 5:02 pm ((PDT))
>
> > Do any nat or conlangs express this type of ideas by means of a
> > specific conjugation of verbs such as "guess", "believe",
> > "deny", "affirms", etc., instead of using "might",
> > "probably", "not", "yes", etc.?
>
> I am sure the answer to this would be "yes"! ;)
>
> I think what you're asking about here is evidentiality:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentials
>
> Padraic
>
> > Leonardo
>
As for polarity ("yes"/"no"), indicating negation with a bound affix on the
verb is extremely common in languages around the world. I guess the goto
reference here is Turkish.
At least Yukaghir extends this system by having a special affirmative affix
that has similar morphology than the negative affix and that contrasts with
the unmarked "non-negative" verb forms. While the unmarked forms simply
indicate non-contrastive declarations, or inferences if evidential
morphology is present, the marked affirmative forms place contrastive focus
on the verb or the whole clause. So in a sentence like
"I got a lot to do for today, but managed to finish it all."
you'd likely leave "got" in the first clause unmarked for polarity but mark
"managed" in the second clause with the affirmative affix to highlight the
contrast between the information contents of the two clauses.
-Jyri
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
6d. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Adam Walker" carra...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 5:08 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 7:01 PM, Jyri Lehtinen <lehtinen.j...@gmail.com>wrote:
> At least Yukaghir extends this system by having a special affirmative affix
> that has similar morphology than the negative affix and that contrasts with
> the unmarked "non-negative" verb forms. While the unmarked forms simply
> indicate non-contrastive declarations, or inferences if evidential
> morphology is present, the marked affirmative forms place contrastive focus
> on the verb or the whole clause. So in a sentence like
>
> "I got a lot to do for today, but managed to finish it all."
>
> you'd likely leave "got" in the first clause unmarked for polarity but mark
> "managed" in the second clause with the affirmative affix to highlight the
> contrast between the information contents of the two clauses.
>
> -Jyri
>
That is pretty cool. Gravgaln has three levels of both affirmation and
negation (not/definitely not/absolutely not you fool!) (yes/oh yes/you bet
your sweet bippy!) But they don't accomplish this very cool trick. I
wonder....
Adam
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
6e. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Alex Fink" 000...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:15 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:11:18 -0300, Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>It seems that the ideas of "may", "will hardly", "must", "not", etc.,
>are logically equivalent to "the author <verb>".
Responding to Padraic's confusion, Leonardo's "author" is what's more usually
framed as "speaker" (primacy of speech, wahey), that is, the person being
deictically referred to by the first person singular.
>Naturally, instead of
>explicitly writing "the author", the verb could simply receive a
>particular form to mean that it's an opinion of the author or a fact
>that doesn't depend on the text character's opinions. Apparently,
>English can do this with adverbs:
[...]
>Do any nat or conlangs express this type of ideas by means of a
>specific conjugation of verbs such as "guess", "believe", "deny",
>"affirms", etc., instead of using "might", "probably", "not", "yes",
>etc.?
Identifying these two sorts of phenomena, or at least considering doing so,
seems to be the sort of thing that Sai and I have a habit of doing.
In the gripping language, the resulting system was the so-called ascriptors,
which are a lot like evidentials and modals and the lot with a
source-of-information argument, which in mòst cases defaults to the speaker.
They are the default thing used to render many of what in English are verbs
taking a clause argument, but their syntax marks them as clearly nonverbal: in
the sentences below they come in first position. Thus we could have e.g.
deduction rain "it must (therefore) be raining"
deduction Harry rain "Harry deduces that it's raining"
assumption rain "let's say it's raining"
assumption Harry rain "Harry assumes that it's raining"
sight rain "it appears (visibly) to be raining"
sight Harry rain "Harry sees that it's raining"
hearsay.distrusted rain "it's said to be raining (but I don't believe it)" --
note this one is nòt speaker default
hearsay.distrusted Harry rain "Harry says it's raining (but I don't trust
him)"
There is also a semantically empty ascriptor, which is used for instance to
ascribe subjective judgments to their judger:
rain scary "rain is scary"
(empty_ascriptor) rain scary "rain is scary" -- or at least it would be, but
since pragma abhors a no-op, this actually has a note of skepticism. never
mind that though.
(empty_ascriptor) Harry rain scary "rain scares Harry"
Negation is not in this system, though.
In UNLWS, I suppose the expression of the same principle is that there are two
fundamental predicates called "line decorations", namely "S is expected" and "S
is good", and their negatives, which are frequently applied to the Davidsonian
event argument of some other predicate (e.g. "it is expected that [it will
rain]".) If one wants to mention an expector or a valuator, one has to bring
in the predicate "X thinks S", and there is a special abbreviatory syntax for
nesting that with a line decoration, to build things like "I expect that it
will rain" = "I think that [it is expected that [it will rain]]". If one
dòesn't mention an expector or a valuator, Sai wants it to default to first
person, but I would rather have it default to something more like the
reasonable person of legal fiction.
But we're not consistent in doing modal-like senses like that. For instance
there are predicates "X has low / ... / high degree of commitment to Y", and by
binding Y to the Davidsonian of "X thinks S" we make "X is uncertain / ... /
certain that S"; as a consequence, rendering a disjunct "Certainly" with
unspecified deemer isn't as easy as the analogue with line decorations is. And
negation is still not in any such system.
AF-notM-CL, I imagine Lemizh <http://lemizh.conlang.org/> would do something
close to this. But I never did get past chapter 4 of the Lemizh documentation,
so don't take my word for it. (I shd give it another try one day, now that
Anypodetos has put some interlinears in; that was my stumbling block earlier.)
There was also a conlang of one of the listmembers not too long after I joined,
so the mid-2000s, which required, effectively, a verb of speech act in every
complete sentence, so most sentences ended with a word meaning the analogue of
"I say that"; it might be the sort of language to do this too. But I can't
remember enough about it to track it down.
Also, I annoyed Tom Chappell in the prevolcanic stages of the Kalusa project
once when he was proposing such a derivation of... mm, it was of a content
(noun? verb?) word meaning "command" from the imperative particle. At the time
I absolutely couldn't be convinced of the believability of that; I described it
as suggesting the speakers had an absurd level of metalinguistic awareness.
(I'm not so unmovable, now -- I suppose we speak of "dos and don'ts" in
English, for instance, doing something similar -- but still those are at least
vèrbs, and dropping a syntactically sui generis particle into derivational
morphology is still weird.)
Alex, rambling
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
6f. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Gleki Arxokuna" gleki.is.my.n...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Jun 28, 2013 10:43 pm ((PDT))
Lojban simply has a predicate like:
kanpe = x1 expects event x2 with likelihood x3 (by default likelihood ~=1)
carvi sei kanpe = Raining (is expected by someone with the default
likelihood)
Of course other options are possible. But this one is probably closest to
your idea of explicit marking it as verbs.
On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Consider the following sentence groups:
>
> "Tom guesses it will rain."
> "It may rain."
> "The author guesses it will rain."
>
> "Dick doubts it will rain."
> "It will hardly rain."
> "The author doubts it will rain."
>
> "Harry knows it will rain."
> "It must rain."
> "The author knows it will rain."
>
> "Harry denies that it's raining."
> "It's not raining."
> "The author denies that it's raining."
>
> It seems that the ideas of "may", "will hardly", "must", "not", etc.,
> are logically equivalent to "the author <verb>". Naturally, instead of
> explicitly writing "the author", the verb could simply receive a
> particular form to mean that it's an opinion of the author or a fact
> that doesn't depend on the text character's opinions. Apparently,
> English can do this with adverbs:
>
> "Possibly, it will rain."
> "Hardly, it will rain."
> "Probably, it will rain."
> "Negatively it's raining." (I guess this one is not really said.)
>
> Do any nat or conlangs express this type of ideas by means of a
> specific conjugation of verbs such as "guess", "believe", "deny",
> "affirms", etc., instead of using "might", "probably", "not", "yes",
> etc.?
>
> Até mais!
>
> Leonardo
>
Messages in this topic (7)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> Your email settings:
Digest Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
conlang-nor...@yahoogroups.com
conlang-fullfeatu...@yahoogroups.com
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
conlang-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
