There are 13 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1b. Re: Mood and author opinion
From: Padraic Brown
2.1. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
From: BPJ
2.2. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
2.3. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
From: Jyri Lehtinen
2.4. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
From: Eric Christopherson
2.5. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
From: Jyri Lehtinen
2.6. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
From: Roger Mills
3a. Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
3b. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
From: Padraic Brown
3c. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
From: Padraic Brown
3d. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
From: R A Brown
3e. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
From: R A Brown
Messages
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1a. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 8:19 am ((PDT))
On 4 July 2013 16:59, George Corley <gacor...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, Choose Your Own Adventure books are the only genre I know that
> regularly uses second person narration. When other genres use it, it's
> usually as a gimmick in some small section.
>
Zompist's Mark Rosenfelder's _Against Peace and Freedom_ (
http://www.zompist.com/apaf.html) is written entirely in the 2nd person,
and it's surprisingly readable and entertaining. He even manages to
completely avoid assigning a gender to this 2nd person protagonist (or even
a sexual orientation), *despite including a sex scene* :P. It has to be
read to be believed :P.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (15)
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1b. Re: Mood and author opinion
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 9:53 am ((PDT))
> From: Leonardo Castro <leolucas1...@gmail.com>
>
> 2013/7/3 Padraic Brown <elemti...@yahoo.com>:
>>
>>> On Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:11:18 -0300, Leonardo Castro
>>> <leolucas1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It's very succinct, so it looks like a "conjugation"
> associated with the
>>> the person being deictically referred to by the first person singular.
>>> But "afirma-se que" (it's affirmed that) and
> "nega-se
>>> que" (it's denied that) have the additional idea of "but
> I don't guarantee what
>>> is being told", while using "sim" (yes) and
> "não" (not)
>>> gives us the idea of undoubtful information, although we know that we
> are simply
>>> trusting the person who says that.
>>
>>
>> Right. I don't see any "conjugation" here that specifically
> refers to the speaker.
>
> It occurs to me that if there was a "narrator pronoun" in some
> language, it could unify "not" and "deny", "yes"
> and "affirm", "may"
> and "guess", but it would sound very unnatural or philosophically
> sophisticated.
I'm not sure I follow... How does a narratory pronoun "unify" those words?
I'm also not so sure I'd actually wánt a narratory pronoun --- if Narrator
and Speaker are the same person, there's no need. If Narrator is external
to the story, there is also no need, because he takes no part in the action
and only rarely injects his own opinions on the action. (Indeed, I have written
stories where Narrator speaks on his own behalf, offering some opinion on
this or that. I'd rather not overdo it, because of the risk of letting the story
become about Narrator rather than about the people in the story.) I didn't
need a special pronoun; I just used ordinary conventions to alert the Reader
that what he's reading is now not part of the plot. I placed the aside into a
foot note and used a more direct, conversational / conspiratorial tone, as if
Narrator had just set the book down for a moment of extemp conversation
with his interlocutor. Aside done, Narrator simply picks the book up again
and continues with the story.
I could see devising such a combined pronoun if, for example, the conventions
of typography did not have any quotation marks. In most (all?) real world
languages, quotation marks are used to denote direct speech, and thus Speaker
is made explicit and is also differentiated from Narrator. If we get rid of the
quotation marks, it might indeed be helpful for there to be some way of
distinguishing those roles.
> Isn't "narrator" a better word than "speaker" for the
> person we're talking about?
Perhaps. If Narrator and Speaker are the same person! Indeed, the story
can be narrated by one of the characters (typical of first person stories),
or by an external / dispassionate / omniscient narrator (third person), or
even by Reader (second person). In the cases of the first and third,
Narrator and Speaker are (or may be) the same. We just have to keep in mind
that the "speaker" can change at any given time, depending upon who in
the story is actually talking! If the narration is first person, but someone
else is talking, then that character is Speaker, but not Narrator.
>
> 2013/7/3 H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx>:
>> my English teacher once stated in class that while a story could be
>> written in the 3rd person or the 1st person, it was impossible to write a
>> story in the 2nd person.
>
> That's how choose-the-ending kids books are written. Take a look:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure
Quite so.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (15)
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2.1. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 11:15 am ((PDT))
2013-07-04 15:46, Jyri Lehtinen skrev:
> 2013/7/4 Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com>
>
>> Certainly someone on the list (Benct maybe? or John Vertical?) has spoken
>> within the last few years about another vowel breaking which seemed to take
>> effect areally in Northern Europe at least in the swath from Finnic and
>> Baltic to continental West Germanic, early in the second millennium IIRC,
>> namely [e: o: (2:)] > [ie uo (y2)].
>>
>
> That would be interesting to read, especially how the Baltic /ie/ and /uo/
> come to the picture. I'll have to do some digging on that.
>
> Already in the Finnic and Saamic area the diphthongisation of long vowels
> is a complicated matter. There is a common Saamic breaking of */o: É: e:
> É:/ into /uo oa ie ea/ which has to be dated back to the Proto Saamic
> period. In Finnic the diphthongisation is less universal and only appears
> in part of the family. It's thus not possible to push the Finnic vowel
> breaking back into Proto Finnic. The northern Finnic diphthongisation /e:
> o: ø:/ > /ie uo yø/ found in Finnish, Karelian and Ludian is often
> explained as a contact feature originating from Saamic. Support to this
> might be seen from the fact that in Karelian and eastern Finnish dialects,
> which being spoken furthest to the inland have had the most contact and
> coexistence with Saamic varieties during their history, have further
> diphthongisation of long low vowels /a: æ:/ > /oa eæ/ ~ /ua iæ/. They have
> also dialectally diphthongisation of secondary long vowels arising from
> dropped intervocalic consonants (*kasteγen > kastien, "dew-GEN", cf.
> standard Fi kasteen) indicating that the vowel breaking process either
> started there later or continued the longest.
Then I must have misremembered which areas of Finnish which
didn't diphthongize. My wife, who is from north of Rovaniemi,
has monophthongs at least (stylistically) variably
for */ee öö oo/. When I ask for a word she'll usually use
diphthongs, but when she actually speaks to her relatives
she will use monophthongs.
>
> The fact that there's diphthongisation also in certain Estonian dialects as
> well as in Livonian cannot be explained realistically by any Saamic
> substratum no matter how hard you try. Certainly the same holds even more
> firmly with whatever is going on in the adjoining Indo European areas. It's
> still possible that the whole thing can be explained as a unified areal
> feature, but the explanation has to deal with some complicated spreading
> patterns as well as assume realistic relative epochs for the various proto
> languages.
>
> -Jyri
>
Messages in this topic (34)
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2.2. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" j_mach_w...@shared-files.de
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 12:51 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, 3 Jul 2013 17:33:16 -0400, Alex Fink wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Jul 2013 12:38:59 -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>>On Wed, Jul 03, 2013 at 01:53:41PM -0400, J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:
>>> A similar thing to the Great Vowel Shift has happened in many Germanic
>>> languages that by some kind of coincidence happened to have similar
>>> vowel changes at around the same time (late Middle Ages).
>>
>>Is there something about Germanic languages at the time that would make
>>them more prone to vowel shifts? A gap in the vowel system leading to a
>>chain shift, perhaps? I'm curious why that would be common then, but
>>less common now (or is it still just as common, we just don't notice
>>it?).
>
>Well, it's possible that the seeds of the change were sown earlier,
>i.e. that already late West Germanic began to have slightly rising
>realisations of its high vowels or something. But what I'd assume to
>be the most important effect would be geographic proximity and
>language contact effects. In neither case, anyway, would it be a
>"coincidence" at all.
I doubt that. Within Germanic languages, the areas where long
monphthongs have been diphthongized are not really contiguous. In
German, the diphthongization of [i:] and [u:] started in the Southeast
in the High Middle Ages, if I remember correctly, as far back as the
12th century. By the 15th century, it had spread all over most of
Southern German (except for the Southsouthwest) and Central German. But
in Low (Northern) German, the monophthongs have not diphthongized. I
think nobody would claim that the English diphthongizations are somehow
connected to Southeast German diphthongizations.
I believe diphthongization of long vowels is just a natural process, so
it is no big thing that two related languages might develop it
independently. What I think is more remarkable is that many (but not
all) Germanic varieties have an opposition of a lax/short/checked vowel
system to a tense/long/free vowel system.
--
grüess
mach
Messages in this topic (34)
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2.3. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" lehtinen.j...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 1:48 pm ((PDT))
2013/7/4 BPJ <b...@melroch.se>
> Then I must have misremembered which areas of Finnish which
> didn't diphthongize. My wife, who is from north of Rovaniemi,
> has monophthongs at least (stylistically) variably
> for */ee öö oo/. When I ask for a word she'll usually use
> diphthongs, but when she actually speaks to her relatives
> she will use monophthongs.
>
I have to say that I didn't know about this feature before. The diphthong
realisation is certainly reinforced in higher registers by the standard
language, but having monophthongs for the original */e: o: ø:/ should
definitely be a secondary development. Otherwise I haven't heard of any
Finnish dialects that wouldn't have diphthongs for the old long mid high
vowels (even the dialect survey I have doesn't include any such
information) and the Lappi dialects are of relatively young origin stemming
from dialect forms that certainly did have diphthongisation here. On the
other hand there are a lot of other secondary developments of both the
opening and the i/y/u final diphthongs from around the country.
Thanks for this bit of interesting information.
For further examples of long vowels breaking into diphthongs, Tundra
Yukaghir has partially turned /e: o: ø:/ into /ie uø uo/. Very similar to
the stuff discussed above but certainly totally unrelated.
-Jyri
Messages in this topic (34)
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2.4. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
Posted by: "Eric Christopherson" ra...@charter.net
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 2:00 pm ((PDT))
On Jul 4, 2013, at 3:48 PM, Jyri Lehtinen <lehtinen.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For further examples of long vowels breaking into diphthongs, Tundra
> Yukaghir has partially turned /e: o: ø:/ into /ie uø uo/. Very similar to
> the stuff discussed above but certainly totally unrelated.
Is that a typo, or is it really
/e:/ > /ie/
/o:/ > /uø/
/ø:/ > /uo/ ?
Messages in this topic (34)
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2.5. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
Posted by: "Jyri Lehtinen" lehtinen.j...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 2:33 pm ((PDT))
2013/7/4 Eric Christopherson <ra...@charter.net>
> On Jul 4, 2013, at 3:48 PM, Jyri Lehtinen <lehtinen.j...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > For further examples of long vowels breaking into diphthongs, Tundra
> > Yukaghir has partially turned /e: o: ø:/ into /ie uø uo/. Very similar to
> > the stuff discussed above but certainly totally unrelated.
>
> Is that a typo, or is it really
>
> /e:/ > /ie/
> /o:/ > /uø/
> /ø:/ > /uo/ ?
A typo indeed, so what I meant was
/e:/ > /ie/
/o:/ > /uo/
/ø:/ > /uø/
Though the switching of frontness would be interesting to see.
-Jyri
Messages in this topic (34)
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2.6. Re: THEORY: Long and short vowels association.
Posted by: "Roger Mills" romi...@yahoo.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 7:08 pm ((PDT))
From: Jyri Lehtinen <lehtinen.j...@gmail.com>
A typo indeed, so what I meant was
/e:/ > /ie/
/o:/ > /uo/
/ø:/ > /uø/
Though the switching of frontness would be interesting to see.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Those are interesting changes, almost parallel to Spanish, where IIRC VL [E] >
ie [je] when stressed (pensár to think, piénso I think) and VL [O] > ue [we]
when stressed VL ?portum > Span. puerto 'port'; and similar changes show up in
French and Italian.
Messages in this topic (34)
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3a. Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 1:32 pm ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
Can anybody of you recommend to me a forum for the discussion
of European linguistic prehistory? I mean such matters as
substratum loanwords in European languages, "Old European"
geographical names, inscriptional fragments of ancient non-IE
languages of the Mediterranean and the like.
Thank you in advance.
--
... 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 (5)
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3b. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 4:49 pm ((PDT))
> From: Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhieme...@web.de>
>
> Can anybody of you recommend to me a forum for the discussion
> of European linguistic prehistory? I mean such matters as
> substratum loanwords in European languages, "Old European"
> geographical names, inscriptional fragments of ancient non-IE
> languages of the Mediterranean and the like.
Greetings!
If you haven't already, you might look into the Yahoo group "Cybalist". Their
group
selfadvertises as "a forum devoted to discussing Indo-European linguistics
and related topics concerning the history and culture of
IE-speaking
peoples. It is the ambition of the owners and moderators of
this list to
promote and popularise sound linguistic and historical
knowledge, and
to make our group a hospitable club where professional
researchers in
IE studies and amateurs with a serious interest in the
field can meet
and exchange ideas." Cyril Babaev founded the list almost 15 years ago,
and I know he has posted here in the past.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/
A far less busy group is "PIEreligion". They advertise themselves thus:
"This list if for the discussion of Proto-Indo-European religion. It is
not a
discussion list for linguistics. That topic is more than well
covered on the
Cybalist. Linguistics will surely be brought up here as
part of the study
but our focus is on the religion of the
Proto-Indo-Europeans."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PIEreligion/
Then try the group "Substratus Languages": "This group is about evidence of
substratum
in Indo-European languages
and discussion of pre-IE items, with particular attention for
the
languages of ancient Europe."
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/substratumlanguages/
Some other possibles:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dumezil/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ViktorRydberg/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/pieconlang/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/balkanika/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ie_polytheism/ (only about 50 messages in their
archive)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Dene_Caucasian/ (few messages)
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/tocharian/ (few messages)
Interesting, but quite possibly crackpotty:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Polat_Kaya/
Bet you didn't know that the ancient city of Troy is actually the "Home of the
Turks"! ;)))
Padraic
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> --
> ... 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 (5)
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3c. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 7:56 pm ((PDT))
> From: Roger Mills <romi...@yahoo.com>
> I should have added: Cybalist lately isn't quite so speculative, though it
> can be at times. But look in their vast archive.
> There used to be a rather controversial guy posting there named Glen Gordon;
> he was into Nostratic (which is another
> avenue to explore), and now inhabits IIRC a Nostratic website.
Cyril himself is also into Nostratic. He is involved with www.nostratic.net
Speaking of, there is also http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Nostratic-L/
Padraic
Messages in this topic (5)
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3d. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Thu Jul 4, 2013 11:55 pm ((PDT))
On 05/07/2013 00:49, Padraic Brown wrote:
[snip]
>
> Interesting, but quite possibly crackpotty:
>
> http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Polat_Kaya/
Polat Kaya, eh? Definitely crackpotty then.
He's the guy who claims the script on the Lemnos stele is
a western Greek alphabet of the 6th century BC, but a script
derived from 'runic' script of the Turkic Orhun and Yeniset
inscriptions and other similar central Asian inscriptions.
The language, of course, is not an Etruscan related one, as
most think, but Turkic!
http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Eteocretan/LemnianTrans.html#Kaya
> Bet you didn't know that the ancient city of Troy is
> actually the "Home of the Turks"! ;)))
... of course, and the Pelasgians were Turks. :-D
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language
began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (5)
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3e. Re: Forums for prehistoric linguistics of Europe?
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Fri Jul 5, 2013 2:28 am ((PDT))
On 05/07/2013 07:55, R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>
> He's the guy who claims the script on the Lemnos stele
> is a western Greek alphabet of the 6th century BC,
OOPS!! a negative got omitted there :(
I should have written: "He's the guy who claims the script
on the Lemnos stele is _not_ a western Greek alphabet of the
6th century BC,
> but a script derived from 'runic' script of the Turkic
> Orhun and Yeniset inscriptions and other similar central
> Asian inscriptions
I suppose I ought to have added that "and only
coincidentally gives the appearance of a Greek script!"
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language
began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (5)
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