There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Unusual Tenses
From: carolandray+ray
1b. Re: Unusual Tenses
From: Leonardo Castro
2a. Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
From: Wm Annis
2b. Re: Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
From: Adam Walker
2c. Re: Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
From: Eric Christopherson
3a. The Language of Pao
From: Logan Kearsley
3b. Re: The Language of Pao
From: John Q
3c. Re: The Language of Pao
From: MorphemeAddict
3d. Re: The Language of Pao
From: MorphemeAddict
3e. Re: The Language of Pao
From: Jim Henry
4a. Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
From: John Q
4b. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
4c. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
4d. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
From: Zach Wellstood
4e. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Unusual Tenses
Posted by: "carolandray+ray" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 9:23 am ((PDT))
On 14.07.2013 12:54, Padraic Brown wrote:
>> From: R A Brown
>
>>
>> On 13/07/2013 23:06, Padraic Brown wrote:
[snip]
>>> Well, WP says that Welsh has an "interrogatory mood" --
>>
>> First I've heard of it. Where does WP say this? I've
>> looked at:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Welsh_morphology
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Welsh_morphology
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood under Other Moods
Yes, and I notice the article begins: "This article needs attention
from an expert in Linguistics." It certainly does! Sadly I do not have
the expertise to do this. But the reference to the "interrogative mood"
in Welsh is misleading IMO. It affects the verb "to be" only, and the
basic form of "to be" in the interrogative tends to be that used in
negation also; the two forms have different preverbal clitics and/or
mutations. The various forms of "to be" are quite complex AFAIK in all
the Insular Celtic languages.
>> ...and can't find any mention of this strange mood. Also,
>> of course, don't take everything WP says as true - because
>> it ain't.
>
> Oh, indeed! I'm well aware of the nature of WP and how it's compiled
> and
> how its articles evolve (having done some work on a couple
> articles).
So have I :)
> It
> really wouldn't be terribly difficult to remove the attestation if
> it's not kosher...
I guess not - but IMO the whole articles needs going over a comptetent
linguist who is an expert in mood and modality.
But I'll not rabbit on. I'm away visiting in-laws at the moment and am
having to use webmail, which I don't much like :(
Ray.
Messages in this topic (9)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Unusual Tenses
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" leolucas1...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 5:50 pm ((PDT))
2013/7/14 R A Brown <r...@carolandray.plus.com>:
> On 13/07/2013 23:06, Padraic Brown wrote:
>>>
>>> From: R A Brown
>
>
> Having now consulted Trask, which I ought to have done
> before I wrote my email yesterday, I can now well see how
> Leonardo could combine moods. I should have asked what the
> moods are, I guess.
Actually, I talked about aspects, tenses and moods just for
comparison, because I want my conlang to have only "modifiers" that
can be used as preffixes.
Instead of indicative and subjunctive, for instance, it'll have
modifiers meaning "actually/factually" and "hypothetically". They
could be combined to mean a "hypothetical fact" (something considered
as a fact in a hypothetical reality) or a "factual hypothesis". There
will be a hierarchy depending on which preffix is closer to the root
and also a way of putting them at the same hierarchical level.
>
> We live and learn.
>
>
> --
> 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 (9)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
Posted by: "Wm Annis" wm.an...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 1:18 pm ((PDT))
I'm going to be on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow (Monday, July 15)
from 4:45-5:00pm (central time, both the time zone and the name of the
show), talking about Invented Languages.
http://www.wpr.org/centraltime/
If you don't live in WI, or have a radio, you can live listen online at
http://www.wpr.org/webcasting/live.cfm � pick "WPR's Ideas Network."
The show will also be archived for later listening.
--
William S. Annis
www.aoidoi.org � www.scholiastae.org
Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
Posted by: "Adam Walker" carra...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 2:54 pm ((PDT))
Cool beans!
Adam
On 7/14/13, Wm Annis <wm.an...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm going to be on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow (Monday, July 15)
> from 4:45-5:00pm (central time, both the time zone and the name of the
> show), talking about Invented Languages.
>
> http://www.wpr.org/centraltime/
>
> If you don't live in WI, or have a radio, you can live listen online at
> http://www.wpr.org/webcasting/live.cfm � pick "WPR's Ideas Network."
> The show will also be archived for later listening.
>
> --
> William S. Annis
> www.aoidoi.org � www.scholiastae.org
>
Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
2c. Re: Wisconsin Public Radio: Central Time
Posted by: "Eric Christopherson" ra...@charter.net
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 9:07 pm ((PDT))
On Jul 14, 2013, at 3:18 PM, Wm Annis <wm.an...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm going to be on Wisconsin Public Radio tomorrow (Monday, July 15)
> from 4:45-5:00pm (central time, both the time zone and the name of the
> show), talking about Invented Languages.
>
> http://www.wpr.org/centraltime/
Nice!
>
> If you don't live in WI, or have a radio, you can live listen online at
> http://www.wpr.org/webcasting/live.cfm � pick "WPR's Ideas Network."
> The show will also be archived for later listening.
Ah -- this finally answers my question as to what is meant when they say "The
Ideas Network of Wisconsin Public Radio". I haven't listened to WPR lately, but
when I used to hear them say that I always wondered if WPR had *other* networks
besides the Ideas one, or if the _of_ had the same function as "City of
Madison", i.e. the nouns on both sides of the _of_ were coreferential. From
that web page I see it's the former.
Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. The Language of Pao
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" chronosur...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 9:20 pm ((PDT))
So, I recently finished a 4-hour car ride and I'm about to be without
internet access for a week. But before that happens, I need to get
ideas out of my head:
On said car ride, I finished _The Languages of Pao_. Despite being all
about using artificial languages to influence culture, only one actual
word of any language is ever mentioned. Nevertheless, the general
structure of the Paonese language is described on several occasions,
and seems to me rather odd. Thus, I spent the rest of the car ride
involuntarily working out Paonese. Or, rather, working out how to make
a language that would reasonably fit the descriptions of Paonese, as I
am not Jack Vance and thus have little incentive to claim that this is
actually Paonese.
The language should be "polysynthetic", but not to the same extent as,
say, Inuit, as all of the sentences described are described as
containing lots of different noun phrases as separate words. The
language should be without verbs, instead using suffixes on every noun
to indicate what function they play in a scene.
When you get to an example that claims a suffix specifically for
"being the object of violence", I start to think that these are
definitely *not* just a closed class of case markers or postpositions.
Instead, I'm thinking an open class of bound, always-intransitive
pseudo-verbal morphemes.
There could, however, be a small closed class of "auxilliary
verblikes" that would cover common generic functions kind of like case
markers or auxilliary verbs like "do", "cause", "have done to", etc.
Symmetrically, there can be a closed class of pronouns / deictics.
Paonese is supposed to embody a culture of total stasis, so clearly it
should have no grammatical tense. And that gets to the end of what I
can induce from the text.
So, now I've got two-and-two-halves lexical classes- nouns, pronouns,
verblikes, and auxilliary verblikes. Argument agreement is unnecessary
because all the verblikes are intransitive and morphologically bound
to their single arguments, so verblikes can be pretty much invariant.
Nice and simple. Now, I wonder about descriptors- adjectives and
adverbs.
To avoid unnecessary complexity, I'd like adjective functions to be
handled by verbs or nouns, and this language has no verbs, so
adjectives = nouns it is. This works out nicely with the polysynthesis
as well if we allow lots of noun roots compounded together (with one
verblike suffixed at the end) to be interpreted as alternate relevant
descriptors of the same referent .E.g., "blackthing-cat" =
"cat-blackthing" = "black cat". Different conjoining morphology could
indicate freely productive compounds vs. set compounds with standard
idiomatic meaning; e.g., "bluebird" vs. "a blue bird". (Herman
Miller's recent idea for constructing arbitrarily complex compounds
might come in handy here, but with the distinction between adjectives
and nouns replaced by a distinction between idiomatic compound nouns
and productive descriptive compounding.)
All of the noun+verblike complexes are already acting pretty much like
adverbs, so I think most contentful adverbs can be rendered by some
such complex. Various other more abstract adverby things (like "very")
can probably be rendered with special affixes that can just be part of
the derivational morphology of the nouns and verblikes.
At this point, I feel like there still needs to be some way to mark
off separate clauses and kind of tie things together- a syntactic head
for the sentence, if you will. With the way noun+verblike complexes
work, I'm in a head-final mood, and I kinda like evidentials, so we'll
have a basic clause structure of a sequence of arbitrarily many
noun+verblike complexes concluded by an evidential marker. To keep
with the polysynthesis, though, these can't be just regular ol'
evidential markers. They'll be bound to some other morpheme that
indicates the general type of the event described and the speaker's
attitude towards it (kind of riffing off of Tatari Faran's finalizers
here), along with some adverby morphology for intensification/hedging
(e.g. "I saw it" vs. "I so totally saw this, no joke" vs. "I saw
something, I'm pretty this is what was going on" as variations on the
"personal experience" evidential).
There is no evidence for this kind of thing in _The Languages of Pao_,
but all of the examples are very simple sentences, and I expect the
guy in-world doing the glossing just left out the boring standard
sentence endings.
And that's about as far as I got on my car ride. To ponder at a lake
this week: relative clauses & nominalization and larger discourse
structures.
-l.
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
3b. Re: The Language of Pao
Posted by: "John Q" jquijad...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 9:31 pm ((PDT))
Parts of your description remind me of Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen. It's been
years since I read The Languages of Pao. You make me want to re-read it.
While I'm at it, maybe I'll dust off Delany's Babel-17 as well.
--John Q
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:20:10 -0600, Logan Kearsley <chronosur...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>So, I recently finished a 4-hour car ride and I'm about to be without
>internet access for a week. But before that happens, I need to get
>ideas out of my head:
>
>On said car ride, I finished _The Languages of Pao_. Despite being all
>about using artificial languages to influence culture, only one actual
>word of any language is ever mentioned. Nevertheless, the general
>structure of the Paonese language is described on several occasions,
>and seems to me rather odd. Thus, I spent the rest of the car ride
>involuntarily working out Paonese. Or, rather, working out how to make
>a language that would reasonably fit the descriptions of Paonese, as I
>am not Jack Vance and thus have little incentive to claim that this is
>actually Paonese.
>
>The language should be "polysynthetic", but not to the same extent as,
>say, Inuit, as all of the sentences described are described as
>containing lots of different noun phrases as separate words. The
>language should be without verbs, instead using suffixes on every noun
>to indicate what function they play in a scene.
>
>When you get to an example that claims a suffix specifically for
>"being the object of violence", I start to think that these are
>definitely *not* just a closed class of case markers or postpositions.
>Instead, I'm thinking an open class of bound, always-intransitive
>pseudo-verbal morphemes.
>
>There could, however, be a small closed class of "auxilliary
>verblikes" that would cover common generic functions kind of like case
>markers or auxilliary verbs like "do", "cause", "have done to", etc.
>Symmetrically, there can be a closed class of pronouns / deictics.
>
>Paonese is supposed to embody a culture of total stasis, so clearly it
>should have no grammatical tense. And that gets to the end of what I
>can induce from the text.
>
>So, now I've got two-and-two-halves lexical classes- nouns, pronouns,
>verblikes, and auxilliary verblikes. Argument agreement is unnecessary
>because all the verblikes are intransitive and morphologically bound
>to their single arguments, so verblikes can be pretty much invariant.
>Nice and simple. Now, I wonder about descriptors- adjectives and
>adverbs.
>
>To avoid unnecessary complexity, I'd like adjective functions to be
>handled by verbs or nouns, and this language has no verbs, so
>adjectives = nouns it is. This works out nicely with the polysynthesis
>as well if we allow lots of noun roots compounded together (with one
>verblike suffixed at the end) to be interpreted as alternate relevant
>descriptors of the same referent .E.g., "blackthing-cat" =
>"cat-blackthing" = "black cat". Different conjoining morphology could
>indicate freely productive compounds vs. set compounds with standard
>idiomatic meaning; e.g., "bluebird" vs. "a blue bird". (Herman
>Miller's recent idea for constructing arbitrarily complex compounds
>might come in handy here, but with the distinction between adjectives
>and nouns replaced by a distinction between idiomatic compound nouns
>and productive descriptive compounding.)
>
>All of the noun+verblike complexes are already acting pretty much like
>adverbs, so I think most contentful adverbs can be rendered by some
>such complex. Various other more abstract adverby things (like "very")
>can probably be rendered with special affixes that can just be part of
>the derivational morphology of the nouns and verblikes.
>
>At this point, I feel like there still needs to be some way to mark
>off separate clauses and kind of tie things together- a syntactic head
>for the sentence, if you will. With the way noun+verblike complexes
>work, I'm in a head-final mood, and I kinda like evidentials, so we'll
>have a basic clause structure of a sequence of arbitrarily many
>noun+verblike complexes concluded by an evidential marker. To keep
>with the polysynthesis, though, these can't be just regular ol'
>evidential markers. They'll be bound to some other morpheme that
>indicates the general type of the event described and the speaker's
>attitude towards it (kind of riffing off of Tatari Faran's finalizers
>here), along with some adverby morphology for intensification/hedging
>(e.g. "I saw it" vs. "I so totally saw this, no joke" vs. "I saw
>something, I'm pretty this is what was going on" as variations on the
>"personal experience" evidential).
>
>There is no evidence for this kind of thing in _The Languages of Pao_,
>but all of the examples are very simple sentences, and I expect the
>guy in-world doing the glossing just left out the boring standard
>sentence endings.
>
>And that's about as far as I got on my car ride. To ponder at a lake
>this week: relative clauses & nominalization and larger discourse
>structures.
>
>-l.
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
3c. Re: The Language of Pao
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" lytl...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 9:49 pm ((PDT))
When I first read The Languages of Pao, I didn't realize how little
information it had in it, and on re-reading it, I disliked the story so
much I didn't finish it.
stevo
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 12:31 AM, John Q <jquijad...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Parts of your description remind me of Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen. It's
> been years since I read The Languages of Pao. You make me want to re-read
> it. While I'm at it, maybe I'll dust off Delany's Babel-17 as well.
>
> --John Q
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:20:10 -0600, Logan Kearsley <chronosur...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >So, I recently finished a 4-hour car ride and I'm about to be without
> >internet access for a week. But before that happens, I need to get
> >ideas out of my head:
> >
> >On said car ride, I finished _The Languages of Pao_. Despite being all
> >about using artificial languages to influence culture, only one actual
> >word of any language is ever mentioned. Nevertheless, the general
> >structure of the Paonese language is described on several occasions,
> >and seems to me rather odd. Thus, I spent the rest of the car ride
> >involuntarily working out Paonese. Or, rather, working out how to make
> >a language that would reasonably fit the descriptions of Paonese, as I
> >am not Jack Vance and thus have little incentive to claim that this is
> >actually Paonese.
> >
> >The language should be "polysynthetic", but not to the same extent as,
> >say, Inuit, as all of the sentences described are described as
> >containing lots of different noun phrases as separate words. The
> >language should be without verbs, instead using suffixes on every noun
> >to indicate what function they play in a scene.
> >
> >When you get to an example that claims a suffix specifically for
> >"being the object of violence", I start to think that these are
> >definitely *not* just a closed class of case markers or postpositions.
> >Instead, I'm thinking an open class of bound, always-intransitive
> >pseudo-verbal morphemes.
> >
> >There could, however, be a small closed class of "auxilliary
> >verblikes" that would cover common generic functions kind of like case
> >markers or auxilliary verbs like "do", "cause", "have done to", etc.
> >Symmetrically, there can be a closed class of pronouns / deictics.
> >
> >Paonese is supposed to embody a culture of total stasis, so clearly it
> >should have no grammatical tense. And that gets to the end of what I
> >can induce from the text.
> >
> >So, now I've got two-and-two-halves lexical classes- nouns, pronouns,
> >verblikes, and auxilliary verblikes. Argument agreement is unnecessary
> >because all the verblikes are intransitive and morphologically bound
> >to their single arguments, so verblikes can be pretty much invariant.
> >Nice and simple. Now, I wonder about descriptors- adjectives and
> >adverbs.
> >
> >To avoid unnecessary complexity, I'd like adjective functions to be
> >handled by verbs or nouns, and this language has no verbs, so
> >adjectives = nouns it is. This works out nicely with the polysynthesis
> >as well if we allow lots of noun roots compounded together (with one
> >verblike suffixed at the end) to be interpreted as alternate relevant
> >descriptors of the same referent .E.g., "blackthing-cat" =
> >"cat-blackthing" = "black cat". Different conjoining morphology could
> >indicate freely productive compounds vs. set compounds with standard
> >idiomatic meaning; e.g., "bluebird" vs. "a blue bird". (Herman
> >Miller's recent idea for constructing arbitrarily complex compounds
> >might come in handy here, but with the distinction between adjectives
> >and nouns replaced by a distinction between idiomatic compound nouns
> >and productive descriptive compounding.)
> >
> >All of the noun+verblike complexes are already acting pretty much like
> >adverbs, so I think most contentful adverbs can be rendered by some
> >such complex. Various other more abstract adverby things (like "very")
> >can probably be rendered with special affixes that can just be part of
> >the derivational morphology of the nouns and verblikes.
> >
> >At this point, I feel like there still needs to be some way to mark
> >off separate clauses and kind of tie things together- a syntactic head
> >for the sentence, if you will. With the way noun+verblike complexes
> >work, I'm in a head-final mood, and I kinda like evidentials, so we'll
> >have a basic clause structure of a sequence of arbitrarily many
> >noun+verblike complexes concluded by an evidential marker. To keep
> >with the polysynthesis, though, these can't be just regular ol'
> >evidential markers. They'll be bound to some other morpheme that
> >indicates the general type of the event described and the speaker's
> >attitude towards it (kind of riffing off of Tatari Faran's finalizers
> >here), along with some adverby morphology for intensification/hedging
> >(e.g. "I saw it" vs. "I so totally saw this, no joke" vs. "I saw
> >something, I'm pretty this is what was going on" as variations on the
> >"personal experience" evidential).
> >
> >There is no evidence for this kind of thing in _The Languages of Pao_,
> >but all of the examples are very simple sentences, and I expect the
> >guy in-world doing the glossing just left out the boring standard
> >sentence endings.
> >
> >And that's about as far as I got on my car ride. To ponder at a lake
> >this week: relative clauses & nominalization and larger discourse
> >structures.
> >
> >-l.
>
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
3d. Re: The Language of Pao
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" lytl...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 10:08 pm ((PDT))
A much better short story about language is H. Beam Piper's "Omnilingual":
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19445/19445-h/19445-h.htm
stevo
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 12:49 AM, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When I first read The Languages of Pao, I didn't realize how little
> information it had in it, and on re-reading it, I disliked the story so
> much I didn't finish it.
>
> stevo
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 12:31 AM, John Q <jquijad...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Parts of your description remind me of Sylvia Sotomayor's Kelen. It's
>> been years since I read The Languages of Pao. You make me want to re-read
>> it. While I'm at it, maybe I'll dust off Delany's Babel-17 as well.
>>
>> --John Q
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:20:10 -0600, Logan Kearsley <
>> chronosur...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >So, I recently finished a 4-hour car ride and I'm about to be without
>> >internet access for a week. But before that happens, I need to get
>> >ideas out of my head:
>> >
>> >On said car ride, I finished _The Languages of Pao_. Despite being all
>> >about using artificial languages to influence culture, only one actual
>> >word of any language is ever mentioned. Nevertheless, the general
>> >structure of the Paonese language is described on several occasions,
>> >and seems to me rather odd. Thus, I spent the rest of the car ride
>> >involuntarily working out Paonese. Or, rather, working out how to make
>> >a language that would reasonably fit the descriptions of Paonese, as I
>> >am not Jack Vance and thus have little incentive to claim that this is
>> >actually Paonese.
>> >
>> >The language should be "polysynthetic", but not to the same extent as,
>> >say, Inuit, as all of the sentences described are described as
>> >containing lots of different noun phrases as separate words. The
>> >language should be without verbs, instead using suffixes on every noun
>> >to indicate what function they play in a scene.
>> >
>> >When you get to an example that claims a suffix specifically for
>> >"being the object of violence", I start to think that these are
>> >definitely *not* just a closed class of case markers or postpositions.
>> >Instead, I'm thinking an open class of bound, always-intransitive
>> >pseudo-verbal morphemes.
>> >
>> >There could, however, be a small closed class of "auxilliary
>> >verblikes" that would cover common generic functions kind of like case
>> >markers or auxilliary verbs like "do", "cause", "have done to", etc.
>> >Symmetrically, there can be a closed class of pronouns / deictics.
>> >
>> >Paonese is supposed to embody a culture of total stasis, so clearly it
>> >should have no grammatical tense. And that gets to the end of what I
>> >can induce from the text.
>> >
>> >So, now I've got two-and-two-halves lexical classes- nouns, pronouns,
>> >verblikes, and auxilliary verblikes. Argument agreement is unnecessary
>> >because all the verblikes are intransitive and morphologically bound
>> >to their single arguments, so verblikes can be pretty much invariant.
>> >Nice and simple. Now, I wonder about descriptors- adjectives and
>> >adverbs.
>> >
>> >To avoid unnecessary complexity, I'd like adjective functions to be
>> >handled by verbs or nouns, and this language has no verbs, so
>> >adjectives = nouns it is. This works out nicely with the polysynthesis
>> >as well if we allow lots of noun roots compounded together (with one
>> >verblike suffixed at the end) to be interpreted as alternate relevant
>> >descriptors of the same referent .E.g., "blackthing-cat" =
>> >"cat-blackthing" = "black cat". Different conjoining morphology could
>> >indicate freely productive compounds vs. set compounds with standard
>> >idiomatic meaning; e.g., "bluebird" vs. "a blue bird". (Herman
>> >Miller's recent idea for constructing arbitrarily complex compounds
>> >might come in handy here, but with the distinction between adjectives
>> >and nouns replaced by a distinction between idiomatic compound nouns
>> >and productive descriptive compounding.)
>> >
>> >All of the noun+verblike complexes are already acting pretty much like
>> >adverbs, so I think most contentful adverbs can be rendered by some
>> >such complex. Various other more abstract adverby things (like "very")
>> >can probably be rendered with special affixes that can just be part of
>> >the derivational morphology of the nouns and verblikes.
>> >
>> >At this point, I feel like there still needs to be some way to mark
>> >off separate clauses and kind of tie things together- a syntactic head
>> >for the sentence, if you will. With the way noun+verblike complexes
>> >work, I'm in a head-final mood, and I kinda like evidentials, so we'll
>> >have a basic clause structure of a sequence of arbitrarily many
>> >noun+verblike complexes concluded by an evidential marker. To keep
>> >with the polysynthesis, though, these can't be just regular ol'
>> >evidential markers. They'll be bound to some other morpheme that
>> >indicates the general type of the event described and the speaker's
>> >attitude towards it (kind of riffing off of Tatari Faran's finalizers
>> >here), along with some adverby morphology for intensification/hedging
>> >(e.g. "I saw it" vs. "I so totally saw this, no joke" vs. "I saw
>> >something, I'm pretty this is what was going on" as variations on the
>> >"personal experience" evidential).
>> >
>> >There is no evidence for this kind of thing in _The Languages of Pao_,
>> >but all of the examples are very simple sentences, and I expect the
>> >guy in-world doing the glossing just left out the boring standard
>> >sentence endings.
>> >
>> >And that's about as far as I got on my car ride. To ponder at a lake
>> >this week: relative clauses & nominalization and larger discourse
>> >structures.
>> >
>> >-l.
>>
>
>
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
3e. Re: The Language of Pao
Posted by: "Jim Henry" jimhenry1...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jul 15, 2013 4:03 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 12:49 AM, MorphemeAddict <lytl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When I first read The Languages of Pao, I didn't realize how little
> information it had in it, and on re-reading it, I disliked the story so
> much I didn't finish it.
It isn't among Jack Vance's best works. I lost my copy a couple of
years ago, and haven't been in any hurry to replace it, there are so
many other Vance works that I more strongly want to re-read.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
4a. Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
Posted by: "John Q" jquijad...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 10:10 pm ((PDT))
Interesting article from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-in-its-infancy.html?pagewanted=all
Although I'm not really quite sure as to why this is not being called a creole.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
4b. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" goldyemo...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 11:00 pm ((PDT))
Interesting. It got me to thinking about Yardish. If Silknish speakers came
into contact with Yardish speakers, would that mean that one language was a
proto-language?
Does it have to be?
What's a Creole, and could Yardish have one?
If the language has just been discovered, who named it?
Mellissa Green
@GreenNovelist
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:conl...@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf
Of John Q
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 1:10 AM
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Subject: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
Interesting article from the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-in-its-infancy.html?pagewanted=all
Although I'm not really quite sure as to why this is not being called a creole.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
4c. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" tsela...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 11:33 pm ((PDT))
On 15 July 2013 07:10, John Q <jquijad...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Interesting article from the NY Times:
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-in-its-infancy.html?pagewanted=all
>
> Although I'm not really quite sure as to why this is not being called a
> creole.
>
>
Me neither. The argument in the article seems to be that a creole is a
mixture of two (or more) languages, spoken as a native language, while this
Light Warlpiri features innovations not present in any of its source
languages (it has elements from Warlpiri, English and Kriol, an
English-based creole spoken there already, but also has grammatical
features not present in any of those, like a non-future suffix on verbs),
and for this reason cannot be called a creole.
Personally this doesn't convince me. I admit I'm not all that up-to-date on
creole development, but is it true that a language mixture can only be
called a creole if it only has features present in either of its source
languages?
II can only read the abstract of the _Language_ article this NY Times
article is based on, and it doesn't seem to feature the word "creole" at
all, only referring to "mixed languages". It's indeed about the fact that
this Light Warlpiri language has developed novel constructions not present
in its source languages, but it says that otherwise it is very much a mixed
language like any other. So I'm not sure why the word "creole" would be
inappropriate here...
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
4d. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
Posted by: "Zach Wellstood" zwellst...@gmail.com
Date: Sun Jul 14, 2013 11:47 pm ((PDT))
I'm not 100% sure of this, but recently wrote a paper for a Pidgins and
Creoles class at my university. Mixed Languages are distinct from pidgins
and Creoles because in a mixed language, the source languages' components
remain relatively distinct. For instance, in Michif the nouns are mostly
from French and the verbs/morphology are Plains Cree.
A Creole, however includes an expansion of form (phonological and
morphological) and function (used outside of one group, the home, etc. Used
frequently across groups of people). A pidgin may be relatively restricted
to a certain group, though it has by definition grammatical and
ungrammatical phrases and morphology/phonology that's less marked than the
original languages. Pidgins don't necessarily lack native speakers, nor do
Creoles necessarily have them.
My professor stressed that even creolists don't agree on what these
languages' defining criteria are, so take this with a grain of salt.
That said the article is interesting but I'd like to read the actual paper.
Zach
On Jul 15, 2013 2:33 PM, "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" <tsela...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 15 July 2013 07:10, John Q <jquijad...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Interesting article from the NY Times:
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-in-its-infancy.html?pagewanted=all
> >
> > Although I'm not really quite sure as to why this is not being called a
> > creole.
> >
> >
> Me neither. The argument in the article seems to be that a creole is a
> mixture of two (or more) languages, spoken as a native language, while this
> Light Warlpiri features innovations not present in any of its source
> languages (it has elements from Warlpiri, English and Kriol, an
> English-based creole spoken there already, but also has grammatical
> features not present in any of those, like a non-future suffix on verbs),
> and for this reason cannot be called a creole.
> Personally this doesn't convince me. I admit I'm not all that up-to-date on
> creole development, but is it true that a language mixture can only be
> called a creole if it only has features present in either of its source
> languages?
>
> II can only read the abstract of the _Language_ article this NY Times
> article is based on, and it doesn't seem to feature the word "creole" at
> all, only referring to "mixed languages". It's indeed about the fact that
> this Light Warlpiri language has developed novel constructions not present
> in its source languages, but it says that otherwise it is very much a mixed
> language like any other. So I'm not sure why the word "creole" would be
> inappropriate here...
> --
> Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
>
> http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
> http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
>
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
4e. Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" goldyemo...@gmail.com
Date: Mon Jul 15, 2013 12:13 am ((PDT))
So would I. Do you have a copy of your paper?
Mellissa Green
@GreenNovelist
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:conl...@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf
Of Zach Wellstood
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 2:47 AM
To: conl...@listserv.brown.edu
Subject: Re: Linguist Finds a Language in Its Infancy
I'm not 100% sure of this, but recently wrote a paper for a Pidgins and
Creoles class at my university. Mixed Languages are distinct from pidgins
and Creoles because in a mixed language, the source languages' components
remain relatively distinct. For instance, in Michif the nouns are mostly
from French and the verbs/morphology are Plains Cree.
A Creole, however includes an expansion of form (phonological and
morphological) and function (used outside of one group, the home, etc. Used
frequently across groups of people). A pidgin may be relatively restricted
to a certain group, though it has by definition grammatical and
ungrammatical phrases and morphology/phonology that's less marked than the
original languages. Pidgins don't necessarily lack native speakers, nor do
Creoles necessarily have them.
My professor stressed that even creolists don't agree on what these
languages' defining criteria are, so take this with a grain of salt.
That said the article is interesting but I'd like to read the actual paper.
Zach
On Jul 15, 2013 2:33 PM, "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" <tsela...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 15 July 2013 07:10, John Q <jquijad...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Interesting article from the NY Times:
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/linguist-finds-a-language-in-its-infancy.html?pagewanted=all
> >
> > Although I'm not really quite sure as to why this is not being called a
> > creole.
> >
> >
> Me neither. The argument in the article seems to be that a creole is a
> mixture of two (or more) languages, spoken as a native language, while this
> Light Warlpiri features innovations not present in any of its source
> languages (it has elements from Warlpiri, English and Kriol, an
> English-based creole spoken there already, but also has grammatical
> features not present in any of those, like a non-future suffix on verbs),
> and for this reason cannot be called a creole.
> Personally this doesn't convince me. I admit I'm not all that up-to-date on
> creole development, but is it true that a language mixture can only be
> called a creole if it only has features present in either of its source
> languages?
>
> II can only read the abstract of the _Language_ article this NY Times
> article is based on, and it doesn't seem to feature the word "creole" at
> all, only referring to "mixed languages". It's indeed about the fact that
> this Light Warlpiri language has developed novel constructions not present
> in its source languages, but it says that otherwise it is very much a mixed
> language like any other. So I'm not sure why the word "creole" would be
> inappropriate here...
> --
> Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
>
> http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
> http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
>
Messages in this topic (5)
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