There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Time for Another Party! Oskana|not Tedve|l Dabolnea!
From: Padraic Brown
1b. Re: Time for Another Party! Oskana|not Tedve|l Dabolnea!
From: C. Brickner
2a. Re: the Deep Structures of Language
From: H. S. Teoh
2b. Re: the Deep Structures of Language
From: Adnan Majid
2c. Re: the Deep Structures of Language
From: Leonardo Castro
3. A directionality operator for word coining
From: Daniel Bowman
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Time for Another Party! Oskana|not Tedve|l Dabolnea!
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Thu Sep 19, 2013 7:18 am ((PDT))
>> If I add a diminutive suffix to the verb root, I can convey the idea of
>> gently,
>> easily, leisurely, partially, etc. Thus, “néða”, walk, can be changed to
>> “néðla”,
>> stroll.
>
>Actually, I like this idea a lot, especially since, like Senjecas, Moten
>allows diminutive suffixes on verbs too (the diminutive suffix _-sin_ can
>be used on both nouns and verbs, unlike _-mas_ and _-zes_ which can only be
>used on nouns –or rather can only *result* in nouns–), as in for instance
>_jeksi|n_: "to brush past" from _jeksaj_: "to touch, to hit".
Neat. I've gotten my wife to do this in Waray-Waray a bit too. I'll say
mahagcotcito for it's a bit chilly or pagtaktaktito or pagmartilito for tap.
> So I decided
>to shamelessly copy you and created the verb _jugzi|n_: "to stroll, to talk
>a walk",
Take a walk or actually talk a walk? ;)
>diminutive of _jugejugej_: "to walk". They are also used
>nominally: while _ugejuge_ can mean "stroll", it's usually more generic and
>means "walk", while _ugzin_ is more specifically "stroll, leisurely walk".
>You get inspired by me, and I get inspired back by you, the circle is
>complete! :)
Funny how these threads weave all throughout our experiences. When we say
gusto mo pagsyadita, that's asking if you want to go for a stroll. Going for a
walk, of course, is pagwawalk.
Of course, all of these have some kind of Spanish diminutive: -tito, -cito and
the like.
Padraic
>I love this list :P.
>--
>Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
>
>http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
>http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
>
>
Messages in this topic (10)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Time for Another Party! Oskana|not Tedve|l Dabolnea!
Posted by: "C. Brickner" tepeyach...@embarqmail.com
Date: Thu Sep 19, 2013 7:20 am ((PDT))
I love this list :P.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
_____________________________
My sentiments exactly!
Charlie
Messages in this topic (10)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: the Deep Structures of Language
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" hst...@quickfur.ath.cx
Date: Thu Sep 19, 2013 4:06 pm ((PDT))
On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 12:07:59PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> On 18 September 2013 11:54, Paul Schleitwiler, FCM
> <pjschleitwiler...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Interesting article.
> > How to Understand the Deep Structures of Language
> > Scientific American
> > Joshua K. Hartshorne September 17, 2013 7:00 AM
> > http://news.yahoo.com/understand-deep-structures-language-110000347.html
>
> Quote: "The researchers also asked people to describe in gestures an
> event in which a girl kicked a boy. Since both boys and girls are
> capable of kicking, it's very possible to be confused about who kicked
> who. And now participants were much more likely to describe (in
> gesture) the girl, then the kicking event, and then the boy -- that
> is, they switched to an SVO order. This was true (with a few
> complications which you can read about in the paper) whether the
> participant was a native speaker of English (an SVO language) or a
> native speaker of Korean or Japanese (SOV languages)."
>
> This raises the question: is there a language that switches between
> SOV and SVO based on an animacy distinction? And if not, who's going
> to make one?
[...]
Finally got around to reading this article today. Very interesting
indeed!
Speaking of animacy... I remember the first time I read about MRL
languages and wondered how on earth the speakers would be able to make
any sense of each other, since there is no way to tell who did something
to whom. Then I read about animacy distinctions: if a clause contains
two NPs, and one is animate and the other is not, then chances are the
verb is performed by the animate NP, so neither NPs need to be marked
for their roles, even when word order is free.
Later on, I observed a similar phenomenon in Russian: although Russian
nouns inflect for case, one thing I initially found puzzling was the
fact that the nominative and accusative cases of many nouns have
identical surface forms. Since Russian has free word order, I wondered
how one would be able to tell which one is the subject and which the
object if one couldn't tell between a nominative form and an accusative
form! And then I remembered animacy: if one of the NPs is animate, then
it is most likely the subject, and therefore the inanimate NP must be
the object. So it didn't matter that, morphologically speaking, you
couldn't distinguish whether inanimate the NP was nominative or
accusative; animacy resolves the ambiguity. And sure enough, it was the
inanimate nouns (masculine & neuter) that had identical forms for
nominative and accusative.
But when an *animate* NP was the object, then it took on a distinct
accusative ending -- which is identical to the *genitive* ending! This
makes sense since when both NPs in a transitive clause are animate,
animacy can no longer distinguish between them, so some other kind of
marking was necessary. Now, I'm no expert in Slavic historical
linguistics, but I found it interesting that the animate accusative case
has the same forms as the genitive case -- it almost seems as though
there is no "native" accusative form at all (for masc/neut. nouns), but
the genitive case is just being "borrowed" to serve as a distinct case
from the default (nominative) when the clause has two animate NPs.
Interestingly enough, the feminine nouns do have distinct
nominative/accusative endings, and the accusative ending is not the same
as the genitive. Why this odd difference from the masc/neut nouns? I
don't really know, though I have my theories.
T
--
Fact is stranger than fiction.
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: the Deep Structures of Language
Posted by: "Adnan Majid" dsama...@gmail.com
Date: Thu Sep 19, 2013 9:22 pm ((PDT))
That's a very cool observation T,
That's very similar to Bengali, a SOV language which uses an object
marker *only
if the object is animate.* So one would say "Girl ball kick" vs "Girl
boy-ke kick." Furthermore, Bengali allows for a certain amount of word
order flexibility, so though it may sound a little odd, it would still be
comprehensible to express these statements as OSV - "Ball girl kick" and
"Boy-ke girl kick." There's no ambiguity in "Ball girl kick" because the
girl's animacy is assumed.
And take a look at the classic Indo-European languages, Latin, Greek, and
Sanskrit. In each language more often than not, there is no difference
between the neuter nominative and the neuter accusative! Maybe that's
because neuter nouns happen to predominantly be inanimate ones.
Adnan
On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 4:05 PM, H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 12:07:59PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
> > On 18 September 2013 11:54, Paul Schleitwiler, FCM
> > <pjschleitwiler...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Interesting article.
> > > How to Understand the Deep Structures of Language
> > > Scientific American
> > > Joshua K. Hartshorne September 17, 2013 7:00 AM
> > >
> http://news.yahoo.com/understand-deep-structures-language-110000347.html
> >
> > Quote: "The researchers also asked people to describe in gestures an
> > event in which a girl kicked a boy. Since both boys and girls are
> > capable of kicking, it's very possible to be confused about who kicked
> > who. And now participants were much more likely to describe (in
> > gesture) the girl, then the kicking event, and then the boy -- that
> > is, they switched to an SVO order. This was true (with a few
> > complications which you can read about in the paper) whether the
> > participant was a native speaker of English (an SVO language) or a
> > native speaker of Korean or Japanese (SOV languages)."
> >
> > This raises the question: is there a language that switches between
> > SOV and SVO based on an animacy distinction? And if not, who's going
> > to make one?
> [...]
>
> Finally got around to reading this article today. Very interesting
> indeed!
>
> Speaking of animacy... I remember the first time I read about MRL
> languages and wondered how on earth the speakers would be able to make
> any sense of each other, since there is no way to tell who did something
> to whom. Then I read about animacy distinctions: if a clause contains
> two NPs, and one is animate and the other is not, then chances are the
> verb is performed by the animate NP, so neither NPs need to be marked
> for their roles, even when word order is free.
>
> Later on, I observed a similar phenomenon in Russian: although Russian
> nouns inflect for case, one thing I initially found puzzling was the
> fact that the nominative and accusative cases of many nouns have
> identical surface forms. Since Russian has free word order, I wondered
> how one would be able to tell which one is the subject and which the
> object if one couldn't tell between a nominative form and an accusative
> form! And then I remembered animacy: if one of the NPs is animate, then
> it is most likely the subject, and therefore the inanimate NP must be
> the object. So it didn't matter that, morphologically speaking, you
> couldn't distinguish whether inanimate the NP was nominative or
> accusative; animacy resolves the ambiguity. And sure enough, it was the
> inanimate nouns (masculine & neuter) that had identical forms for
> nominative and accusative.
>
> But when an *animate* NP was the object, then it took on a distinct
> accusative ending -- which is identical to the *genitive* ending! This
> makes sense since when both NPs in a transitive clause are animate,
> animacy can no longer distinguish between them, so some other kind of
> marking was necessary. Now, I'm no expert in Slavic historical
> linguistics, but I found it interesting that the animate accusative case
> has the same forms as the genitive case -- it almost seems as though
> there is no "native" accusative form at all (for masc/neut. nouns), but
> the genitive case is just being "borrowed" to serve as a distinct case
> from the default (nominative) when the clause has two animate NPs.
>
> Interestingly enough, the feminine nouns do have distinct
> nominative/accusative endings, and the accusative ending is not the same
> as the genitive. Why this odd difference from the masc/neut nouns? I
> don't really know, though I have my theories.
>
>
> T
>
> --
> Fact is stranger than fiction.
>
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
2c. Re: the Deep Structures of Language
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" leolucas1...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Sep 20, 2013 5:29 am ((PDT))
2013/9/19 H. S. Teoh <hst...@quickfur.ath.cx>:
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 12:07:59PM -0600, Logan Kearsley wrote:
>> On 18 September 2013 11:54, Paul Schleitwiler, FCM
>> <pjschleitwiler...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Interesting article.
>> > How to Understand the Deep Structures of Language
>> > Scientific American
>> > Joshua K. Hartshorne September 17, 2013 7:00 AM
>> > http://news.yahoo.com/understand-deep-structures-language-110000347.html
>>
>> Quote: "The researchers also asked people to describe in gestures an
>> event in which a girl kicked a boy. Since both boys and girls are
>> capable of kicking, it's very possible to be confused about who kicked
>> who. And now participants were much more likely to describe (in
>> gesture) the girl, then the kicking event, and then the boy -- that
>> is, they switched to an SVO order. This was true (with a few
>> complications which you can read about in the paper) whether the
>> participant was a native speaker of English (an SVO language) or a
>> native speaker of Korean or Japanese (SOV languages)."
I wonder if the choice for SVO order in this case is due to the
real-life temporal order.
Até mais!
Leonardo
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3. A directionality operator for word coining
Posted by: "Daniel Bowman" danny.c.bow...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Sep 20, 2013 5:47 am ((PDT))
Hi All,
I recently had an idea - not sure what to call it because I initially
conceptualized it in mathematical terms rather than linguistic - so maybe after
I describe it someone can suggest a linguistic term.
Suppose I have a word "sarhala" which means "to glow." In this case, the verb
denotes the giving off of light (or, the outward movement of light from the
object).
Suppose I then added the prefix "ar" which reversed the implied directionality
of the verb.
So "ar-sarhala" would mean "to be illuminated" (the inward movement of light
towards the object)
Assuming we have a VSO word order:
Sarhala at. "It glows"
but
Ar-sarhala at. "It is illuminated."
and
Ar-sarhala il at.
"That thing [il] causes it to be illuminated." I.e. a light source [il] causes
the object to become illuminated.
This operation is not a simple transition from active to passive voice, I
think, since it can also convert a more or less intransitive verb (glow) to a
transitive verb (illuminate). I imagine this sort of construction could arise
from an adposition denoting movement (perhaps "ar" originally meant "moving
outward").
Do any of your conlangs have a similar construction? Any natlangs?
I expect this construction is rather common, actually.
Danny
Messages in this topic (1)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
