------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
$9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/J8kdrA/y20IAA/yQLSAA/GSaulB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
There are 8 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: new conlang- Behuenagwon
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: "Isaac A. Penzev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: [4:] ~ [r]
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language
From: "Isaac A. Penzev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Those darn curly subscripts (was: More orthographic miscellanea)
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: sexual dimorphism( was: So-called Alternative Lifestyles)
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 04:23:33 EDT
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: new conlang- Behuenagwon
[Note to List: I accidentally sent a private message to CONLANG. I was
just telling Adrian the HTML for opening a blank window with a link. I
would've apologized for the mistake, but, well, that would've been a
message, and we only get five!]
Rodlox wrote:
<<on thinking it over, I suspect that "clay" would be the subject...yes?>>
Uhh...no. Direct object. The thing affected by the verb. If the clay
were
the subject, it'd be the one baking *something else*. The only way it could
be a subject would be if there were a kind of middle voice thing going on,
e.g., "That clay is baking in the sun."
Anyway, on reading through your replies, I think that you're a long, long
way off from understanding my reply, or even being able to adequately
describe what it is your language is doing. Here's what I recommend:
(1) Keep working on your languages (and keep records!);
(2) Read through the list; try to learn stuff;
(3) Find an elementary linguistics textbook and study it.
Eventually you'll be able to understand the various things we've been talking
about. But do keep records of what you're doing now, 'cause I'm afraid once
you do learn about basic linguistics it might eliminate the really bizarre
stuff
you're doing now.
Anyway, commenting on something you wrote...
<<well, if I make 'ea into simply "sun" (since it's already following "[to]
bake"...then
what happens when "sun" follows "cold"?>>
You have "to bake" as a verbal prefix, and then /-'ea/ as a modifier.
Rather than
thinking of it as simply "sun", you might think of it as a marker of source.
So rather
than source being just the sun, say, it could be the weather in general.
So, when /-'ea/
followed "cold", it could mean "to freeze in cold weather". That's the idea
I had.
Anyway, if you really wanted to define all these suffixes as *things*,
though, it might not
even be useful to have them be suffixes. Might as well make each one a
separate word,
and rather than trying to string them together into larger words, you can
just keep them
separate, like Chinese. It'd certainly make processing everything easier.
-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
[This message contained attachments]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:53:32 +0300
From: "Isaac A. Penzev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
Ph. D. wrote:
> In the United States, the education establishment in the
> public schools (i.e. primary and secondary schools) considers
> it old-fashioned to teach grammatical concepts such as
> subject and object and how to analyse a sentence.
Wow! I didn't know the thing were *SO* bad in the States :((((
Yitzik
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 04:54:17 EDT
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language
Roger wrote:
<<It seems to be true that we don't
favor such languages (or do we, and I just haven't encountered many?); are
we so much in love with complexity?
Any thoughts or comments?� Any suggestions as to how an apparently
uncomplex language might be jazzed up?>>
I have a somewhat analytical language I haven't done much with (Njaama),
but I too have been bitten by the Southeast Asian-style language bug. I
believe I even once posted something about the tonal system to the list
(specifically,
how I derived the tones. The proto forms are, just like yours,
(C)V(C(V(C))).
I was inspired mainly by two things that I wanted to try out:
(1) An animacy system (with an inverse marker, and all that);
(2) A classifier system like Chinese, but stretching it to see what the
possibilities are.
Along with that are some ideas I aquired from ASL.
Anyway, another reason I wanted to do this was to get back to my "roots"
(sounds
peculiar to say that) and get back and do some syntax. Starting with
Zhyler, I sort
of lost my syntactic creativity as I experimented with all kinds of
morphology. Before
that I used to actually sit there and diagram sentences and try out syntactic
ideas I
came up with. This is where complexity and "jazzing up" can come into an
analytical
language: Syntactic mazes. Some things to look at might be...
(1) Island Constraints. These invisible constraints prevent "movement", if
you believe
in movement. A good example comes from the Simpsons: "You know what I blame
this on the breakdown of? Society." The "what" comes from the PP headed
by "of".
Anyway, if you look these up, there are certain things that are supposed to
be absolutely
and totally illegal. For example, think of the sentence, "You said you sent
who what?!"
That works, but imagine if you wanted to say, "Who did you say sent what?"
That's
grammatical, but not if it comes from the sentence above. That's because
there's
apparently some sort of island that the "who" can't be pulled out of. This
apparently
holds for a lot of languages. What would be interesting is if a language
broke one or
more of these island constraints, and *how* they broke them.
(2) Word order. A linguist here at UCSD, Masha Polinsky, said that there is
no such
thing as a purely SVO language. There are SVO languages that behave like
VSO languages
in some places, and SVO languages that behave like SOV languages in some
places.
German would be an example of the latter. I know that my language Njaama is
an
SVO language that acts like an SOV language in certain places. An
interesting thing to
work on would be to work on a way for one of these other word order patterns
to
arise in your SVO language. For instance, where would it show up and why?
What
implications would this have? Based on the orderings you listed above, it
seems like
your language is a head-final language, which would suggest that the buried
word
order would be SOV. This could mean that the verb in the second position
could be
doing some interesting things, and that verbs could appear finally for some
reason in
some places.
(3) Compounding and relative clauses. Compounding is how my current SEA
project
(the language is called Sheli) is going to build a lot of its vocabulary
(well, that and
zero-derivation). Compounding always seems to have a lot in common with
sentence
structure. One thing I've never had the chutzpah (sp?) to try is a language
where
relative clauses are nothing more than complex NP's. Inflection makes it
easy, though.
Doing this with an analytical language would be *very* interesting, since all
the cues
would have to be syntactic (or possibly supersegmental...?).
(4) Compounding again. Another way to make things interesting would be to
come
up with a bunch of crazy compounds. So maybe "cloud stomach" is the word
for
"sea-sickness". Of course, in a relay you'd have to gloss the whole thing
as "sea-sickness",
since you can't figure it out from "cloud" and "stomach", but still...
(5) Pronouns. Zero-derivation does a lot of the derivational footwork in an
analytical
language. Why not make it do more? Say you have a sentence like this:
Quick, brown fox jump head lazy, yellow dog.
Now let's say you want to keep talking about the fox. Why not refer to him
as "brown"?
Or "quick"? Or how about "jump head dog" (e.g., "the one who jumped over
the dog").
It's kind of like metonymy, but taken to an extreme. Hey, that can lead to
some fun
allegory--where you literally have two stories working right on top of each
other.
Anyway, those are some ideas I had. I've hit a little road bump with Sheli,
but once I get
past it, I'll start posting on it.
-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
[This message contained attachments]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 4
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 10:10:11 +0100
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [4:] ~ [r]
Staving Trebor Jung:
>Since [4] is a tap, and [r] is a trill, wouldn't [4:] be essentially the
>same as [r]? Or is there a difference?
I've treated it that way in Khanga�yagon. There is a gemmination rune in
the bukhstav alphabet, and [r] is written with the rune for [4] followed by
the gemmination rune.
Pete
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 5
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:04:05 +0300
From: "Isaac A. Penzev" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language
Roger Mills jazdy:
> The person who received my version found it easy to translate (as I knew
it
> would be), and commented that likes analytical languages, "wish[ing] they
> were more popular among conlangers." It seems to be true that we don't
> favor such languages (or do we, and I just haven't encountered many?); are
> we so much in love with complexity?
I'm afraid most ppl here are afraid to present anything too much analytical
because the others would consider their projects "primitive" or "naive". A
year ago I had an idea for a similar project but then changed to smth
else...
Yitzik
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 6
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:52:18 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Those darn curly subscripts (was: More orthographic miscellanea)
Quoting Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> But it would surely have been very strange to have two diacritics which
> look so similar and not treat them the same way. Romanian has no |ç|
> (c-cedilla), so putting a comma below |s| and |t| is quite consistent. But
> have a cedilla beneath |c| and a comma beneath |s| would be a tad odd.
> Even if the Turks had done this, all but the pedantic would surely have
> actually written the things the same way.
In practice, the Turks do not seem to much care exactly how their diacritics are
realized; I saw considerable variation in the week I was there.
Some texts even realized all diacritics, except the dot above the dotted i, as
either a macron-above or macron-below.
Andreas
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 7
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:00:28 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: sexual dimorphism( was: So-called Alternative Lifestyles)
Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Don't know about the Meghean-speakers. I don't even know if homosexuality
> occurs
> > among them, but since sexual dimorphism is less pronounced among them than
> among
> > humans, it would seem likely.
>
> What do you mean by "sexual dimorphism is less pronounced among them"?
> Does it refer to secondary gender characteristics?
"Sexual dimorphism" refers to anatomical differences between the sexes,
particularly ones not directly related to sexual functions.
In this case, the chief difference as compared to humans is that elven females
are on average only marginally smaller and weaker than males, and have what
human males might characterize as a disappointing lack of curves. Elves of both
sexes are decidedly thinly built by human standards. Their average height is
about the same as that for men in neighbouring human communities.
Andreas
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 8
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:01:46 +0200
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
En r�ponse � Joe :
>Personally, I'd agree with that
So basically, you're saying that it's acceptable to be unable to analyse
your own sentences. I can't agree with that.
> - but what about in language classes?
Surely English classes for English speakers *are* language classes ;) .
>Surely it's neccesary to learn it there.(though, having said that, I've
>just remembered that the main language learned is Spanish, which doesn't
>have cases...)
The more useful those concepts are then! The concepts of subject and object
are mainly useful in Indo-European languages without cases, where you
cannot just indicate the noun's case to know its function.
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
[This message contained attachments]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
