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There are 13 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
From: Sylvia Sotomayor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. bye
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Pronouns in Split Ergative systems
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Pronouns in Split Ergative systems
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: A few phonetics-related q's
From: Tamas Racsko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:01:01 -0500
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: "Ph. D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > Rodlox wrote:
> > > what is the difference between Subjects, Objects, and
> > > something that might be confused with them?
> >
> > Is Rodlox American? Is the education system where he
> > lives so bad?
I'll try to ignore this rather gratuitous comment. As far as
the logic of this complaint is concerned, those of us on the
list who are actual professional linguists might as well say
the same thing of many of the rest who can't tell their EPP
from their ECM, and again from their OCP -- but we generally
don't, because we realize that that's not the point of the Conlang
list, and that there are other things in the world besides linguistics
which are interesting and worth investing time in, too.
> [...]
> > This is nothing against Rodlox. He isn't responsible if he
> > wasn't given that information before. But I shudder at the
> > kind of education that leaves such simple (and necessary
> > if you want to be able to even begin analysing a sentence)
> > notions out.
>
> 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.
This American is only 25, a rather recent product
of its public education system, and the teaching of basic
grammatical principles was still firmly in place during
my whole primary and secondary education. I realize this
is not the case in all places, but this just goes to show
that one cannot generalize easily about an "American"
education system. Public education in the US is profoundly
decentralized: the existence of a fad in one school
district in a city may find the contrary tendency in
an immediately neighboring school-district in the same
city.
==========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:20:39 -0400
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
David Peterson wrote:
> Trebor wrote:
>
> << I don't know how I'm going to get my hands on a Braille copy of
> _Describing
> Morphosyntax_, unfortunately, but maybe you guys could help?>>
>
> I don't know if you're at or associated with a university, but I remember
> when I
> was at Berkeley and working for the DSP (Disabled Students Program), if
> someone
> who was visually impaired wanted a given text, no matter what it was, they
> would
> either come up with a Braille or spoken version of the book--free of
> charge.
Sometimes it's possible to find a volunteer reader; Payne would require
someone with linguistic knowledge because of terminology, the foreign lang.
examples, phonetic stuff, etc. I wrote to Trebor that I emailed Cambridge
U.P. to ask about a Braille or audio version-- of course he may already have
thought of that.....
An invaluable resource whose name I forget and which I'd love to
> have
> is a book that gives every type of verb in American English. I think
> there
> are something
> like 150 different types of verbs that this author identifies, and she (I
> know the author
> is female) gives examples of each and how specifies how exactly they're
> different.
Can you summon up any specifics or examples from the memory banks? 150 seems
an awful lot. Now that I think of it, someone on the List (sorry, I forget
who) has been doing complicated diagrams of verbs wrt what can occur with
what (is it Venn diagrams? or something like that??) Perhaps that's what
your author was doing?
There's also Martin Joos's old "The English Verb" (1950s/early 60s), based
on a fictional "trial transcript" in some British novel. Very thorough, but
quite traditional (and very British). I have a copy somewhere..........
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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:51:25 EDT
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
Roger wrote:
<<Can you summon up any specifics or examples from the memory banks? 150
seems
an awful lot.>>
It was an awful lot (and I seem to remember the exact number being something
like 176),
but it's not like she was coming up with categories like "transitive" and
"ditransitive", etc.
She was grouping verbs together that worked the same in *all* sentences. So
here are two
similar examples:
(1) "to like"
(a) I like cookies.
(b) I like to eat.
(c) I like for him to read.
(d) ?I like him to read.
(e) I like that he's okay with that.
(2) "to want"
(a) I want cookies.
(b) I want to eat.
(c) I want for him to read.
(d) I want him to read.
(e) *I want that he's okay with that.
Based on the examples above, these two verbs, though very similar,
form two distinct classes. This is because (1e) is okay but (2e) isn't.
( (2d) is negligible. I think it's bad, but others might not. Also, if
you
add a "would" it becomes grammatical in all dialects, I believe.) Now
compare "like" to "hate":
(3) "to hate"
(a) I hate cookies.
(b) I hate to eat.
(c) I hate for him to read.
(d) *I hate him to read.
(e) I hate that he's okay with that.
I'm *pretty* sure that (3d) is bad in all dialects, and adding "would"
doesn't
make it any better. So that's a third class. These are the kind of
miniscule
distinctions that the author in question draws attention to. And the book
is,
essentially, just a big list of these, with a note about the other verbs that
work
*exactly* like the verb being described. Any of the linguists on the list
know
what book I'm talking about?
-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]
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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:11:28 -0500
From: "Thomas R. Wier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Elliott Lash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> I really think this depends on the school and the
> state and the specific teacher. I hate the way the
> Europeans on this list seem to think that ALL American
> schools will be horrible, no matter what.
I sympathize; but to be fair, there are only a few such people on
the list, particularly of a Gallic nature, and there are other
Europeans who've openly criticized that reasoning. I mean, it could be
worse. I just came back to the States from three weeks in Germany,
where one particularly obnoxious German directly and explicitly
said I was personally to blame for the firebombing of Frankfurt and
other cities during the War. But not all Germans are bigots like that,
and not all Europeans make hopelessly superficial generalizations about
other countries.
(Please forgive me if I sound bitter. I'm particularly sick of meeting
people from abroad who think they know a lot about America but can't
even get Bush's name right -- virtually every American knows you can't
be called "Jr." if your father's middle names are not identical!)
> Both my
> Elimentary School, Middle School and High School
> English classes spent time talking about Grammar. And
> I knew about Subjects, Objects and all the essential
> before I became a conlanger and a linguist. I'd
> appreciate a little less broad generalizations.
I second that. Based on the descriptions I have heard of some European
highschools, most are far worse than the one I received from my
public school in Houston, where 95-100% of all graduating
classes go on to some form of higher education, overwhelmingly four-year
universities. For most people, their junior and senior years were
spent in various kinds of college-level courses in the sciences and
humanities, and by passing advanced placement tests, we received
credit as if in college.
==========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:26:32 -0700
From: Sylvia Sotomayor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
On Monday 13 September 2004 21:51, David Peterson wrote:
> Trebor wrote:
>
> << I don't know how I'm going to get my hands on a Braille copy of
> _Describing
> Morphosyntax_, unfortunately, but maybe you guys could help?>>
> An invaluable resource whose name I forget and which I'd love
> to have
> is a book that gives every type of verb in American English. I think
> there are something
> like 150 different types of verbs that this author identifies, and she (I
> know the author
> is female) gives examples of each and how specifies how exactly they're
> different.
> That's what to do with verbs, in my opinion.
>
This wouldn't be _English Verb Classes and Alternations_ by Beth Levin, U
Chicago Press 1993 0-226-47532-8 (cloth) 0-226-47533-6 (paper), would it?
It's a useful book even for languages that don't have verbs. :-)
--
Sylvia Sotomayor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
KÃlen language info can be found at:
http://home.netcom.com/~sylvia1/Kelen/kelen.html
This post may contain the following:
à (a-acute) à (e-acute) à (i-acute)
à (o-acute) à (u-acute) à (n-tilde)
Ãe Ãarra anmÃrienne cà Ãe reharra anmÃrienne lÃ;
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Message: 6
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 03:17:44 -0400
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:34:32 +0200, Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Quoting Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>> En rÃponse à Andreas Johansson :
>>
>> >* This is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely curious as to why
>> > you apparently see a need for primary schools to teach kids how to
>> > analyze sentences in their native language.
>>
>> Because that's the only way to make them able to reliably and
>> consistently build and understand complex sentences in their own
>> language. I remember reading the results of a survey that proved that
>> illiteracy was caused in part by a lack of teaching the basic analytic
>> tools necessary to analyse sentences in one's native tongue. It was in
>> dead tree form, so I don't have a link to it (nor do I have it here).
>> Note that I'm referring to illiteracy here (the inability to understand
>> texts of medium to high complexity), not analphabetism, which has other
>> causes.
>
>I must say this much surprises me. Particularly since I know plenty of
>people who could not grammatically dissect the simplest sentence (altho
>they likely could for a while during their school years), yet can read and
>write texts of highish complexity perfectly well.
>
>It also seems a priori unexpected - why would not one's subconscious grasp
>of one's native grammar suffice, when it clearly does for speaking? At
>least I "say" what I'm going to write in my head as I type it, which makes
>it hard for me to believe the mental processes involved in the production
>of written and spoken texts are _that_ different.
Spoken language is different from written language.
>> If your goal is just to allow all children to write SMS messages on their
>> mobiles, then you're right that this is unnecessary. I personally think
>> literacy should be a little higher than that.
>
>I would too, but I had never in my life suspected that that sort of
>conscious grammatical understanding would be necessary or even
>particularly helpful for achieving it.
I've experienced this. In the gymnasium school (age 15 to 20), we had a
very tough German teacher, that is, a teacher who teached us much of
grammar, quite exceptional here in Switzerland (at least by impressionistic
comparison to Linguistics university students). When we got a written text
back, it used to be all red because of his corrections, even if it were
written by the best students. He made us analyze thoroughly our errors,
syntactical errors, logical errors, stylistical errors, errors of word
choice, etc. We all hated it, but the awareness of syntactical ambiguities
proved to be very useful for the better domination of the written language.
I believe that the same effect can be achieved by years of reading practice.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
j. 'mach' wust
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Message: 7
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:10:57 +0200
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: bye
aside from a few posts helping me with conlanging, everything else in reply
to me has almost instantaneously devolved into a mud-slinging match of
insults to various schools.
therefore - fare-thee-well.
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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:05:02 +0100
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Pronouns in Split Ergative systems
]
>
> Anyway, what kind of system were you picturing?
>
I tried to describe it, but obviously my description wasn't very good.
:) I know some languages have split ergativity based on languages, the
heirarchy being something like this:
1<2<3 (verb marking) < 1 < 2 < 3 (pronoun system) < Proper nouns <
people < animals < plants < inanimates etc....
Wherever the split occurs, what's left of the split tends to be
accusative, and what's to the right tends to be ergatively marked. My
question was, suppose I place the split so that nouns referring to
people take accusative marking and nouns referring to non-people take
ergative marking. Are there any natural languages with a split like this
that also exhibit the same animacy split in the pronoun system? The
hierarchy (from Describing Morphosyntax) would seem to suggest that in
such cases the pronoun system would be completely accusative, but I
don't know if this is an absolute universal or one of those 99% of
languages.... type universals.
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Message: 9
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:23:55 +0100
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Pronouns in Split Ergative systems
Based on animacy... mental hiccup. :)
> :) I know some languages have split ergativity based on languages, the
> heirarchy being something like this:
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Message: 10
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 04:56:20 EDT
From: David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
Sylvia the Magnificent wrote:
<<This wouldn't be _English Verb Classes and Alternations_ by Beth Levin, U
Chicago Press 1993 0-226-47532-8 (cloth) 0-226-47533-6 (paper), would it?
It's a useful book even for languages that don't have verbs. :-)>>
That's *exactly* it! Thank you so much! Furthermore, it's available via
Amazon fairly cheap--and even cheaper in the used & new section:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226475336/qid=1095151918/sr=8-1
/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-0607994-4263220?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Though not for long, as I'm ordering it right now as I type. ;)
Thanks again!
-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]
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Message: 11
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:01:49 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:34:32 +0200, Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >It also seems a priori unexpected - why would not one's subconscious grasp
> >of one's native grammar suffice, when it clearly does for speaking? At
> >least I "say" what I'm going to write in my head as I type it, which makes
> >it hard for me to believe the mental processes involved in the production
> >of written and spoken texts are _that_ different.
>
> Spoken language is different from written language.
I believe I implied as much. Question is, different to what degree, and in what
respects. As far as my native Swedish is concerned, there seems to be very
little in the way of _grammatical_ differences - the chief differences are of
style and of higher level structure (eg, multi-clause sentences being more
common in writing).
I certainly do not normally carry out any conscious grammatical analyses when
writing a Swedish text. If having been taught formal grammar helps here, it
must be by sharpening one's subconscious linguistic competence.
> >> If your goal is just to allow all children to write SMS messages on their
> >> mobiles, then you're right that this is unnecessary. I personally think
> >> literacy should be a little higher than that.
> >
> >I would too, but I had never in my life suspected that that sort of
> >conscious grammatical understanding would be necessary or even
> >particularly helpful for achieving it.
>
> I've experienced this. In the gymnasium school (age 15 to 20), we had a
> very tough German teacher, that is, a teacher who teached us much of
> grammar, quite exceptional here in Switzerland (at least by impressionistic
> comparison to Linguistics university students). When we got a written text
> back, it used to be all red because of his corrections, even if it were
> written by the best students. He made us analyze thoroughly our errors,
> syntactical errors, logical errors, stylistical errors, errors of word
> choice, etc. We all hated it, but the awareness of syntactical ambiguities
> proved to be very useful for the better domination of the written language.
>
> I believe that the same effect can be achieved by years of reading practice.
The later might apply to me - in my early school years, my writing (particularly
spelling) was way below par, while by gymnasium age (16-19) it was well above*,
and I read _alot_ in the intervening years.
Anyway, of the types of errors you mention, only syntactical ones would seem
here relevant - at the very least, I'm gonna take plenty of convincing to
believe that teaching formal grammar helps against stylistical or lexical
errors, and I'm highly skeptical on logical ones too. The null hypothesis must
be that they're better fought by teaching the students logic and stylistics,
and expanding their vocabularies.
* If I'm forgiven for a possibly amusing anecdote, I once had a gymnasium essay
downgraded on the grounds it used "too advanced language"; it was to be written
as for inclusion in a youth magazine, and my teacher felt it was too tough for
the typical reader of such. My protests to the effect this was an insult to the
literacy of young people were rejected.
Andreas
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Message: 12
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:24:21 +0200
From: Tamas Racsko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A few phonetics-related q's
On 13 Sep 2004 Trebor Jung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In a word like /anta/, would it be more likely that it's pronounced [anda]
> or [an_0ta]?
IMHO you should make first a more principal decision: Do you
prefer regressive or progressive assimilation? The actual
likelihood is based on this underlying liguistic preference.
However, in Hungarian -- which is uses basically progressive
assimilation -- nasals are not subject of voice assimilation at
all, therefore /anta/ = [anta] is also possible. (And even [a~ta]
is likely, see later.)
Btw you said that yout conlang is derived from English. In this
case, there must be a sudden change to adopt progressive
assimilation. (I guess eg. strong Slavic-Hungarian substratum
effect.)
> If a language has a rule (a) /s/ is [S] before /i/ and (b) /s/ is [z]
> intervocalically, would it be more likely that a word like /asi/ be
> pronounced [azi] or [aZi] or even [aSi]?
English gives examples of [aS] in |Asia| and of [aZ] in |casual|.
In Hugarian |S| > |Z| voicing is tipical. My preference would be
[aZi], less [aSi] and least [azi].
However, probably, you might assign a time-scale to sound
changes, e.g. whether intervocalic voicing is happened earlier or
later than pre-iotic palatalization. If it was earlier (as AFAIK
e.g. in Romance), you should consider the possiblity of
intervocalic [S] > [Z] voicing. It it was later, the likelihood of
a pre-iotic [z] > [Z] change is in question.
> French nasal vowels can differ from their oral counterparts, cf. [i] ~
> [e~]. Is there an articulatory/acoustic precedence for this? What are some
> oral-nasal correspondances for /i/, /e/, /A/, etc.?
There are also subphonemic nasal vowels in Hungary: orals are
usually pronounced as nasals before a nasal consonant, especially,
before a consonant cluster starting with a nasal. Moreover, in
sequence VNS (where V=vowel, N=nasal consonant, S=sibilant) nasal
consonant is regularly assimilated into the vowel as a nasal
acoustic feature, e.g. VNS > V~S. During these nasalizations, the
original quality of the vowel is retained (they are allophones, not
phonemes, though).
I think there was rather a phoneme merging in French. I am not
well-informed in French phonetics, but my textbooks mention a
present /2~/ > /e~/ change and that would be a later step in the
merging process.
Similarly Old Slav /e~/ and /o~/ merged into one nasal phoneme
(let's say /@~/) in Old Polish, and that was split according to the
vowel length: short nasal vowel became front /E~/ and the long
variant became /O~/.
However it seems that there is an articulatory precedence that
causes merging the nasal vowels. Nasal vowels have less dispersion
of contrast than oral ones, therefore masals are merged more often.
Cf. a paper on Polish nasals
<http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/Papers/sanders-wccfl21.pdf>.
Btw, if you use nasal vowels, /anta/ in the first question would
be realized also as [a~ta].
> How could vowel harmony (any type) develop in a language?
In Uralic branch, the back ~ front alternation seems to be an old
derivational tool, and it is still vivid in Hungarian; e.g. root
pair |gur-| ~ |gör|: |gurít| 'to roll, trundle', |gördít| 'to
wheel, roll, push'; root pair |ker- ~ kör| ~ |kar-|: |kerék|
'wheel' ~ |karika| 'ring, circle' etc. (Not counting the obvious
near-distant contrast in demonstrative pairs like, |ez| 'this' ~
|az| 'that', |itt| 'here' ~ |ott| 'there' etc.)
IMHO the opposition of back ~ front variants was emphasized that
suffixes (bound morphemes) were joined in their harmonic form.
----
For some of your previous questions:
> How could I represent /K/ and /tK)/ as non-digraphs?
If you do not want to use modified Latin letters, I would propose
a compromise between previous proposals: |x| for /K/ (|x| is used
both for [S] in some languages, and [S] is a [-lateral] variant of
postalveolar [K]; moreover |x| is obvious for [x] which is also a
fricative and evokes the "hissing" characteristics of /K/), and |j|
for /tK/ (|j| conveys an affricate in many languages, the voice
variant of [tS]; and the latter is a non-lateral counterpart for
/tK/).
> Any other [Spanish] dialects have <y> as /dZ/?
I heard Julio Iglesias singing on the TV yesterday. For my
Hungarized
ears, he pronounced |yo| after a pause with [J\j\], i.e. a voiced
palatal
affricate. (N.B. This sound is very familiar to me, since Hungarian
|gy| is
phonetically rather an affricate [J\j\] than a stop [J\].)
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Message: 13
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:59:25 +0200
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
En rÃponse à Elliott Lash :
> I really think this depends on the school and the
>state and the specific teacher. I hate the way the
>Europeans on this list seem to think that ALL American
>schools will be horrible, no matter what. Both my
>Elimentary School, Middle School and High School
>English classes spent time talking about Grammar. And
>I knew about Subjects, Objects and all the essential
>before I became a conlanger and a linguist. I'd
>appreciate a little less broad generalizations.
>
> Thank you.
And I hate when people use their own personal experience to state: "it
isn't that bad", when I've read various surveys proving that despite some
exceptions due to the decentralised nature of the education in the US, in
*average* the situation *is* bad, and it's not improving (it may not be
getting worse, but it's not getting better).
I *know* the education system in the US is decentralised. I *know* there
are good schools in the US. But I also *know* that they are in the
minority. I am *not* overgeneralising here. If you choose randomly a school
in the US, you're more likely to find insufficient education rather than
sufficient one (especially among public schools, and I believe because of
lack of money rather than anything else). But it's true that if you find a
good school, it's likely to be very good. But then, maybe I just have
higher expectations regarding education that you all have.
As for the overrepresentation of people coming from good US schools here,
remember that conlangers are hardly a representative group.
So, next time, before jumping at my throat, you may think a bit before (I'm
not talking to Elliot alone here). I don't have the habit of talking about
what I know nothing about. And I was just genuinely surprised by the
question Rodlox asked, which should indicate that I had a higher opinion of
the US education system*s* than you seem to think I have. But I must say
it's just one more piece of circumstancial evidence that I got that proves
that *in average*, the US education level in primary and secondary schools
is not good enough.
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
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