------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~-->
Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar.
Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/GSaulB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
There are 25 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: A few phonetics-related q's
From: Michael Poxon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Italic Greek
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: bye
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. English word order and bumper stickers
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: English word order and bumper stickers
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. tongue twisters
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: English word order and bumper stickers
From: Elliott Lash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: tongue twisters
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Re: English word order and bumper stickers
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
19. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
20. Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Apollo Hogan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
21. Re: Conlang flag voting
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
22. Hebrew Dictionaries
From: David H <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
23. Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
From: Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
24. Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
25. Re: ! Re: Subject / Object / ?
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:03:01 +0100
From: Michael Poxon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A few phonetics-related q's
Depends what sound/stress rules you posit. In your example, all the phonemes
seem to be voiced apart from /t/ so I'd say that it'd get assimilated to /d/
resulting in /anda/ > /adda/?... who knows?
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Mills" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 12:30 AM
Subject: Re: A few phonetics-related q's
> Trebor wrote:
>
> > In a word like /anta/, would it be more likely that it's pronounced
[anda]
> > or [an_0ta]?
>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:14:38 +0200
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
En r�ponse � Christian Thalmann :
>But in spoken French, from what I've heard, the subject
>vs object distinction is even marked with a case suffix!
>Observe: /lOm/ "the man (ACC)", /lOmi/ "the man (NOM)",
>as in /lOmi vwa lotROm/ "the man sees the other man". ;-)
That's incorrect. The /i/ you're referring to (written "il") is not a
suffix to the previous word but a prefix to the verb! It's easy to check:
there's one big intangible rule in Spoken French, which is that the stress
marks the *last* syllable of the phrase (stress is phrase-based rather than
word-based in French). Anything after the stress belongs to the *next*
phrase. And if you add stress to your phonetic description (otherwise
correct), you arrive at:
/'lOm i'vwa lot'ROm/. The /i/ is a subject-agreement prefix to the verb (if
you don't believe it, ask a French person to speak slowly. Most will do
that by exaggerating pauses between phrases, and will cut the sentence as
such: /'lOm/, /i'vwa/, /lot'ROm/. It wouldn't be like that if the /i/
belonged to the previous phrase). Spoken French is a polysynthetic
language, which like many other polysynthetic languages indicates a lot of
the sentence's structure through affixes on the verb (mostly prefixes but
also a few suffixes). The phrases whose functions are indicated on the verb
often don't receive any special function marking (indirect object do
though). Agreement and word order are normally enough. And for the phrases
whose functions are not indicated on the verb, they receive case prefixes
to indicate their function (which are misnamed as "prepositions" ;)) ).
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
[This message contained attachments]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:28:54 +0200
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
On Monday 13 September 2004 02:53, 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.
And how will you learn about how your own language works
syntactically to avoid syntax mistakes? OTOH, English has
no declension, therefore you cannot run into any errors
there. We've learnt that stuff in second or third grade,
when I was 8 or 9 or so. It was a pain to learn because of
the "what": nominative "who or what", genitive "whose",
dative "to whom", accusative "to whom or what". When you
haven't got any feeling for language, I never knew if an
argument is nominative or accusative when it was neuter.
Poor Finnish children ...
I don't believe there are any more things than subjects and
objects? I mean except the verb, which is actually called
"predicate" when talking about syntax!
Carsten
--
Eri silvev�ng aibannama padangin.
Nivaie evaenain eri ming silvoiev�ng caparei.
- Antoine de Saint-Exup�ry, Le Petit Prince
-> http://www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 4
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:55:52 +0100
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
I was just reading about this... I've never heard of any government
apart from this one (the old Basque system) which actually held its
meetings under a tree... its a very romantic image, along the lines of
the tree of gondor in the Lord of the Rings, and it think its really sad
that the Nazis blew it up at the behest of General Franco. :( My opinion
of him has sunk even lower if that's possible... There's a word in
german that I can't quite remember (someone told it me once), but it
means... "the feel of a time/age/century/etc" and I think the feel of
this century and the one before is loss. :( The more we discover about
the world, the more we plot it and map it and explain it, the more I
just get this feeling of loss, like there's nothing left in the
spiritual realm any more, nothing left except what is and what we know
and its not fascinating anymore because we can explain it all. :( And
its even worse when peices of the past, pieces that feel worth saving,
have been destroyed for one reason or another (like the Tree of Guernica).
I'd emigrate if there was anywhere to go... but unfortunately we're all
stuck on planet Earth lol, and we've pretty much moulded everywhere in
the image of our industrial and scientific pursuits. I suppose I could
go live in the middle of the amazon or something, but I suppose I
wouldn't enjoy that either... being isolated from all the information
and analysis and knowledge that makes me despair sometimes, I think it
would be like a drug user without his or her fix. Maybe despair is the
feel of the last two centuries, or perhaps addiction to "progress". I
don't know. :)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 5
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 07:45:36 -0400
From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:01:49 +0200, Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>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.
Different languages. Just a moment ago, I wrote "f�r unflexible wie uns
studenten" (for unflexible [ones] like us students), and this was a phrase
where I really had to think consciencely about the grammar: Is it "uns" or
is it "wir"? Is there really an "-en" on "studenten" (acutally, there could
be no other ending, but it still sounded strange to my inner ear)? I had to
remember that nouns added by conjunction "wie" take the same case as the
nouns they're added to, in this case, the accusative demanded by the
preposition.
Also, German capitalization and German commas require syntactical analysis,
so German orthography may require more syntactical knowledge than the
orthography of other languages?
>> >> 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.
I should have put the types of errors between apostrophes, since it's just
the terms he was using. I consider them to be hard to break up into
different categories (that is to say, it'd require a lot of theoretical
decisions).
An example from this reply of mine: First I had written "German orthography
may require more syntactical knowledge than other languages". In my
teachers terms, IIRC, this would be an error of the kind "Syntax-Logik:
Bezug" (syntaxis logic: reference), since a comparison requires two
entities of the same type to be compared. I've corrected it to "(...) than
_orthographies of_ other languages".
I doubt that an awareness for this kind of errors can be trained by
teaching but logic and stylistic.
>* 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.
Isn't it the teachers who are responsible for the literacy of young
people... :(
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
j. 'mach' wust
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 6
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:23:17 +0100
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
Chris Bates wrote:
> "the feel of a time/age/century/etc"
Zeitgeist.
--
Keith Gaughan -- talideon.com
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 7
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:18:17 +0100
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Italic Greek
This, I suppose, is of most interest to LLL types, but I thought I'd share
it with everybody.
Until at least the first century AD, Greek was spoken more frequently than
Latin in southern Italy (Magna Graeca) I don't know when its use died out,
but I imagine that it may have been due to the fall of the Western Empire
severing ties between Italy and Greece. Suppose its use had continued in
isolated villages to the present day, and it had undergone Latin to Italian
type sound changes. What might the result have been?
Pete
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 8
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:29:56 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
Quoting John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > > >* 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 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.
>
> Remember that you are talking to a francophone, for whom this procedure is
> essentially impossible due to the wide separation of spoken French and
> written
> French, which Christophe has himself characterized as "two separate
> languages"
> on many occasions.
The thought occured to me, but Christophe's comments very much sounded like he
believed them to be valid for all languages, and his comments about Dutch
appeared to settle the matter.
Andreas
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 9
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:16:41 -0400
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: bye
Well, I hope y'all are happy.
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 11:10:57AM +0200, Rodlox wrote:
> 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.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 10
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 16:31:48 +0200
From: Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:01:49 +0200, Andreas Johansson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >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.
>
> Different languages.
Indeed. It's not hard to see how conscious grammatical understanding might be
effectively necessary for literacy in a sufficiently diglossic situation.
Going back to where this started, the question should then be whether knowing
formal grammar is necessary for Americans to write good written English. My gut
feeling would be 'no'. (Redlox is a case in point - his written English isn't
particularly bad as far as this non-native can judge.)
> >> >> 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.
>
> I should have put the types of errors between apostrophes, since it's just
> the terms he was using. I consider them to be hard to break up into
> different categories (that is to say, it'd require a lot of theoretical
> decisions).
>
> An example from this reply of mine: First I had written "German orthography
> may require more syntactical knowledge than other languages". In my
> teachers terms, IIRC, this would be an error of the kind "Syntax-Logik:
> Bezug" (syntaxis logic: reference), since a comparison requires two
> entities of the same type to be compared. I've corrected it to "(...) than
> _orthographies of_ other languages".
I doubt I'd noticed the incongruency if you'd let it be.
But I don't consider this a _grammatical_ error. That you cannot reasonably
compare
an orthography to other languages is a fact about the outside world, not about
English grammar. If we amend the original sentence to read "... other
orthographies"
we have not changed its grammatical structure, but the problem is gone.
> I doubt that an awareness for this kind of errors can be trained by
> teaching but logic and stylistic.
Should "but" read "about"?
Again, I can't see how it's a grammatical problem, or how your teacher teaching
you to watch out for it amounts to grammatical tuition.
> >* 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.
>
> Isn't it the teachers who are responsible for the literacy of young
> people... :(
Well, assuming she was right, this particular one teacher was not responsible
for the literacy of the average youngster, still less in a position to do
anything
about it. One might of coure also question whether getting all/most youths to
the level of literacy necessary to understand the text in question is a sensible
use of state funds. My personal answer would be yes, but in the end it's a
question of a boundary line that has to be drawn at some more or less arbitrary
point.
Andreas
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 11
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:24:36 -0400
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: English word order and bumper stickers
Saw a bumper sticker this morning that gave me pause:
AMERICA BLESS GOD
Now, this is not the appropriate forum to discuss my feelings on the
USA's recent theocratic tendencies, nor do I wish to do so. No, what
we have here is a striking example of the importance of word order in
English. Sure, we have subject becoming object and vice-versa, but
that's old hat; "dog bites man", etc. But in the same swell foop
we have moved from humble petition to stunning presumption!
I mean, let's assume for the moment that God exists; let's assume,
furthermore, that He is even the God of Abraham and Isaac as originally
described in Jewish scripture. Why would He need, want, or even care
about America's blessing?
Of course, I assume that we have a simple mistake in intent, where the
author hasn't quite twigged onto the unidirectionality of mortal/deity
interaction verbs in English, i.e. gods do the blessing, while worshippers
are limited to praise/cursing, supplication, etc.
-Marcos
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 12
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 10:49:31 EDT
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: English word order and bumper stickers
In a message dated 9/14/2004 10:24:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Saw a bumper sticker this morning that gave me pause:
> AMERICA BLESS GOD
>Of course, I assume that we have a simple mistake in intent, where the
>author hasn't quite twigged onto the unidirectionality of mortal/deity
>interaction verbs in English, i.e. gods do the blessing, while worshippers
>are limited to praise/cursing, supplication, etc.
You are mistaken. "Bless" is not "unidirectional," though the meaning is
not identical in each direction.
The Gospel of Luke (in the KJV) says "24:52 And they worshipped him, and
returned to Jerusalem with great joy: 24:53 And were continually in the temple,
praising and blessing
God."
It's similar in the RSV.
People can bless God; that's a grammatical fact.
(Note these comments are solely linguistic.)
Doug
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 13
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:04:39 -0400
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: tongue twisters
I was speaking Spanish this morning and wished to express the meaning of
the English saying "The grass is always greener . . .". So I said
"La hierba es siempre mas verde . . .".
Or rather, I tried to say that.
And then spent a minute repeating it until I got it right. I meant to
say [la 'jE4.ba Es 'sjEm.pre mas 'bE4.de], but I kept saying either
[sEM.pre] or [bjE4.de]; I couldn't quite properly time the switch from [jE]
to [E]. So I seem to have stumbled upon a mild tongue-twister, although I'm
sure it's not one for native speakers.
So - have any of y'all ever stumbled across accidental tongue-twisters
in your conlangs? Or, have you ever designed vocabulary/morphology
with tongue twisters in mind?
-Marcos
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 14
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:13:19 -0400
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dealing with an idea deficit...
David Peterson wrote:
> Roger wrote:
>
> <<Can you summon up any specifics or examples from the memory banks? 150
> seems
> an awful lot.>>
>
> 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.
That's similar to what the person I mentioned who was doing the Venn
diagrams was doing. [Parse that sentence!!] I've tried to find his/her posts
in the archive but no luck; I'm sure it was within the past year. Is he/she
still with us? Lurking? Does anyone else remember, or have the site
bookmarked?
Thanks to Sylvia for the book title. It sounds worthwile.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 15
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:07:58 +0200
From: Christophe Grandsire <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
En r�ponse � Chris Bates :
>I was just reading about this... I've never heard of any government
>apart from this one (the old Basque system) which actually held its
>meetings under a tree...
As the story goes, Saint Louis rendered justice under a tree :) .
I've always found the old Basque government system interesting (the
"fueros", which is actually a Spanish word, probably from Latin FORUM). The
interesting part being that the kings had to abide by the fueros :) .
But what I've read is that the tree was the place where kings swore that
they would not break the fueros, not the place where the assemblies met for
decision-making.
> its a very romantic image, along the lines of
>the tree of gondor in the Lord of the Rings, and it think its really sad
>that the Nazis blew it up at the behest of General Franco. :( My opinion
>of him has sunk even lower if that's possible... There's a word in
>german that I can't quite remember (someone told it me once), but it
>means... "the feel of a time/age/century/etc" and I think the feel of
>this century and the one before is loss. :( The more we discover about
>the world, the more we plot it and map it and explain it, the more I
>just get this feeling of loss, like there's nothing left in the
>spiritual realm any more, nothing left except what is and what we know
>and its not fascinating anymore because we can explain it all. :( And
>its even worse when peices of the past, pieces that feel worth saving,
>have been destroyed for one reason or another (like the Tree of Guernica).
>I'd emigrate if there was anywhere to go... but unfortunately we're all
>stuck on planet Earth lol, and we've pretty much moulded everywhere in
>the image of our industrial and scientific pursuits. I suppose I could
>go live in the middle of the amazon or something, but I suppose I
>wouldn't enjoy that either... being isolated from all the information
>and analysis and knowledge that makes me despair sometimes, I think it
>would be like a drug user without his or her fix. Maybe despair is the
>feel of the last two centuries, or perhaps addiction to "progress". I
>don't know. :)
There's a beautiful Dutch song that describes that exactly: "Vluchten kan
niet meer": "Fleeing is no longer possible".
http://www.xs4all.nl/~werksman/liedjes/laden.html?vluchten_kan_niet_meer.html
Lyrics only in Dutch, but translation shouldn't be too difficult (even
Babelfish shouldn't make too much of a mess out of it).
Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.
[This message contained attachments]
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 16
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 08:27:01 -0700
From: Elliott Lash <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: English word order and bumper stickers
--- Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In a message dated 9/14/2004 10:24:45 AM Eastern
> Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> >Saw a bumper sticker this morning that gave me
> pause:
>
> > AMERICA BLESS GOD
>
> >Of course, I assume that we have a simple mistake
> in intent, where the
> >author hasn't quite twigged onto the
> unidirectionality of mortal/deity
> >interaction verbs in English, i.e. gods do the
> blessing, while worshippers
> >are limited to praise/cursing, supplication, etc.
>
> You are mistaken. "Bless" is not "unidirectional,"
> though the meaning is
> not identical in each direction.
I second this. In Hebrew:
Baruch ata adonai
blessed you Lord
"Blessed are you Lord."
Jewish Prayers regularly begin with this Blessing from
the Worshipers to God.
Elliott Lash.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 17
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 11:44:12 -0400
From: "Mark J. Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: tongue twisters
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 11:04:38AM -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> I was speaking Spanish this morning and wished to express the meaning of
> the English saying "The grass is always greener . . .". So I said
> "La hierba es siempre mas verde . . .".
BTW, that should be |m�s|.
> I meant to say [la 'jE4.ba Es 'sjEm.pre mas 'bE4.de]
Or something like that. For some reason, |r|s confuse me; is a voiced
stop after them fricativized or not? That is, should it be
['jE4.ba]/['bE4.de] or ['jE4.Ba]/['bE4.De]?
-Marcos
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 18
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 16:43:23 +0100
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: English word order and bumper stickers
Staving Elliot Lash:
>I second this. In Hebrew:
>
> Baruch ata adonai
> blessed you Lord
>
> "Blessed are you Lord."
>
>Jewish Prayers regularly begin with this Blessing from
>the Worshipers to God.
And in the Catholic Mass
Blessed are You Lord, God of all creation,
Through Your goodness we have this bread to offer...
Pete
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 19
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 16:44:03 +0100
From: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Quoting John Cowan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
>
>
>>Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>>
>>
>>
>>>>>* 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 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.
>>>
>>>
>>Remember that you are talking to a francophone, for whom this procedure is
>>essentially impossible due to the wide separation of spoken French and
>>written
>>French, which Christophe has himself characterized as "two separate
>>languages"
>>on many occasions.
>>
>>
>
>The thought occured to me, but Christophe's comments very much sounded like he
>believed them to be valid for all languages, and his comments about Dutch
>appeared to settle the matter.
>
>
Dutch the same applies - the local dialects can be very different from
the standard language(and they are quite numerous). Depends on the
speaker, of course.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 20
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:03:07 -0700
From: Apollo Hogan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Subject / Object / ?
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En r�ponse � 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.
WTF does this have to do with Conlanging? I would very much appreciate
if this thread would be taken off-list.
If questions about LaTeX and conlanging are shouted off to a different list,
then surely America-bashing threads don't belong either.
Thank you,
Apollo
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 21
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:08:10 -0400
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Conlang flag voting
Adrian Morgan wrote:
>I. K. Peylough wrote:
>> How do we vote if we doesn't see any flags we like?
>What's the problem? I've almost never seen any politicians I like, but
>I've still voted for them ...
We've done without a flag for a while; we could do without a flag for a while
longer if need be. There should be a "none of the above" option
on the ballot, as "no award" on the Hugo Award ballot. One can rank "none
of the above" higher than some or all of the candidates if some (or all)
are entirely unsatisfactory.
- Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 22
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:01:55 -0400
From: David H <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Hebrew Dictionaries
In my recent attempt to learn Hebrew, I have decided that I will need a
dictionary of Modern Israeli Hebrew. I have been looking for a dictionary
that; uses vocalization, indicates gender of nouns (and irregular plurals)
and inflections, is up-to-date and shows the meaning of the words well.
Can anybody recommend a good dictionary that lives up to most of these
things?
Thanks
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 23
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:26:38 +0300
From: Steg Belsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola
On Sep 14, 2004, at 6:07 PM, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En r�ponse � Chris Bates :
>> I was just reading about this... I've never heard of any government
>> apart from this one (the old Basque system) which actually held its
>> meetings under a tree...
> As the story goes, Saint Louis rendered justice under a tree :) .
In the Tanakh (Jewish Bible), book of _Shofetim_ ("Judges"), the
chieftain(ess?) Devora is described as judging the people underneath
her very own personal tree.
-Stephen (Steg)
"the truth is he's a punk."
~ law and order
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 24
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 12:35:05 -0400
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on my Gwr Language
Robert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> li toki e ni:
>On Monday 13 September 2004 09:04, Isaac A. Penzev wrote:
>> 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
> Yes, I too have noticed that. My only defense to that is the amount of time
>spent on working on these types of languages. Personally I prefer a "simple"
>type of language. My current baby is *very* simple compared to many of the
>others projects, but I meant it to be that way, sort of as a secondary
>language for me to use day to day.
gjax-zym-byn is mostly isolating with some agglutinative bits; it
has suffixes, but they're all whole syllables, many of which could be
considered postpositive particles. I designed it with a simple grammar
because I intended to become fluent in it (and have, to some degree).
- Jim Henry
http://www.mindspring.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 25
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:01:44 +0200
From: Rodlox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: ! Re: Subject / Object / ?
> > 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.
I focused, in school, on the Sciences (ie biology), rather than the
Languages, which I skimmed through/past. it was only after graduating, that
I began to delve into Languages.
translation: in this case, it is the result of the individual, not the
system.
ps: if *you* don't know the answer to my question, you don't need to
digress into a discussion of school systems -- just say that you don't
know the answer. I won't tell anyone!
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
