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There are 19 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Language change among immortals
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
From: Tom Chappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Hello
From: Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: OT: [TECH] MySQL 4.1.11 and Unicode I/O
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. migjan laggvage (my language)
From: Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Language change among immortals
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. New language grammar--what needs work?
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
8. Re: Language change among immortals
From: 轡虫 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Language change among immortals
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: Vowel Harmony
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
11. Re: Amerinds (was: Gallopavo (was: Re: fruitbats))
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
12. Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Referent Tracking (Was: (Re: THEORY: Information Structure;
Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.))
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: how many cases is too many?
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: Language change among immortals
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: Test for middle voice?
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Re: migjan laggvage (my language)
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
19. Re: migjan laggvage (my language)
From: Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:57:35 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
Dirk Elzinga wrote:
> On 11/21/05, Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > Personally I feel it takes quite a jolt for a person's language to
> > change
> > noticeable [correction: noticeably :-( ] within their lifetime.
> > (Excluding emigration to a foreign
> > country, of course.) The principal factor would be exposure to a dialect
> > that is perceived as more prestigious than one's own.
> >
>
> I was waiting for this to come up :-). There is a short article in the
> journal Nature from 2000 which reports on the changing pronunciation
> of Queen Elizabeth between the 1950s and 1980s. Basically, her vowels
> are moving towards what the article calls "Standard Southern
> British". The URL is
> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6815/abs/408927a0.html .
> (Hmmm. This may be subscription-only (I'm looking at if from work); if
> it is, I have the PDF and would be happy to send it to interested
> persons.)
I think the abstract is sufficient. (But why did they stop at the 1980s?)
The Queen will soon be 80 (that's 800 in terms of Kutsuwamushi's 1000-yr.
immortals) and has personal/political reasons to retain her popularity, and
to retain the respect of, and remain in communication with, her subjects--
most of whom belong to at least 2 new generations and have grown up in a
world very different from the one she grew up in. So, consciously or not,
she moderates somewhat the accent she grew up with. If she didn't, she'd
probably find herself considered totally irrelevant and out of touch, and
the butt of jokes (Upper Class Twit of the Year etc.). One wonders how many
elderly members of the House of Lords have changed their accents? They'd
have little reason to, IMO.
Perhaps the Queen has become a little bit bi-dialectal; it would be
interesting to eavesdrop on her non-public conversation with relatives and
social peers.....
I now see that "prestigious" wasn't quite the right word, though it fits in
many cases; "normative [for a given region/occupation/status]" might have
been more accurate.
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 14:43:42 -0800
From: Tom Chappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
Hello the list.
The recent discussion about Middle Diathesis and Middle Voice reminded me of
some stuff that I've thought of but that hasn't always been really clear.
I understand it was Trubetzkoy and his (or her?) colleagues, students, and
teachers in the "Prague school" (?) and the "Functional Sentence Perspective",
if I've got that right, who introduced the ideas of the Information Structure
of an utterance.
More than one of the writers whose work I have read recently (on the advice
of members of this list, incidentally -- thank you all for that) have mentioned
Information Structure while discussing other things. Four who come to mind are
M.H. Klaiman ("Grammatical Voice"), Barry J. Blake ("Case"), Anna Siewierska
("Person"), and Thomas E. Payne ("Describing Morphosyntax").
There seem to be three (3) layers of information structure:
Topic vs. Comment --
The topic is what the utterance is about; the comment is what is uttered
about the topic.
Focus vs. Background --
The Focus is the "most important" or most salient or highlighted or most
foregrounded part of the utterance -- the background is the rest of the
utterance.
Given vs. New --
The "Given" is the part of the utterance that the speaker expects the
addressee already knows or at least should already know; the "New" is the part
of the utterance that is new, or at least new relative to this discourse and
new relative to the "Given".
------
In a theory-neutral description, not necessarily every sentence would have a
Topic and a Comment; not necessarily every sentence would have a Focus and a
Background; and not necessarily every sentence would have a Given and a New.
Also, what qualifies as the Topic of a narrative, or a discourse, or a
conversational turn, may be different from what qualifies as the Topic of a
sentence or a clause. Similarly for the Focus, or the Given and New.
-----
Topics and Backgrounds and Givens tend to line up statistically, although
they are logically independent; similarly Comments and Foci and News tend to
line up statistically, although they are logically independent.
Multi-sentence utterances, such as conversational turns, tend to have
persistent Topics, where several sentences in a row will have the same Topic.
After the first, many of these sentences won't even explicitly mention their
Topic -- it will make no surface appearance. Among those that do, after the
first, it will certainly be Given information, not New information.
When a new Topic is introduced for the first time, it is usually introduced
in one of a few specific special sentence formats. When a new Topic is
introduced for the first time, it will be Focused, and it will be New.
Otherwise, Topics are either "absent" (i.e. implicit), or Given, and probably
Background instead of Focused.
If a sentence has any New information, it is almost certain that some of the
New information will be Focused. A sentence may have several New items; and
"not have room" for more than one of them to be Focused.
-----
Languages with evidentials, frequently use the evidential to mark the Focused
item. So the evidential not only explicitly means "this is how I found out";
it implicitly means "and this is the key thing".
One kind of marker frequently discussed along with evidentiality is
"mirativity". "Mirativity" is any morphological indication that the speaker
"has not yet integrated the information he/she is uttering into his/her
worldview"; that the speaker has "an unprepared mind" for the information
marked with the mirative.
Some linguists have suggested that "New" information is always, semantically,
"mirative" -- although it may not be marked as such.
Some languages with evidentials have a "mirative" entry in their paradigm of
evidentials -- for instance, among the "visual evidence" markers is one for
"oh, now I can finally make it out".
-----
Japanese, and some Mayan languages, has a Topic "adposition" (postposition
"wa" in Japanese's case), which "overrides" -- takes the place of -- the
adposition which would mark the Subject (ga) or Direct Object (o) or Indirect
Object (ni) or any other participant.
Tagalog, and other Philippine languages, and some Mayan languages, including
some of those mentioned in the above paragraph, has a Focus adposition
(preposition "ang" for Tagalog -- although Tagalog speakers I have spoken to
tend to think of this as a definite article), which overrides and replaces
whatever adposition would otherwise mark its role in the sentence.
In Tagalog and the Philippine languages, the Verb's morphology is altered so
that its "Grammatical Voice" indicates which semantic role is played by its
Focus. For the Mayan languages, I believe Klaiman reported, the Grammatical
Voice of the Verb morphologically indicates the semantic role of both the Topic
and the Focus. It has to be indicated on the Verb, because the "original" case
of the noun itself has been "overwritten" by "Topic" or "Focus".
This use of the Voice system was why Klaiman classified these languages into
his super-type "Information-Salience Voice Systems".
-----
If a language such as one of the Mayan languages also had evidentials -- and,
for all I know, one of them does -- it could, also, use an evidential instead
of a focus-marker on the focused element.
-----
[Kinds of Focus]
Thomas E. Payne, in "Describing Morphosyntax", lists several different kinds
of focus; unfortunately, I have not memorized them yet.
I do remember that one kind was what he called "Truth Value Focus"; this was
the type of focus in which the speaker's main thrust was to emphasize that his
entire sentence was, indeed, true.
Siewierska, OTOH, only describes four kinds of Focus, though to be sure
neither she nor Payne claims to have exhausted them.
She says Focus can be either contrastive or non-contrastive.
Contrastive Focus can either contrast within the utterance or not.
Utterance-Internal, Explicit Contrast:
"Feed the cat the fish; feed the rabbit the lettuce."
Utterance-External, Implicit Contrast:
"Two U.S. Presidents have been impeached."
Non-contrastive focus can either be a "wh"-question word, or the answer to a
"wh"-question.
"Who was the first U.S. President to be impeached?"
"Andrew Johnson was the first U.S. President to be impeached."
-----
None of these three kinds of Information Structure is actually a Dichotomy of
the sentence.
If the sentence is "...A...B...C...", it may be that it is possible to think
of it as having the general, terse Topic "...A...", with "...B...C..." an
elaborate, specific Comment about "...A..."; and yet the same sentence may be
also thought to be about a more specific, more elaborated Topic "...A...B...",
with a terser Comment, "...C...".
Likewise, if the sentence is "...X...Y...Z..."; it may be that "...X..." is
the most Given information; "...Z..." is the Newest information; and "...Y..."
is transitional between them.
It's also possible that a sentence could have a smaller, tighter, more highly
focused, part, standing out amongst a somewhat broader area that still was more
in focus than the sentence as a whole.
To me, that suggests that it might be worthwhile to have two degrees of
Topicness; perhaps a Topic marker and a Comment marker? And whatever isn't
marked must be halfway between? Or, instead, a BroadTopic marker and a
SubTopic marker?
Likewise, maybe it would be worthwhile to have two degrees of Focus marking
-- maybe a Foreground marker and a Background marker, with the understanding
that unmarked=midrange; or a Foreground marker and a Midground marker.
Similarly, it might be worthwhile to have two degrees of Given vs. New marked.
-----
In most languages that allow speakers to pragmatically rearrange the
information in their sentences according to information salience, most speakers
arrange most sentences these ways:
If there are a topic and a comment,
Topic first, Comment last:
If there are a focus and a background,
Background first, Focus last.
If there are given information and new information,
Given first, New last.
But, if they have the freedom to do so, speakers will deviate from this on
purpose when they have sentences to say to which they want addressees to pay
special attention. Also, when a speaker has to, for instance, narrate two
story-lines simultaneously -- say, for instance, the story of an ancient
battle, along with the story of the archeological dig which discovered what
happened during that battle -- they will adopt one consistent style for one
storyline, and a contrasting consistent style for the other.
-----
Tell me what you think.
Tom H.C. in MI
---------------------------------
Yahoo! FareChase - Search multiple travel sites in one click.
[This message contained attachments]
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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:11:17 -0500
From: Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Hello
no unfortunately i havent got a web site but i can supply you with
everything i have on it so far (which isnt much yet.
also i think i shall drop the acutes and umlauts and just write out the
spelling.
ig aspreg bjerig lidlja dusagje.
ig aspr\eg bjer\ig lidlI@ dusagj@
I speak very little to say.
i dont talk much.
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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:39:32 +0000
From: Keith Gaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OT: [TECH] MySQL 4.1.11 and Unicode I/O
Carsten Becker wrote:
> Hm. Sylvia Sotomayor offlistly suggested to simply convert special letters
> to entities, that's a possible solution. I nevertheless *do* want to know
> why entering and getting out Unicode doesn't work with my server
> version/configuration. I'm about to download an update of the server package
> I use which also includes MySQL 5. Since I found out that the folks at MySQL
> AB forgot to compile in UTF8 in version 4.1.0 I guess the same might have
> happened in 4.1.11, since Unicode support works for Mark Reed who has 4.1.9.
> I hope an upgrade will help.
MySQL's poor relationship with Unicode is all too well-known. I've
encountered it myself quite a bit. I find though that an effective
work-around is to ignore character encodings in the database. Set up
your tables to use Latin1 or some other 8-bit encoding, but rather
than pumping Latin1 into it, dump your UTF-8 encoded text straight
in. You're essentially treating everything as binary data. You'll have
to sacrifice some nicities such as case insensitivity to get everything
to work just right, but when you're stuck, it works well enough.
K.
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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 19:01:32 -0500
From: Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: migjan laggvage (my language)
well since i dont really know what the protocol for submitting my lingua i
will just some stuff down. and please dont think to badly of it, seeing as
it is a work in progress and mostly i would like help with it.
okay.
pronunciation:
a=a e=e i=i o=o u=u y=y
aa=a: ee=E ii=I oo=Q uu=u:
au=&U ai=ay
p=p b=b f=f v=v t=t d=d th=T dh=D k=k g=g m=m n=n j=j l=l r=r ss=s s=s/z
z=s h=h
'a' and 'e' finally = @
'r' between vowels = 4
'sk' before e,i,ee,ii,ai = S
velar+alveolar fricative = K or K\
okay.
halo, migjan neemje iss Reilly. halo, neemje migjen iss Reilly.
hello, 1stposs. name be reilly. hello, name 1stgen. be reilly.
my name is reilly.
dhau skal gibje miir dje gatz-jan huuse-sja.
you shall give 1stdat. the cat-poss. house-plur.
give me the cat's houses.
asky gobjar dhiir migjan geeje sja.
3rdmix. gave 2nddat. 1stposs. key plur.
he/she gave you my keys.
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Message: 6
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:20:19 -0000
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
--- In [email protected], Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> kutsuwamushi wrote:
>> [snip]
>> I'm writing a pair of stories that take place five thousand years
>> apart. The people and the country are the same. The people
>> (human-like, not dragons or anything) live, on average, 1000 years.
>> [snip]
> [snip]
> .... my guess would be that there'd be probably minor changes in
> pronunciation only.
> Probably new vocab. to keep up with technological innovations.
> Some factors that might upset this conservative scheme:
> revolutions, dynastic changes, migrations ....
> [snip]
Ah heck, Roger, I should have read your post before I posted mine!
You'd already said that -- I didn't need to say it again.
(Just in case there's any question --
kutsuwamushi, I agree with Roger on this point.)
>> Could I simply use a natural language as an example, calculate the
>> generations, and scale up the number of years to fit?
> [snip]
> .... It depends on your people reproducing at a slow rate. ....
> [snip]
You mentioned the reproduction rate too!
(Once more, just so there's no question --
I agree with Roger on this point too, kutsuwamushi.)
>> Or would language change continue at a similar pace, because
>> people's language evolves continually throughout their lives, not
>> just primarily at one stage of it?
> Personally I feel it takes quite a jolt for a person's language to
> change noticeable within their lifetime. (Excluding emigration to a
> foreign country, of course.) The principal factor would be exposure
> to a dialect that is perceived as more prestigious than one's own.
OK, here I quite disagree.
(Let's leave aside, for the moment, the fuzzy question of whether
moving from Texas to Michigan counts as "emigrating to a foreign
country".)
I agree that exposure to a dialect that, in some ways and in some
circumstances, seems attractive, is either the "principal factor", or
at least the biggest one I can think of.
The thing is, "seems attractive" doesn't mean "is perceived as
prestigious" -- not even if you vary who does the "perceiving" and
what constitutes "prestige".
If I suddenly find myself having to talk over a tinny intercom a lot,
or over a staticky radio, I may find Sealane English or CB slang
becoming very attractive, and using the "military alphabet", just
because it is a very quick way to make myself clear without having to
repeat (by the way, use "say again", not "repeat").
If I suddenly find myself having to help a large number of just-
toilet-trained and almost-toilet-trained post-toddlers negotiate the
path to the bathroom, I will find it useful to adopt the vocabulary
they use, no matter what vocabulary is used in the pathology lab in
the hospital or the zoologists' office at the zoo.
It so happens that habits acquired in one environment will become the
most accessible behaviors in another environment. When I need to ask
my daughter or my wife or my brother to repeat what they just said,
I, now, always say, "say again?". Also, certain "linguisticsisms"
are finding their way into my daily speech now, even though I have no
friends nor family with whom I can discuss this subject by voice,
instead of in type. And, long ago, mathematical, musical,
scientific, and cybernetic terminology and ways of seeing things --
"sorry, my mind was paged out" -- were coming into my speech,
although I made more of an effort to think of something else if I was
sure my audience wouldn't understand.
In some cases, though, even when I know my audience won't understand,
the best course seems to be to explain it to them, rather than come
up with a different way of saying things.
----
These all apply to differences that would constitute "dialect",
rather than "accent". I change my "accent" just to be understood.
-----
I enjoyed reading your post, Roger, even if two-thirds of it made 40%
of my previous post redundant.
:-)
Tom H.C. in MI
(and even if *these* folks call the Great Lakes "The 3rd Coast",
people from Galveston and Noo Awlins know the Gulf of Mexico is the
_real_ "3rd Coast".)
(also Michiganders think U.P. stands for Upper Peninsula;
but everyone in India knows U.P. stands for Uttar Pradesh.)
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Message: 7
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:41:30 -0800
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: New language grammar--what needs work?
Check your reply-tos.
I have a new language proposal. I don't have vocabulary or anything,
but here's the (highly disorganized) grammar. I don't have a website,
so I have to post it here. What do you think needs work?
Vowels: a (_e_lbow), e (_A_labama), i (V_ea_l), o (fi: ö), u (fi: y)
Dipthongs: ei, oi, uo
Consonants: c (s), v (f), h (_kh_ochu), l, m, n, s (sh), t (th)
Clusters: hl, hm, hn, tl, tm, tn
Syllable formats: CV, CV'V (this is not a dipthong, separated by '),
CVn (can only appear at the end of a word)
Sentence order is free with the first item being emphasized. There
are no articles.
Subject and object can be skipped if they can be filled by endings in the verb.
Noun structure
noun base root + modifiers + [[noun base root + modifiers] + ...] +
plurality + case
Modifiers are parsed right to left, so Root1 Modifier1 Modifier2 Root2
Root3 Modifier3 is a Root1 that is both Modifier1, Modifier2, as a
"compound word" with Root2 and a Root3 that is Modifier3
plurality:
*specifying a number is allowed and indicates that number of objects.
*leave it out to specify singular.
*quantity listings, like "few" or "many", are used for plurals
Cases: As many or as few of these cases as needed can be used. The
arrangement of these cases allows several ideas in each sentence.
Subject: Indicates the subject of the sentence.
Object: Indicates the object of the sentence.
Method: Indicates the method of the sentence.
Temporal: Indicates the time of the sentence.
Assistive: Indicates an object used to help perform the action.
Obstructive: Indicates an object that hindered the action.
Cause: Indicates the cause of the action.
Result: Indicates the effect of the action.
Means: How the action happened.
English:
Because I ran out of gas, I had to run a mile through the woods to the
bus stop this morning, and take the bus to work. The end result was
that I was covered in sweat.
Equivalent with cases
car-empty-gas-CAUSE-OBSTRUCTIVE I-SUBJECT run
distance-long-woods-inside-MEANS stop-bus-OBJECT morning-TEMPORAL
work-arrival-RESULT me-covering-sweat-RESULT
The following tenses exist: I, you, they, the-object-of-this-sentence,
the-subject-of-this-sentence. They must also be used with pronouns if
pluralized.
A verb consists of the following structure:
verb root + all applicable tense markers + subject tense marker +
object tense marker.
Tense markers consist of the following: past, present, future,
conditional, subjunctive, negative, command.
Subject and object tense markers refer to the real subject or object.
If either of these is simply I, you, or they, a separate pronoun is
not necessary. If they are pluralized or refer to a separate item in
the sentence, they must be marked as such.
Subclauses: each subclause begins and ends with a particle.
Adverbs are added to the verb root.
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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:51:42 -0600
From: 轡虫 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
Thanks everyone for your replies!
I'm reassured, because I was hoping that they wouldn't be too
different. It seems that it would be plausible to go ahead and make
the two different versions about as different as contemporary English
and Elizabethan English, which is close to what I had planned. =)
---
kutsuwamushi
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Message: 9
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 01:26:03 +0000
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
>From: 轡虫 <>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
>Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:51:42 -0600
>
>Thanks everyone for your replies!
glad we were all able to help.
>I'm reassured, because I was hoping that they wouldn't be too
>different. It seems that it would be plausible to go ahead and make
>the two different versions about as different as contemporary English
>and Elizabethan English, which is close to what I had planned. =)
you said they live a 1,000 years (thereabouts) right? well, you mentioned
your story would be two parts, each 5,000 years apart -- that's only a few
generations.
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Message: 10
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:01:05 -0800
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Vowel Harmony
At 10:51 PM -0600 21/11/05, Herman Miller wrote:
>That's a funny coincidence, I was just listening to the Routledge
>Mongolian tapes earlier today, and thought that the sound spelled
>with the Cyrillic letter that looks like "o" with a line through it
>sounded quite a bit like [8]. Considering that the IPA symbol for
>[8] looks like this Cyrillic letter, I wonder if there's some
>relation (one borrowed from the other). I do recall that the vowels
>they were calling "front" vowels didn't sound a bit like front
>vowels, and that the Cyrillic letter that looks like a capital Y
>moved downward was pronounced pretty much like /u/ in American
>English (not a fully back [u], but not far enough forward to be
>anywhere near [u\], either). I don't recall if there was any
>difference between short [8] and the long equivalent, but if
>anything, the long equivalent of [U] sounded a bit like [o:] (or
>perhaps [7:]).
Yeah, you're right. (I think... not up to speed on the current ASCII
IPA flavor!). In crude terms, you could even say that it's a
rounded/unrounded distinction, not a front/back one. That's certainly
what it sounded like to me when I was learning and working with it.
The description of vocalism in the Mongolian languages has been
driven, until very recently, by 19th century Turkological models. (In
general, the state of linguistics of Mongolian languages is amazingly
primitive; the historical-comparative tail has been wagging the
linguistic dog for generations -- but that's another rant.) Hence the
definition of certain vowels as "front", and the tradition of
transliterating and transcribing them as such. I think it's pretty
safe to say that in reality, there is not a single Mongolian language
with the vowels /y/ or /2/ -- in fact, I'm prepared to go further and
claim that there *never has been* one, either. (G'wan, someone, prove
me wrong...) It's just an artifact of 'prescriptive descriptivism' by
early Western students of those languages, and a reliance on
'argument from authority' by their successors.
Of course, the fact that the traditional Mongolian script is borrowed
from Uighur, and reflects Uighur vocalism, further muddies the
picture. I never got around to it, but at one point I had the idea of
looking at Middle Mongolian texts in non-Turkic-derived scripts
(Chinese and hphags-pa) with a more critical eye to the presentation
of the vowels and vowel harmony. I'd gotten the impression that
modern scholars of those texts had kind of shoehorned that data into
the front/back distinction they presumed 'must' be there -- but I
could well be totally off the mark there.
As far as vowel harmony in Mongolian goes, it definitely still is
alive and well in at least the 'southern' dialects of modern
Mongolian -- Chahar and so forth. I'm not so familiar with Khalkha,
but I doubt it's much different. It *can* be difficult to spot it
immediately, given the tendency of any short unstressed vowel to turn
into some kind of schwa-like microvowel, but it's definitely there,
and works just as described in the literature. (Notwithstanding
quibbles about what those vowels *are*; the pattern is correct
enough.)
A couple years ago Bert Vaux (sp.?) at Harvard published a paper
suggesting that vowel harmony in the Tungusic languages is actually
+/-ATR harmony -- at least in origin, even if it's not intact or
clearly preserved in all members of the family today. I'd already
seen some part of that argument in the older Russian literature on
Even ("Lamut"), but Vaux's paper sold me on the bigger idea -- enough
to build it into my own faux-Tungusic conlang from the ground up.
Being pretty much totally out of academe these days, I don't know if
anyone has looked into whether ATR could play a role in the harmony
systems of any of the modern Mongolian languages, but it seems
plausible to me on the surface. Certainly "front/back" is quite
inaccurate for Mongolian, even if it is still appropriate for at
least some of the Turkic languages.
Oooo-kay... that was a longer rant than I intended. Sorry. But it's
pretty exciting to see multiple people on the list talking about
Mongolian -- and listening to it! Pity all that gets any coverage
these days is Khalkha, it's got to be the ugliest-sounding of all the
dialects... ;)
Kim
--
CONLANG Code: G/S v1.1 !lh@ cN:L:S:G a+ x0 n3d:1d !B A--- E--- L-- N0
Iv/m<s k-- ia--@ p- s+@ m- o P--- S++
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Message: 11
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 18:09:57 -0800
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Amerinds (was: Gallopavo (was: Re: fruitbats))
At 12:19 PM -0500 22/11/05, Steg Belsky wrote:
>What about _Native American_ (=Amerind) vs. _native American_ (born in...)?
That doesn't work in speech, though, which is where so many of the
misunderstandings and disputes occur. I've seen a genuine all-out
fistfight over this ambiguity, between patriotic white country boys
and, er, the *other* kind of "REAL Native Americans".
There's always the issue of in-group vs. out-group usage, too. I've
got some reservation-dwelling cousins who pretty vocally insist that
whites call them "Native American", though I've never heard them use
anything but "Indian" themselves in un-mixed company.
The thing with 'aborigine' is that, in American English usage at
least, it seems to have such strongly pejorative connotations that I
can't imagine it ever catching on. Except as another term of abuse,
anyway. Which is unfortunate :(
True story: as a very young kid, when I read about "Amerinds" at
first I thought it meant a kind of fruit. You know, like tamarinds.
K
--
CONLANG Code: G/S v1.1 !lh@ cN:L:S:G a+ x0 n3d:1d !B A--- E--- L-- N0
Iv/m<s k-- ia--@ p- s+@ m- o P--- S++
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Message: 12
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 08:15:54 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
> Likewise, if the sentence is "...X...Y...Z..."; it may be that
> "...X..." is the most Given information; "...Z..." is the Newest
> information; and "...Y..." is transitional between them.
There's a language called Lisu spoken somewhere in South Eastern Asia
which allows you to use its topic marker with more than one argument. If
you want you can designate every single argument except the verb as the
topic (forcing the verb to be the focus) or you can mark the entire
clause except one argument as the topic (although to do that you need
some kind of cleft construction). Unfortunately I don't have the book
where I read most of the information about Lisu from anymore, but I do
have a pdf somewhere with more info... here are some examples:
Multiple Topics:
asa nya phwu nya ale la [EMAIL PROTECTED]
asa top. money top. ale to give-decl.
Asa *gave* the money to *ale*
Whole Clause except one argument is topic:
asa la [EMAIL PROTECTED] ma nya ale
asa to hit-decl. one top. ale
the one who hit asa is *ale*
(I can't copy and paste the exact text for some reason... perhaps
because it has a lot of accents etc on it)
The language is more topic oriented than anything, with somewhat
minimal marking of grammatical role (it's not compulsory to mark the
difference between actor and patient, although I believe it's possible
to do so). I believe, although I'm not sure, that if there are multiple
topics then the first is taken to be the most topical and so on...
certainly, topic and comment are split with word order, with topical
nouns or whatever coming first and the nouns in the comment always
occuring last (there may be more than one focused noun in the comment by
the way), immediately before the verb.
(If you want me to send you the pdf I can do, but I can't find the
place on the internet I downloaded it from now...)
On a related matter to topics, you described various grammatical
systems involved with marking the topic. I'd like to suggest (at least
one) one more: the proximate vs obviate distinction in many american
languages. Although I'm not an expert and don't speak any language which
consistently makes this distinction (ie, I've just seen lots of examples
and read about it in linguistics books) it seems to me that the
proximate functions very much like a discourse topic for many languages
that have it. The difference is that for those languages that make a
proximate vs obviate distinction the distinction has been integrated
into the systems of noun marking and verbal agreement, and more
constraints are put on what can be proximate than what can be topic
(possessors are perfectly good topics for instance, but not, in some
languages, good proximate arguments). But still, the core function of
proximate marking in many languages that have it seems to be to mark and
keep track of the discourse topic.
There's also the matter of the way languages like English treat the
subject. The subject has topicality as a very strong part of its
definition, and we frequently use voice to maintain subject (and thus
topic) continuity between clauses. For instance:
I was taken to the cinema by some friends and given a lift home afterwards.
?I was taken to the cinema by some friends and they gave me a lift home
afterwards.
For me, the second sentence sounds a lot less natural than the first,
which has subject continuity. Frequently languages which have integrated
topics into the argument structure of verbs as subjects use voice to
maintain subject continuity. This even happens in syntactically ergative
languages like Dyirbal where the topical role (the absolutive) is very
different from what we consider a subject... frequent use of the
anti-passive is made to keep continuity of reference if possible with
the abs argument.
So I think that there's a continuum with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean
(which mark topic separately) at one end, language with proximate
obviate systems (which restrict slightly the role of topic and integrate
it into verbal marking etc) in the middle, and languages like English
(which have merged topic marking with role marking, usually into
subject) at the other end.
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Message: 13
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 08:23:34 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Referent Tracking (Was: (Re: THEORY: Information Structure;
Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.))
Since we're talking about Topics I'd like to share something that I
posted on the ZBB a while ago (and sadly got few replies). It's
indirectly relevant to the issue of Topics (or at least one of the
purposes of Topics). Here it is:
"I've been giving a lot of thought to referent tracking recently, since
I started making deeper forays into the area of syntax books. There seem
to be a few major ways that languages use to keep track of referents in
discourse and resolve ambiguity:
SWITCH REFERENCE SYSTEM
Basically works by indicating if some argument of the verb (usually the
subject) is the same as an argument of the preceding or following
clause. Usually switch reference systems don't have a fully functional
voice system for promoting other arguments to the priledged role
(subject) since if they did it would kind of defeat the purpose of the
system.
SWITCH FUNCTION SYSTEM
This is what one of the syntax books I read calls a system with a
reasonably well developed voice system (like English) that is used to
keep track of referents via processes like zero anaphora. Eg in English,
if you have two consecutive clauses with the same subject you can delete
the second:
the man went to the store and 0 bought a coke
and you can use the voice system to maintain subject continuity:
the man went to the store but 0 was hit by a bus on the way
Although such voice changes can be used simply to delete arguments, they
are also widely used in English and other languages to maintain subject
continuity as a form of referent tracking. This is actually one of their
primary functions that is often overlooked, which is why languages with
an alternate means of reference tracking often lack a well developed
voice system.
*TOPIC* SYSTEM
*Topic* systems, while not obviously about reference tracking, seem to
play a major role in the tracking of referents in some languages such as
Japanese and Mandarin, where topics control zero anaphora. The choice of
a *topic* is often a fairly discourse stable referent which is then
assumed to be an argument of the verb where the number of arguments
present does not match the valency (transitive, intransitive etc).
PROXIMATE OBVIATIVE DISTINCTION
In many Amerindian languages especially there is a system very much like
a *topic* system in its function except for the fact that verbal
morphology plays a large role (unlike extremely *topic* based languages
I know, which typically lack verbal agreement). Basically one argument
in a stretch of discourse is designated proximate, all others are
obviate, and then verbal agreement and other markers keep track of what
role the proximate plays in the discourse. The choice of proximate seems
to be a little more constrained than the choice of *topic* in *topic*
languages though.
AGREEMENT
Some languages, especially those like Swahili and the other Bantu
languages with a large number of genders, mainly use their extensive
agreement systems to keep track of referents.
OTHER
Those are the obvious systems for reference tracking, but there are
probably more.
This area doesn't seem to have been giving much thought or through
describing by people writing conlangs, which is why it interests me. I
mean, people say "I have a switch reference system" or "I have a *topic*
system" etc, but they don't go into detail when it comes to the role
such systems play in things like reference tracking, and indeed whether
for a given system that is one of its functions (Swahili, for instance,
has a passive but does not use it as a major reference tracking device).
So your thoughts? I'd love to hear details about how various natlangs
accomplish reference tracking functions, and also about how any of your
conlangs do it."
Although obviously I missed off discussion of things like pronouns, my
main focus at the time was on ways that most languages track a core
argument through a dialogue or story, rather than how they track all
arguments, especially since often knowing the identity of one argument
helps you work out the rest.
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Message: 14
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:24:03 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
One minor issue: I don't believe the "Trigger" in Tagalog is the Focus.
In fact, the only completely reliable feature that all triggers exhibit,
that they are definite, strongly suggests that the trigger isn't the
focus (the focus is often new information, and unlike the topic is very
frequently indefinite). I read a paper about this once, but I don't have
it anymore and I can't recall all the details.
>
> In Tagalog and the Philippine languages, the Verb's morphology is
> altered so that its "Grammatical Voice" indicates which semantic role
> is played by its Focus.
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Message: 15
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 12:29:28 +0000
From: Peter Bleackley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: how many cases is too many?
Staving Reilly Schlaier:
>one of my older conlangs has: Nom., Accu., Dative, Benefactive,
>Genitive, Posessive, Ablative, Allative, Vocative and Insrumental.
>how many in you personal opinions is too many?
>most of the time i prefer to keep it down to Nom./Accu., Dative,
>Posessive and Instrumental.
I believe that Finnish has seventeen cases, so ten is certainly not
excessive. My main conlang, Khangaþyagon, is an agglutinating language, in
which nouns can be modified by fairly long strings of affixes - each noun
can potentially have several thousand grammatical forms. See
http://www.artlangs.com/index.php?module=v4bJournal&func=journal_view&uid=88
for more details. Of course, in a noun system this complex, I don't think
that "case" is really an applicable term
Pete
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Message: 16
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 08:12:31 -0500
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
On 11/22/05, tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> According to some theorists, one of the major engines behind the rapid
> linguistic change in the Papua/New Guinea area and its nearby islands,
> and one of the major regions that this 1% of the world's inhabited land
> area contains 15% of the world's languages, is that when someone there
> dies, it becomes taboo to say their name -- and, of course, most
> people's names are words or short phrases (usually nominals or
> adjectivals, of course).
That sounds intriguing. Do you remember where you read
about that? Is this custom pretty much common to all the tribes
of Papua New Guinea?
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/esp.htm
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field
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Message: 17
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 15:13:26 +0100
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Test for middle voice?
On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, 01:29 CET, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> The way I intuitively understood middle voice was looking
> at some
> examples of Ancient Greek. E.g. that 'to appear'
> (phainomai, the stem
> of 'phenomenon') is middle voice of 'to show'. It's clear
> that 'to be
> shown' (the passive voice) is not the same as 'to appear'
> (the middle
> voice) and this difference is just the point: it is shown,
> but no-one
> shows -- the agent is missing (nicely compares to 'the cup
> is filled'
> -- 'the cup fills)'.
When the agent is missing in 'the cup fills', wouldn't that
be some kind of antipassive -- if I understood the notion of
antipassive correctly at all, that is?
Carsten
--
"Miranayam cepauar� naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)
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Message: 18
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 10:28:26 -0500
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: migjan laggvage (my language)
On 11/22/05, Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> pronunciation:
> a=a e=e i=i o=o u=u y=y
> aa=a: ee=E ii=I oo=Q uu=u:
> au=&U ai=ay
Are you sure you don't mean /aj/? I can't
quite figure out how /ay/ would be pronounced.
>ss=s s=s/z
What conditions whether |s| is pronounced /s/ or /z/?
> z=s h=h
> halo, migjan neemje iss Reilly. halo, neemje migjen iss Reilly.
> hello, 1stposs. name be reilly. hello, name 1stgen. be reilly.
> my name is reilly.
This is tolerably clear, but for longer sentences
putting hyphens between the morphemes and
using standard abbreviations for grammatical
categories helps a lot. We usually use the
Leipzig Glossing Rules or some variation on them:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html
For instance, you might write (if I've guessed
right about the morpheme boundary, if any)
halo, neemje mig-jen iss Reilly.
hello name 1-GEN be Reilly
If "migjen" has no clear morpheme boundary you would
gloss it as
halo, neemje migjen iss Reilly.
hello name 1.GEN be Reilly
> asky gobjar dhiir migjan geeje sja.
> 3rdmix. gave 2nddat. 1stposs. key plur.
> he/she gave you my keys.
What does "mix." stand for here?
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field
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Message: 19
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 11:39:22 -0500
From: Reilly Schlaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: migjan laggvage (my language)
> pronunciation:
> a=a e=e i=i o=o u=u y=y
> aa=a: ee=E ii=I oo=Q uu=u:
> au=&U ai=ay
Are you sure you don't mean /aj/? I can't
quite figure out how /ay/ would be pronounced.
>ss=s s=s/z
What conditions whether |s| is pronounced /s/ or /z/?
> z=s h=h
> halo, migjan neemje iss Reilly. halo, neemje migjen iss Reilly.
> hello, 1stposs. name be reilly. hello, name 1stgen. be reilly.
> my name is reilly.
This is tolerably clear, but for longer sentences
putting hyphens between the morphemes and
using standard abbreviations for grammatical
categories helps a lot. We usually use the
Leipzig Glossing Rules or some variation on them:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html
For instance, you might write (if I've guessed
right about the morpheme boundary, if any)
halo, neemje mig-jen iss Reilly.
hello name 1-GEN be Reilly
If "migjen" has no clear morpheme boundary you would
gloss it as
halo, neemje migjen iss Reilly.
hello name 1.GEN be Reilly
> asky gobjar dhiir migjan geeje sja.
> 3rdmix. gave 2nddat. 1stposs. key plur.
> he/she gave you my keys.
What does "mix." stand for here?
--
Jim Henry
ai=/ay/ in the northern dialect which is the one represented here (and
is very hard to pronounce)
's' can be either it isnt distinguised in the language, it is entirely up to
you to say /s/ or /z/
i never really learned how to gloss very well seeing as the leipzig rules
always seemed a bit confusing to me but i will go give it another read.
oops sorry 'mix.' stands for 'mixed gender'
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