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There are 23 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Referent Tracking
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Vowel Harmony
From: caotope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
From: caotope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Referent Tracking
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Punctuation as typography (was Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?)
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Referent Tracking
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Punctuation as typography (was Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?)
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: Referent Tracking
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: how many cases is too many?
From: John Vertical <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: Poetry Translation Challenge
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: 115 different language to say i luv u....
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Referent Tracking
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: Language change among immortals
From: John Vertical <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. A more challenging poetry translation challenge
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: Referent Tracking
From: Rik Roots <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
18. Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
19. Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
20. Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
From: Tim May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
21. Re: A more challenging poetry translation challenge
From: Wesley Parish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
22. Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
23. Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 18:11:37 -0000
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
--- In [email protected], Jonathan Knibb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Tom wrote:
> >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".
> >
> >Topic vs. Comment --
> >The topic is what the utterance is about; the comment is what is
uttered
> >about the topic.
>
> I've never really understood the difference between 'topic' and
> 'given (information)'. What does 'about' mean in this context?
>
> It's a fundamental feature of my 'lang T4 that given information is
> expressed in the first half of the sentence (subject, roughly
speaking)
> and new information in the second half (~predicate). All sentences
have
> both. Tom, you say that a sentence may or may not have both given
and
> new information; I'd be interested to see examples which have only
one
> of these, to see how I'd render them in T4.
>
> Jonathan.
> ==
>
I meant the terms "given" and "new" in a purely non-technical
way: "given" information is anything the speaker expects the
addressee either already knows, or should already know; "new"
information is either "new" in the barest since, or "new" relative to
the discourse, or "new" relative to the "given" information.
If I tell you "Your name is Jonathan", you will probably notice
immediately that that sentence contains no new information. When
your parents first named you -- at your christening or baptism or
whenever it was -- "Johnathan" was new information to you, but you've
had a long time to get used to it by now -- much longer than
I've had.
"Topic", also, I meant in the strictly non-technical sense, of "what
the text is about". The sentence "Your name is Jonathan" is about
your name. That also happens to be the grammatical subject of the
sentence.
I can no longer remember where I read it, but, I remember reading
some Russian linguist saying that it is a feature of Russian that
most sentences are organized with the givenmost information earliest
and the newest information latest. Probably in a few days I will
find it again.
In "Evidentiality: the Linguistic Coding of Epistemology", Wallace
Chafe & Johanna Nichols, editors, Volume XX in Advances in Discourse
Processes:
in Chapter One, "The Heterogeneity of Evidentials in Makah", William
H. Jacobsen, Jr. mentions evidentials Kwakiutl studied by Boas and in
Washo studied by Jacobsen himself.
The (I'm spelling it wrong perforce) -emskw evidential in Kwakiutl
means, according to Boas, "as I told you before";
the "-le" evidential in Washo, which Jacobsen summarizes
as "redundant", means, Jacobsen says, "the speaker believes that the
addressee either already knows it, or should already know it."
These two evidentials, then, would clearly mark Given information.
"Given" information need not always be marked as "given"; and, I
don't suppose every sentence -- not even every declarative,
indicative, sentence -- has to have a "given" part. But if a
language has a "as I told you" evidential or an "as you (should)
already know" evidential, and a sentence has a part marked with such,
that part must be a "given" part of that sentence.
Also, some languages have a "mirative". A "mirative" basically
encodes something along the lines of either "I don't quite believe it
myself yet, but..." or "I don't quite know how to take it yet, but..."
Clearly, anything marked with the "mirative" would have to be "new".
Some Arabicists have said that some Arabic sentences have what they
called a Major Subject, or a Broad Subject, possibly in addition to
what is usually called a "subject". That is what grammarians of
Japanese, Chinese, and other so-called "topic-prominent" languages
call the Topic. Some "topic-prominent" languages are also "subject-
prominent", and some of their sentences have what some grammarians
have called a "double-subject" construction; that is, the topic is
expressed as a noun phrase, then the comment is expressed as a
complete clause, having its own subject.
Example:
"That tree, the leaves don't go all the way to the top."
Tom H.C. in MI
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 18:30:01 -0000
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background,
Given/New.
--- In [email protected], Tom Chappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> -----
>
> [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."
By the way, the "answer-to-a-wh-question" is the closest match between
"focus" and "new". In some ways, if part of a sentence can be seen
as an answer to a "wh-"question, even if there was no explicit
"wh-"question asked, that part of the sentence may reasonably be seen
as both the "focus" and as the "new information".
>
> -----
Payne's "Describing Morphosyntax", on pp. 266-270, talks
about "focus", which has been used in several different ways. One
particular way, the way I have been using it in this thread, is for
the "pragmatically marked focus"; it is something that not
necessarily every clause has. He says some authors, among
them "Chafe 1976, Givon 1979", use the term "contrast" to describe
this pragmatic functions.
He talks about the "scope of focus"
If the "scope of focus" is the entire clause, that is "Truth Value
Focus" abbreviated TVF, also called "polar focus".
Example.
(in response to "he didn't eat the apple"):
"Yes, he DID eat it."
If the "scope of focus" is a particular constituent, that is one of
possibly many kinds of "Constituent Focus", abbreviated CF.
Among the sorts of CF are:
Assertive focus;
Speaker believes Addressee has no knowledge of information
"They brought me a bowl of /this thick, green, mushy stuff/."
Counter-Presuppositional focus
also called "Exclusive focus"
"Sally and Robert came over last night; but SHE got drunk."
(Presupposition: You would have thought it would have been Robert
that would get drunk, but he stayed sober.)
Exhaustive Listing focus
The information which the Speaker asserts is unique, in that the rest
of the clause is true only of it, and false with respect to any other
possibilities.
"I drank /only Pepsi/ at the party."
(I did not drink any rum or vodka.)
I don't think Payne thinks that's all there are; in fact, he mentions
the African language Aghem as having all of these and a few more.
I think he only thinks those were the ones that were common in the
literature by the time he wrote his book.
Tom H.C. in MI
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Message: 3
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 18:55:42 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Referent Tracking
> Are (wannabe) trigger systems also Topic systems? (Not
> intending to tread loose [lostreten?] a debate about trigger
> systems)
Leaving aside for now various arguments about how exactly to
characterise a trigger system, I would say no, for this reason: although
the topic of a clause is what the clause is about, there is no
restriction in languages which mark topic separately from grammatical
roles (ie, what most people think of as a topic system) for the topic to
occur in a certain subset of roles, whereas with a trigger system, while
the choice of the trigger does seem to be motivated by factors related
to topicality, the referent chosen to be trigger must occur in a certain
subset of possible roles. Indeed, the stereotypical "double subject"
(that elephant, trunk is long) construction that such topic languages
possess is, I think, not possible in (as far as I know all) trigger
languages such as Tagalog.
This is, of course, assuming that the trigger can be identified with
the topic of the clause. While they do share many features in common
(for instance, in Tagalog the trigger must be chosen to be definite
whenever possible, and similar requirements hold for the topic in topic
languages) there also do seem to be differences between the two. One big
unexpected use of the trigger if it is in fact the topic is the sheer
number of times the trigger is the object (and indeed the fact that
object focus seems to be more basic from a marking point of view than
subject focus)... since subjects are generally much more topical than
objects, you'd expect the opposite if the trigger were simply the topic
in such languages.
We also have to consider the question of syntactic pivots. In a
language like Japanese or Chinese with a well developed topic system,
typically the topic acts much more like a syntactic pivot than any other
role. This simply isn't true in Tagalog and probably other Phillipine
languages with trigger systems... in Tagalog, according to papers I've
read on the issue, the syntactic pivot remains the subject role even
when the trigger is not the subject. Thus, while the trigger system
(whether you consider it voice or not) alters the pragmatic marking of
the clause (equivalent to say, stressing a pronoun or topic fronting in
English), it doesn't alter which argument controls zero anaphora,
whereas changing the topic in a topic language does.
This is of course only relevant to the trigger systems as found in
Tagalog and related languages. Ayeri, which I think you've said before
is a trigger language, needn't function in this way, and its triggers
may indeed be much closer to topics in topic languages. The main
questions are, I think:
1) are your triggers the syntactic pivot of the clause?
2) what factors are involved in the choice of trigger?
[If you want to read more about trigger vs topic vs subject in Tagalog,
I suggest you read a paper in the book:
Subject and Topic
Edited by: Charles Li
If you can get hold of it, that is]
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Message: 4
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 18:39:55 -0000
From: caotope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Vowel Harmony
tomhchappell wrote:
> Close vs. Open, Front vs. Back, Round vs. Unround, ATR vs. notATR,
> Nasal vs. notNasal, are essentially all the features there are to
> vowels;
What about phonetion? Or is breathyness/creakyness etc. of vowels
always considered a question of tone?
> Front vs. Back frequently has at least three, and sometimes has
> more than three values;
It's been asked already, but you are here talking phonetically, not
phonemically, right? /a/ is quite common of course, but I've thought
it usually analyzes as front (whenever that is relevant anyway)
> Round vs. Unround sometimes has more than two values in
> conlangs, although I am not personally aware of any natlang in which
> it has more than two values.
Don't some dialects of Swedish shift /u\/ to /y_c/ - hence contrasting
three degrees of roundedness in high front vowels?
> I don't think anyone has even proposed that Nasal vs. notNasal can
> be given a third value.
How about oral vs. nasal approximant vs. nareal fricative? ... Hell, I
can even pronounce nareal *trills*! :)
(Of course, I can only make these work if the oral component is a
stop. But nevertheless, it's certainly possible to have more than two
values of nasality...)
> "consonant harmony" if it occurs is likely to apply just to syllable
> onsets or just to codas; or, even, just to onsets of stressed
> syllables or just to codas of stressed syllables.
Couldn't the frequent POA assimilation of nasal+plosive clusters (and
maybe some other sorts of clusters too) be considered a sort of
consonant harmony? I have a phonology sketch around which extends this
to almost all consonant clusters and also prohibits certain kinds of
POA combinations in successive syllabes.
Sibilant harmony (that is, /s/ may not mix with /S/ etc) is, however,
the only obvious natlang case of consonant harmony I've read about.
John Vertical
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Message: 5
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 18:59:52 -0000
From: caotope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
> (PS: I believe in German it's actually /hail/. If you intended to do
> italics, the accept way to do that is with underscores, thus _heil_,
> to avoid confusion with phonemic notation.)
>
> --
> Tristan
Um, aren't underscores used for underlining? I propose using //two//
slashes for italics...
John Vertical
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Message: 6
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:15:38 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Referent Tracking
Oops, you pretty much answered question (1) in your reply before, so I
guess (2) just remains. But, can I ask... does your language try to
retain trigger (and thus perhaps topic) continuity over long stretches
of dialogue?
>
> 1) are your triggers the syntactic pivot of the clause?
>
> 2) what factors are involved in the choice of trigger?
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Message: 7
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 14:26:33 -0500
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Punctuation as typography (was Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?)
On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:59:52 -0500, caotope <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>> (PS: I believe in German it's actually /hail/. If you intended to do
>> italics, the accept way to do that is with underscores, thus _heil_,
>> to avoid confusion with phonemic notation.)
>>
>> --
>> Tristan
>
> Um, aren't underscores used for underlining? I propose using //two//
> slashes for italics...
Two slashes are for archiphonemes.
Underscores, however crazy, have a sturdy history as ASCII underlining,
being used since time immemorial (more or less) to bracket the titles of
books, films, and other media, traditionally italicised in typeset text.
Paul
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Message: 8
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:27:39 -0000
From: tomhchappell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Referent Tracking
The Chafe & Nichols book on Evidentials has a chapter on the Quechua
languages by Weber.
These languages have both topic-marking and focus-marking.
They also have grammatical relations of subject and object, independent
of topic and focus.
In some of these languages, the verb, as well as one of the
participants, may be marked with a focus-mark; in others, only one of
the participants may be so marked.
In some of these languages, the focus-marked participant may also be
topic-marked; in others, the focus-marked participant may not be topic-
marked.
Different Quechua "languages" or "dialects" have different rules about
how many participants may be topic-marked and what order they may come
in; that is, how many may come before the verb, how many before the
focus-marked participant, how many before the subject, how many before
the object, etc.
--
M.H. Klaiman, in his Grammatical Voice book, discussed some Mayan
languages which had both Topic marking and Focus marking. If I both
remember correctly, and understood correctly in the first place, the
verbs in these languages were marked for Voice, in order to specify the
semantic roles played by the Topic- and Focus- marked participants.
I suppose that may not have been all there was to that system; just as
that isn't all there is to the Focus system in Tagalog, and the Trigger
system in Tagalog is, according to Chris, not only about Focus; and, as
Klaiman says, in the Philippine languages with Information-Salience
Voice, "the closest thing to a 'Subject' is a focussed agent".
--
As for pivots -- is it not the case that, in some ergative natlangs,
the pivot is indeed the patient (the absolutive argument)?
---
Tom H.C. in MI
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Message: 9
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 14:39:58 -0500
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Punctuation as typography (was Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?)
On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 14:26:33 -0500, Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> as ASCII underlining,
ASCII italics.
Furrfu.
Paul
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Message: 10
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 19:49:24 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Referent Tracking
>--
>M.H. Klaiman, in his Grammatical Voice book, discussed some Mayan
>languages which had both Topic marking and Focus marking. If I both
>remember correctly, and understood correctly in the first place, the
>verbs in these languages were marked for Voice, in order to specify the
>semantic roles played by the Topic- and Focus- marked participants.
>
>
I would be very interested to see more details about these systems. Next
time I'm at university I'll look see if they own the book you mentioned.
>I suppose that may not have been all there was to that system; just as
>that isn't all there is to the Focus system in Tagalog, and the Trigger
>system in Tagalog is, according to Chris, not only about Focus; and, as
>Klaiman says, in the Philippine languages with Information-Salience
>Voice, "the closest thing to a 'Subject' is a focussed agent".
>
>
The paper I cited agrees that that is the only type of argument that has
all the features associated with subject in other languages. I have
though used the terms "subject" and "object" in relation to Tagalog
because, as I mentioned, the syntactic pivot in Tagalog is S (argument
of intransitive clause) + A (actor of transitive clause)... ie
syntactically Tagalog does exhibit in some ways the notion of subject,
but the subject role is seriously impoverished in other ways compared to
other languages except when the subject is also the trigger.
>--
>As for pivots -- is it not the case that, in some ergative natlangs,
>the pivot is indeed the patient (the absolutive argument)?
>---
>
>
Yes, although the fact remains that in such languages, as in typical
languages with nominative alignment, the syntactic pivot is mainly role
defined (ie S + A or S + P). In topic languages, by far the most
important thing for resolving things like zero anaphora is not the
identity of the subject or absolutive of the previous clause but the
identity of the discourse topic.
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Message: 11
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 22:34:56 +0200
From: John Vertical <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: how many cases is too many?
Jim Henry wrote:
>On 11/22/05, David J. Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I've been waiting for this topic to come up. ;) I cannot find my
> > typology handout, but there is a natural language with over
> > 140 local cases. And those are just local cases (I think it has
> > six or seven non-local cases, as well). So it need not be a
> > logical language to have a large number of cases.
>
>gjâ-zym-byn has over 350 spacetime postpositions, plus an open-ended
>set of derived abstract postpositions. So 140 local
>cases is not excessive. I would be surprised though if
>the 140 local case affixes can't be further broken
>down into component morphemes, at least diachronically.
So, what's the record for *monomorphemic non-local* cases? It seems that all
the huge case systems just have metric buttloads of local cases but still no
more than half a dozen non-local ones.
John Vertical
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Message: 12
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:47:52 +0100
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Poetry Translation Challenge
On Thu, 24 Nov 2005 11:41 CET, Taliesin wrote:
> English:
> I am sky and world
> I am moon and sun
> Day watches my work
> Night sings my happiness
> Can you understand?
Ayeri:
CIUNAN ENA ELOCUNO
Ayang lenoaris nay mavayaris
Ayang colunaris nay perinaris
Bahison eng silvarà gummolei ayena
Sirutayon eng maliarè minanaris
Ming bihaneváng?
That's 11-11-13-12-5 and not very beautiful. The point is
that I haven't yet worked on poetry.
Interlinearized:
Ciunan ena Elocuno
Beginning GEN Elocuno
Ay-ang leno-aris nay mavay-aris
1s-A sky- P and world-P
Ay-ang colun-aris nay perin-aris
1s-A moon- P and sun- P
Bahis-on eng silv- ar-à gummo-lei ay-ena
Day TRG TRG:A watch-3s-day='a' work- P 1s-GEN
Sirutay-on eng mali-ar-è minan- aris
Night- TRG TRG:A sing-3s-night='e' happiness-P
Ming bihan- eva-ang?
Can understand-2s- A
Carsten
... throwing lurk-mode over board again.
--
Keywords: translation_exercise
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)
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Message: 13
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:47:28 +0100
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: 115 different language to say i luv u....
On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, 08:49 AM, Michael Adams wrote:
> 17> China - Wo ai ni
> 64> Mandarin Chinese - Wo ai ni
There's a language called 'China'? Or is that supposed to be
standard (Peking?) Chinese with tones lacking due to
ignorance? However, the Chinese pocket dictioanry Henrik
sent me some time ago says _wÇ ài nÇ_
> 30> Finnish - Mina rakastan sinua
And that's _Minää rakastan sinuä_ or something like that.
> 46> Icelandic - Eg elska tig
And that must be _Ég elska tig_, where _ég_ is /jEx/ AFAIK,
not /e(:)k/. In my organizer, there's something like that
as well, but they write _big_ instead of _tig_. Hrm.
> 75> Pig Latin - Iay ovlay ouyay
75a. Hühnersprache (German equivalent of Pig Latin):
Ich-hich-le-fich lie-hie-le-fie-be-he-le-fe
dich-hich-le-fich
75b. Löffelsprache (Another word game like Pig Latin):
Ilefich lielefiebelefe dilefich
111> Mongolia - Bi Charmed heir teh (update by Kent)
That's not a joke?!
Ayeri:
a. Ang tyáyin eváris. (*I* love you)
/AN 'tja:.in e.'va:.rIs/
b. Sira tyáyang evain (I love *you* [and nobody else])
/'si.ra 'tja:.jAN 'e.va.in/
I guess a) doesn't make so much sense here.
Daléian:
Ce si tastad. (I you love)
/se Si 'tAS.tat/
At least they were smart enough to know that there doesn't
exist Belgian ...
Carsten
--
Keywords: translation_exercise
"Verbieren verkomischt Sprache."
(Calvin und Hobbes)
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Message: 14
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 21:50:00 +0100
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Referent Tracking
On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, 02:02 CET, Rik Roots wrote:
> Before I rejigged the system relative clauses would have
> relative conjunctions
> at the beginning and the end, and could be embedded
> anywhere within the main
> clause - but it was clumsy and cumbersome. The system
> still needs a little
> bit of tweaking I think, but I'm in no hurry.
I can do that too in Ayeri. If the relative pronoun does not
follow directly the argument it relativizes (word?) on, the
case ending of the argument it refers to is added: sang,
saris, sireng, silei, sena, siyam, ... I don't undestand
what this has to do with Switch Reference systems, e.g. as
described in Describing Morphosyntax (pp. 322-325).
Carsten
PS: I've been offered a Gmail account. I've always wanted
to try that out. The only bad thing is that all 'nice'
user names like Carsten.Becker, carstenbecker, C.Becker
etc. are already used. So I need to think of something
else (I hate beckerscarsten because people always ask why)
--
Keywords: switch_reference, relative_clause
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)
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Message: 15
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 23:05:27 +0200
From: John Vertical <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Language change among immortals
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>From what I've seen, the purpose of language evolution is to speed
>thought or speech. For example, AOLspeak is faster to type than real
>English.
Are you really saying that all sound changes are lenition? How would you
explain sound changes like [r] -> [R\] (French / German), [ts] -> [T:] ->
[ts] (Finnish) or [i:] -> [ai] (English)?
John Vertical
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Message: 16
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:59:41 -0800
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: A more challenging poetry translation challenge
The 17th century English poet Robert Herrick, whose
most famous line is probably "Gather ye rosebuds while
ye may," somewhere around 1629 wrote this short, but
memorable two-line poem. I give it in the original
English since I'm not yet completely satisfied with my
translation to Elomi.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to
translate it into your favorite conlang.
Another Upon Her Weeping by Robert Herrick.
She by the river sat, and sitting there,
She wept, and made it deeper by a tear.
--gary
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Message: 17
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 01:07:04 +0000
From: Rik Roots <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Referent Tracking
On Saturday 26 Nov 2005 20:50, Carsten Becker wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Nov 2005, 02:02 CET, Rik Roots wrote:
> > Before I rejigged the system relative clauses would have
> > relative conjunctions
> > at the beginning and the end, and could be embedded
> > anywhere within the main
> > clause - but it was clumsy and cumbersome. The system
> > still needs a little
> > bit of tweaking I think, but I'm in no hurry.
>
> I can do that too in Ayeri. If the relative pronoun does not
> follow directly the argument it relativizes (word?) on, the
> case ending of the argument it refers to is added: sang,
> saris, sireng, silei, sena, siyam, ... I don't undestand
> what this has to do with Switch Reference systems, e.g. as
> described in Describing Morphosyntax (pp. 322-325).
>
Oh I wouldn't call the Gevey system "switch referencing", but rather something
inspired by the idea of switch referencing - which I've never been able to
fully understand in any case.
> Carsten
>
Rik
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Message: 18
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 12:14:27 +1100
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 18:59 +0000, caotope wrote:
> > (PS: I believe in German it's actually /hail/. If you intended to do
> > italics, the accept way to do that is with underscores, thus _heil_,
> > to avoid confusion with phonemic notation.)
> >
> > --
> > Tristan
>
> Um, aren't underscores used for underlining? I propose using //two//
> slashes for italics...
As has been pointed out, that also clashes. There is no difference
between underlining and italics in almost all cases (underlining is
simply used when italics is not possible, but there are some people
who use word processors too often for their continued good health &
underline headings and emphasis), so there's usually no clash. (The
most common case when there *is* a contrast between underlining and
italics is with hyperlinks, and so obviously there is no problem in
plain text when you can't do links!)
Many people use *asterisks* for emphasis and _underscores_ for other
uses of italics; this isn't really a distinction of bold and italics
because bold isn't really emphasis, but rather so it stands out from
the surrounding text. So "*Surely* George Orwell wrote _Lord of the
Rings_!" translated into proper non-ASCII typography would have both
"Surely" and "Lord of the Rings" in italics.
--
Tristan.
(This message is best viewed in a fixed-width font :)
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Message: 19
Date: Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:20:32 -0500
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:14:27 -0500, Tristan Mc Leay
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> (This message is best viewed in a fixed-width font :)
Not just "best". I'd go as far as to say "rather impressive when".
Paul
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Message: 20
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 02:25:59 +0000
From: Tim May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
Tristan Mc Leay wrote at 2005-11-27 12:14:27 (+1100)
>
> As has been pointed out, that also clashes. There is no difference
> between underlining and italics in almost all cases (underlining is
> simply used when italics is not possible, but there are some people
> who use word processors too often for their continued good health &
> underline headings and emphasis), so there's usually no clash. (The
> most common case when there *is* a contrast between underlining and
> italics is with hyperlinks, and so obviously there is no problem in
> plain text when you can't do links!)
>
> Many people use *asterisks* for emphasis and _underscores_ for
> other uses of italics; this isn't really a distinction of bold and
> italics because bold isn't really emphasis, but rather so it stands
> out from the surrounding text. So "*Surely* George Orwell wrote
> _Lord of the Rings_!" translated into proper non-ASCII typography
> would have both "Surely" and "Lord of the Rings" in italics.
>
Personally I'm inclined to see asterisks as roughly equivalent to
*bold* text (when transcribing from print, for instance), but for
original compositions it doesn't really make much difference.
Semantically it's an indicator of emphasis, whereas for titles only
italics will do. (Actually, in HTML I try to make exactly this
destinction between <em> and <i> tags, both of which are normally
realized as slanted text...) As you say, one hardly ever needs to
distinguish underlining specifically, so there's no generally
understood mechanism for indicating it.
Of course, hére, some have in the past tried showing emphasis by
áccenting the stressed syllable, as in Dutch. It hasn't really caught
on, but one has the option.
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Message: 21
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 22:40:41 +1300
From: Wesley Parish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A more challenging poetry translation challenge
On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 10:59, Gary Shannon wrote:
> The 17th century English poet Robert Herrick, whose
> most famous line is probably "Gather ye rosebuds while
> ye may," somewhere around 1629 wrote this short, but
> memorable two-line poem. I give it in the original
> English since I'm not yet completely satisfied with my
> translation to Elomi.
>
> Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to
> translate it into your favorite conlang.
>
> Another Upon Her Weeping by Robert Herrick.
>
Li' Anyerra-Tarah
> She by the river sat, and sitting there,
nan a li' foru'a, nan a li' apai
sat-by she a river, sat she there
> She wept, and made it deeper by a tear.
li' si'araf, li' ai'if li' no'uru pata'i u siai
she wept, she made it more deep of a tear
>
> --gary
Wesley Parish
--
Clinersterton beademung, with all of love - RIP James Blish
-----
Mau e ki, he aha te mea nui?
You ask, what is the most important thing?
Maku e ki, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
I reply, it is people, it is people, it is people.
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Message: 22
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 21:19:46 +1100
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 02:25 +0000, Tim May wrote:
> Tristan Mc Leay wrote at 2005-11-27 12:14:27 (+1100)
> >
> > As has been pointed out, that also clashes. There is no difference
> > between underlining and italics in almost all cases (underlining is
> > simply used when italics is not possible, but there are some people
> > who use word processors too often for their continued good health &
> > underline headings and emphasis), so there's usually no clash. (The
> > most common case when there *is* a contrast between underlining and
> > italics is with hyperlinks, and so obviously there is no problem in
> > plain text when you can't do links!)
> >
> > Many people use *asterisks* for emphasis and _underscores_ for
> > other uses of italics; this isn't really a distinction of bold and
> > italics because bold isn't really emphasis, but rather so it stands
> > out from the surrounding text. So "*Surely* George Orwell wrote
> > _Lord of the Rings_!" translated into proper non-ASCII typography
> > would have both "Surely" and "Lord of the Rings" in italics.
Hmm, that paragraph didn't seem to come through quite properly. I'll try
it again with hard returns (which ISTR I used in the first paragraph
even though it naturally wrapped there):
Many people use *asterisks* for emphasis and _underscores_ for other
uses of italics; this isn't really a distinction of bold and italics
because bold isn't really emphasis, but rather so it stands out from
the surrounding text. So "*Surely* George Orwell wrote _Lord of the
Rings_!" translated into proper non-ASCII typography would have both
"Surely" and "Lord of the Rings" in italics.
There, perhaps that shows up better. (Or maybe it was just re-wrapped by
your email client when you pressed "reply", but it took a while to get
it just-so so I want it to come through properly ;)
> Personally I'm inclined to see asterisks as roughly equivalent to
> *bold* text (when transcribing from print, for instance), but for
> original compositions it doesn't really make much difference.
Well yeah, when transcribing from text it tends to be used as bold, so
for instance the introduction to a Wikipedia article might be:
*Typography* (from the Greek words _typos_ = form and _graphein_
=
to write) is the art and technique of selecting and arranging
type
styles, point sizes, line lengths, line leading, character
spacing
and word spacing for typeset application.
(ooh, freaky given my earlier posting! That indentation is just my email
client's default!)
But I was indeed intending to focus on original compositions, in which,
as you say, the difference between *asterisks* and _underscores_ is
comparable to the difference between <em> and <i> in HTML.
> Semantically it's an indicator of emphasis, whereas for titles only
> italics will do. (Actually, in HTML I try to make exactly this
> destinction between <em> and <i> tags, both of which are normally
> realized as slanted text...) As you say, one hardly ever needs to
> distinguish underlining specifically, so there's no generally
> understood mechanism for indicating it.
>
> Of course, hére, some have in the past tried showing emphasis by
> áccenting the stressed syllable, as in Dutch. It hasn't really caught
> on, but one has the option.
Yeah. I reckon that's "cute", one might say, but I don't really think
it's as useful as *asterisks* or anything... They're kinda harder to
see; they don't emphasise as much. Also, I imagine for many people it's
not all that easy to type in arbitrary acute accented vowels...
--
Tristan
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Message: 23
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 05:42:36 -0500
From: Paul Bennett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?
On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 05:19:46 -0500, Tristan Mc Leay
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I imagine for many people it's
> not all that easy to type in arbitrary acute accented vowels...
For me, it's no easier or harder to type in arbitrary acute accented
consonants.
I have neither a funny foreign keyboard nor the spare brainpower to
memorise arcane ALT+0573622 sequences, so I rely on the Character Map.
It's actually a capable application once you get the swing of it.
Paul
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