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There are 13 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Hyperlinking a dictionary to a corpus
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Thoughts on Word building
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: Thoughts on Word building
From: Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Thoughts on Word building
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Thoughts on Word building
From: Aaron Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: Thoughts on Word building
From: Aaron Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: Thoughts on Word building
From: Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Mysterious email(er)
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Mysterious email(er)
From: Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Sheli Names
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Thoughts on Word building
From: Taka Tunu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. New language grammar--what needs work?
From: Taka Tunu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: Thoughts on Word building
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 13:58:16 -0500
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Hyperlinking a dictionary to a corpus
On 12/2/05, Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 01 Dec 2005, 12:43 CET, Gary Shannon wrote:
> database and PHP? It sounds like a nifty idea. How does the
> program know, though, how to assemble example sentences?
> I.e. AFAIU your Elomi is isolating and rather simplistic
> (at least it seems so at first sight), but what about
> more complex agglutinating or even inflecting languages?
> To link words in example sentences, you'd need a script that
> would split at *morpheme* boundaries and when the respective
> morpheme already exists in the dictionary, a link to this
> one is provided. Well, but I quite don't know how to tell a
> program how to split on morpheme boundaries the way the
> sentence is meant ... for example, when there's a prefix
> _a-_ and there are words beginning with _a_, all first a's
> of such words would be linked to the entry for that prefix
Unless the conlang has a self-segregating morphology,
you probably need to go through the example sentences
file and manually mark them up with hyphens or some other
divider characters between morphemes. Then your
conversion script would produce links around
the morphemes and delete the hyphen characters.
My sample sentences in gzb already have the hyphens
between morphemes; the tricky bit is that the
base version of the lexicon is in gzb's ASCII orthography
and the sample sentences are in Unicode. So
the conversion script needs to convert the sample
sentences from Unicode back to ASCII in memory
to match them to the dictionary's link anchors,
and vice versa.
Today I modified the script that formats glossed
sentences so it will automatically link each word
to the dictionary entry. I did that for the new
"Danti and the Donkey" text, but I don't think
I'll be redoing all the other texts that way
because most of them have had hand-edited
corrections to the HTML version that didn't
go back into the ASCII sources.
I need to make it also generate output to another
stream of some format like
<gzb word> <target doc>.htm#<anchor for sample sentence>
then the output of the other stream can be appended
to a table of cross-references that can be merged
with the lexicon table and used by the lexicon
HTMLization script. I've started working
on that but it's not finished, and it will only
work on new glosses; I'll need another script
to generate anchor lists for existing sentences.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 13:51:07 -0800
From: Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Thoughts on Word building
Prefixes and suffixes added to a root word can be used
to derive more words in languages structed that way.
But what is the "best" root, and the "best" set of
derivations for any given concept. The derivation can
proceed in any direction, but there must be some
particular root or set of roots that results in an
optimal tree with the shortest or most understandable
derivatives. For example, given a set of words having
to do with information: to know, knowledge, known,
knowledgable, to teach, to learn, teacher, student, to
forget, to remember, lesson, ignorance, scholar,
dunce, etc. ANY ONE of those words can be used as the
root from which all the others can be derived.
know -> know-stuff (knowledge) -> know-stuff-give (to
teach) -> know-stuff-give-person (teacher).
teacher -> teacher-job (to teach) -> teacher-job-stuff
(knowledge) -> treacher-job-stuff-have (to know).
ignorance -> ignorance-remove (to teach) ->
ignorance-remove-person (teacher) ->
ignorance-remove-person-client (student).
If all these words were arranged in an interconnected
multi-dimensional network, where the paths linking
adjacent words (nodes) represented the meaning of the
prefix or suffix connecting them, then there cannot be
such a thing as a "most primative" word. Any word can
be taken to be the most primative word and all other
can be shown to be derived from it.
So the question is not what words are more primative,
but rather, what distribution of arbitrary root words
in the network result in the "best" set of derived
words? Here, "best" will have to be defined according
to the design goals of the language.
So the first question is what is the optimum set of
affix pairs? They will be pairs because they must be
bi-directional as in doer/job (to_teach + doer ->
teacher; teacher + job -> to_teach) so that each
member of the pair un-does the other member. (doer +
job = NULL, so that to_teach + doer + job = to_teach).
How many affixes exist in English? There must be a
bunch of them. In five minutes, just off the top of my
head I have: (The letters in brackets are replaced by
the suffix)
-[ce]-tific science -> scientific
-[y]-ic geology -> geologic | history -> historic
-ic[]-al geologic -> geological | tropic -> tropical
-[os]-ic cosmos -> cosmic
-[o]-ic volcano -> volcanic
-n[]-ic titan -> titanic | electron -> electronic
-[an]-c barbarian -> barbaric
-[an]-ism barbarian -> barbarism
-[]-agoric phantasm -> phantasmagoric
-[e]-ic -> automate -> automatic
-[y]-iance comply -> compliance compliance | vary ->
variance
-[]-ance -> appear -> appearance | accept ->
acceptance
-[]-ence correspond -> correspondence
-[ect]-igence neglect -> negligence
-t[]-ion invent -> invention
-[y]-ial deny -> denial | try -> trial
-[y]-ful beauty -> beautiful | pity -> pitiful |
plenty -> plentiful
-t[e]-ion obligate -> obligation | automate ->
automation
plus -able, -ible, -ment, -er (doer), -ive, -ative,
-ish,
And on and on. It seems like it would be very handy to
have a systematic list of such derivational
components. Even things like being able to derive
"pizzaria" from "pizza" and "happy" from "sad" makes
the job of vocabulary building much simpler.
So anyway, the point of all this rambling is; it seem
like a very good starting point for a conlang
(assuming it is structed to be able to use prefixes
and suffixes) is to collect a comprehensive set of
conlang affixes and compounding rules. After that, one
single primative root can yeild dozens, or maybe
hundreds of additional words by affixing and
compounding.
But is there in existence on the web such a list of
affix functions?
--gary
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Message: 3
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 17:56:15 -0500
From: Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Word building
On 12/3/05, Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
---SNIP---
>
> But is there in existence on the web such a list of
> affix functions?
>
> --gary
>
I've generally found Esperanto's and Ladekwa's affixes to be a pretty
good collection. Together they seem pretty comprehensive without going
off the deep end. ---larry
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Message: 4
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 19:25:01 -0500
From: Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Word building
On 12/3/05, Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 12/3/05, Gary Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > But is there in existence on the web such a list of
> > affix functions?
> I've generally found Esperanto's and Ladekwa's affixes to be a pretty
> good collection. Together they seem pretty comprehensive without going
> off the deep end. ---larry
The Volapük affix list, though overall not as powerful as
Esperanto's, has a few good affixes that Esperanto
lacks. I'm not sure where to find a comprehensive
list all in one place online, however; the best list
I know of is in Andre Cherpillod's _Konciza
Gramatiko de Volapuko_.
The gjâ-zym-byn suffix list might give you a few
ideas, too; it has some curious affixes not found in
the other lists.
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/semantic.htm#section5
I also could see the value of a comprehensive list
of affixes or derivational methods; maybe we could
collaborate on such a list at the Conlang Wikicity?
One might turn it around and say: we want
to look for semantic patterns that suggest
factoring into two or more concepts, so
the word can be derived from two or more
morphemes. A while ago I started compiling
a list of such patterns, most of them used
in Esperanto or gzb, a few of which I don't
think I've used or seen used yet. Some of them...
(X represents the root the affix
would be applied to)
method, system, way of doing X
to produce, emit, give off X (milk -> suckle)
do X with attention (see -> look, hear -> listen)
sense for perceiving X (light -> vision -> see,
sound -> hearing -> hear)
generally cable of X (conceive -> female,
beget -> male, think -> intelligent )
actually capable of X (conceive/beget -> fertile)
to violate X (human law > crime, language > solecism,
moral law > sin...)
Other such patterns would indicate a
compounding of two root morphemes, perhaps
with a linking morpheme indicating their
relationship, or formation of an noun-adjective
phrase with some appropriate tagging
of the adjective:
an X made of Y (brick house)
an X with property Y (bluebird)
a mixture of X and Y (red+blue > purple, iron + carbon > steel)
an X that does Y, is associated with Y
You might look through the list archives
of the ceqli and konyalanguage mailing lists;
there have been discussions like this there
in the last year. Also, just in the last
few days there have been similar discussions
in the AUXLANG mailing list about how
Esperanto's root lexicon might have been even
smaller with more extensive use of
compounding and affixing.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm
...Mind the gmail Reply-to: field
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Message: 5
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 18:43:43 -0800
From: Aaron Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Word building
Hmm, here's a list of IE roots.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/IEroots.html
þ
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Message: 6
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 18:41:07 -0800
From: Aaron Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Word building
I think that Roget's Thesaurus, the old one, before they started doing
the "dictionary style" thesauri, contains a good list of about 1000
concepts. A language that has a word for each Roget category would be
able to say most things, and would make a fine parent for a language
family. At least so goes my thinking.
Also, there may be a dictionary of IE roots somewhere. If such a thing
exists, I would be most interested in learning where it is, because it
would enable me to make a very compelling language. Possibly.
þ
Gary Shannon wrote:
>Prefixes and suffixes added to a root word can be used
>to derive more words in languages structed that way.
>But what is the "best" root, and the "best" set of
>derivations for any given concept. The derivation can
>proceed in any direction, but there must be some
>particular root or set of roots that results in an
>optimal tree with the shortest or most understandable
>derivatives. For example, given a set of words having
>to do with information: to know, knowledge, known,
>knowledgable, to teach, to learn, teacher, student, to
>forget, to remember, lesson, ignorance, scholar,
>dunce, etc. ANY ONE of those words can be used as the
>root from which all the others can be derived.
>
>know -> know-stuff (knowledge) -> know-stuff-give (to
>teach) -> know-stuff-give-person (teacher).
>teacher -> teacher-job (to teach) -> teacher-job-stuff
>(knowledge) -> treacher-job-stuff-have (to know).
>ignorance -> ignorance-remove (to teach) ->
>ignorance-remove-person (teacher) ->
>ignorance-remove-person-client (student).
>
>If all these words were arranged in an interconnected
>multi-dimensional network, where the paths linking
>adjacent words (nodes) represented the meaning of the
>prefix or suffix connecting them, then there cannot be
>such a thing as a "most primative" word. Any word can
>be taken to be the most primative word and all other
>can be shown to be derived from it.
>
>So the question is not what words are more primative,
>but rather, what distribution of arbitrary root words
>in the network result in the "best" set of derived
>words? Here, "best" will have to be defined according
>to the design goals of the language.
>
>So the first question is what is the optimum set of
>affix pairs? They will be pairs because they must be
>bi-directional as in doer/job (to_teach + doer ->
>teacher; teacher + job -> to_teach) so that each
>member of the pair un-does the other member. (doer +
>job = NULL, so that to_teach + doer + job = to_teach).
>How many affixes exist in English? There must be a
>bunch of them. In five minutes, just off the top of my
>head I have: (The letters in brackets are replaced by
>the suffix)
>
>-[ce]-tific science -> scientific
>-[y]-ic geology -> geologic | history -> historic
>-ic[]-al geologic -> geological | tropic -> tropical
>-[os]-ic cosmos -> cosmic
>-[o]-ic volcano -> volcanic
>-n[]-ic titan -> titanic | electron -> electronic
>-[an]-c barbarian -> barbaric
>-[an]-ism barbarian -> barbarism
>-[]-agoric phantasm -> phantasmagoric
>-[e]-ic -> automate -> automatic
>-[y]-iance comply -> compliance compliance | vary ->
>variance
>-[]-ance -> appear -> appearance | accept ->
>acceptance
>-[]-ence correspond -> correspondence
>-[ect]-igence neglect -> negligence
>-t[]-ion invent -> invention
>-[y]-ial deny -> denial | try -> trial
>-[y]-ful beauty -> beautiful | pity -> pitiful |
>plenty -> plentiful
>-t[e]-ion obligate -> obligation | automate ->
>automation
>plus -able, -ible, -ment, -er (doer), -ive, -ative,
>-ish,
>
>And on and on. It seems like it would be very handy to
>have a systematic list of such derivational
>components. Even things like being able to derive
>"pizzaria" from "pizza" and "happy" from "sad" makes
>the job of vocabulary building much simpler.
>
>So anyway, the point of all this rambling is; it seem
>like a very good starting point for a conlang
>(assuming it is structed to be able to use prefixes
>and suffixes) is to collect a comprehensive set of
>conlang affixes and compounding rules. After that, one
>single primative root can yeild dozens, or maybe
>hundreds of additional words by affixing and
>compounding.
>
>But is there in existence on the web such a list of
>affix functions?
>
>--gary
>
>
>
>
>
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Message: 7
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 21:57:29 -0500
From: Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Word building
On 12/3/05, Aaron Grahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think that Roget's Thesaurus, the old one, before they started doing
> the "dictionary style" thesauri, contains a good list of about 1000
> concepts. A language that has a word for each Roget category would be
> able to say most things, and would make a fine parent for a language
> family. At least so goes my thinking.
>
Also, the ULD (universal language dictionary?) of 1600 words...but now
we're stretching beyond useful productive affixes and into roots.
---larry
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Message: 8
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 22:17:17 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mysterious email(er)
I am receiving almost daily a message from "[EMAIL PROTECTED]",
encoding ISO 2022JP -- all I see are little boxes. Even if it were in
readable Japanese , it wouldn't help :-))
Do you suppose this is legit? or just more Spam, as I suspect? Does anyone
know this sender? Thanks for any advice.
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Message: 9
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 2005 23:18:14 -0500
From: Larry Sulky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mysterious email(er)
On 12/3/05, Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am receiving almost daily a message from "[EMAIL PROTECTED]",
> encoding ISO 2022JP -- all I see are little boxes. Even if it were in
> readable Japanese , it wouldn't help :-))
>
> Do you suppose this is legit? or just more Spam, as I suspect? Does anyone
> know this sender? Thanks for any advice.
>
Spam.
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Message: 10
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 02:47:02 -0800
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Sheli Names
My purpose in writing is twofold. First, I wanted to announce
a new names page for Sheli (I find names fun):
http://dedalvs.free.fr/sheli/names.html
Second, I wanted to see if I could get some JavaScript advice. On
this names page I want to have one of two things: Either a button
you can press that'll randomly generate a name of Sheli (it'd require
grabbing one word from each of three lists and listing them), or
a field where you can enter your name and get the Sheli equivalent.
For the latter, I'd want to have some way of manipulating the
selection criteria (e.g., if a name begins with a certain letter and
has a certain number of letters in it, then it'll return a given name).
I gather the former would be easier. Anyway, I'd be appreciative
of any advice (especially if someone knows of a script like this
out there somewhere on the web...).
-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
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Message: 11
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 13:16:04 +0100
From: Taka Tunu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Thoughts on Word building
Why not consider that any root word is a potential, valid "derivational affix"?
See Chinese,Japanese, Khmer lexicons. Indonesian uses both a very small set of
affixes and loads of compounds. The so-called "power" of affixes is their
fuzziness. For instance "invention" is either an process or a result. Affixing
and compounding are different in the sense that affixing requires making a whole
kind of lame second lexicon. With compounds, "Esthetics" may be more evocative
"beauty feeling", "beauty yearning", "beauty concept", etc.
Other posts give lists of material. I have a list of 1450 Tunu concepts that I
made by criss-crossing the kanjis and the words I encountered most often when
translating languages. The good thing (and the real conlanging pleasure) with
the 1860 or so jouyou kanjis is that they have been used for centuries so you
are pretty sure that with compounding the few of them you can translate most
imaginable words (although you'd rather use the concepts they express rather
than the kanjis themselves) without needing a single affix. Modern SinoJapanese
vocabulary was built with them by a handful of "academicians" at the turn of the
19th century to match the Western vocabulary. And it's so precise and handy!
With kanjis, no need correct "pafiluto" into "kanono", but rather a ready-to-use
"gun" with any twin you want to associate with.
>From time to time I try to downsize that list, but always come to realize that
less is less efficient.
µ.
Gary wrote:
>>>>
So anyway, the point of all this rambling is; it seem
like a very good starting point for a conlang
(assuming it is structed to be able to use prefixes
and suffixes) is to collect a comprehensive set of
conlang affixes and compounding rules. After that, one
single primative root can yeild dozens, or maybe
hundreds of additional words by affixing and
compounding.
But is there in existence on the web such a list of
affix functions?
--gary
>>>>
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Message: 12
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 13:18:58 +0100
From: Taka Tunu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: New language grammar--what needs work?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>>>
Because this is an agglutinating language.> And why not use nouns
instead? This isn't designed to be simple. It's an
(soon-to-be)artlang, not a log/eng/auxlang.
>
> "I sit @ now @ the underneath of the chair @ the outside of the house and I
walk
> @ the past @ (the midst of) mud @ the (surface of) the road @ the proximity of
> the forest."
>
> µ.
>>>>
I was not intent on going there. Rather, I read once a book with several Papuan
language grammars and some "agglu(tinative)native" ones had interesting
mandatory spacial and dispositional(?) auxiliary verbs like "to stand by", "to
lie down", "to stoop" that were mandatory with any verb and combined with space
nouns.
µ.
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Message: 13
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 2005 14:26:21 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Word building
Hi!
Taka Tunu writes:
> Why not consider that any root word is a potential, valid
> "derivational affix"?
My Qthyn|gai does that. It was inspired by Greenlandic, but in that
language, the correspondence of many (most?) derivational affixes to
normal roots cannot be recognised anymore, but probably most really
stem from roots.
> See Chinese,Japanese, Khmer lexicons. Indonesian uses both a very
> small set of affixes and loads of compounds.
Don't mix up derivation and compounding. Derivation is a much more
narrow technique of constructing new words. Chinese is full of very
different kinds of compounds, where the meaning often cannot easily be
derived from the parts -- the new meaning is ad-hoc and then
lexicalised, and not predictably derivable. It usually does not make
use of derivation, but of compounding.
OTOH, Greenlandic derivation is an operation where a new affix
determines in a defined manner how it alters the meaning of the word
it attaches too. A lexicon will list the ~500 Greenlandic affixes and
tell you what they do. (Anyway, there is unpredictability in
Greenlandic, too, which comes from the vagueness of some affixes.
Compounds may be interpreted and lexicalised in a more special way,
and this specialisation cannot be predicted.)
So, derivation is usually not what is done in Chinese (and Japanese).
Here, you put together two words that contribute to the complete
meaning in some unpredictable way. Which way has to be guessed.
>...
> >From time to time I try to downsize that list, but always come to
> realize that less is less efficient.
Maybe not downsize, but your might just want a different list,
especially for engelangs. Using a natlang list is often undesirable,
because it is not 'modern' and not philosophical enough in the view of
the conlanger, and will contain many things you'd want to be composed
instead of atomic. Typically a lot of food and nature words exist,
and many words for typical animals of the area, but virtually
everything about science and philosophy and abstract stuff in general
is missing. That's how it developed, but the conlanger might not want
it that way.
**Henrik
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