There are 5 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Transcription exercise
From: R A Brown
1b. Re: Transcription exercise
From: Carsten Becker
2a. Point of View and Empathy
From: Christopher Bates
2b. Re: Point of View and Empathy
From: Sai Emrys
3. Flight.
From: Lars Finsen
Messages
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1a. Re: Transcription exercise
Posted by: "R A Brown" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Sep 29, 2006 1:53 am (PDT)
Carsten Becker wrote:
[snip]
>> La Valette
>
> ??? ("Humilissima Civitas Valletta")
the very insignificant (low-lying?) town of Vallette
Without context one cannot be certain the precise meaning of
_humilissima_ (very low, very humble, very insignificant etc) - but it
tells us nothing about the meaning or origin of the name _Valletta_.
[snip]
>
>> London
>
> Landeng (N/A)
> /lAn.'dEN/
The original settlement was Roman, but the name would have taken from
native British. The sources clearly show that the standard Latin form
was _Londinium_ (neuter singular).
The spelling _Lundinium_ is also found and becomes common later. The Old
English name, Lúndene, would have been taken from the contemporary
native spoken form, and clearly shows a long-u as the initial vowel. The
Welsh _Llundain_ clearly shows a form derived from British [u:] derived
from an earlier [o:]. We know from Gaul that in certain contexts [o:]
shifted to [u:] in ancient Gallic; Welsh - and not just with this name -
gives evidence of a similar shift in Old British.
The suffix -inium has also caused problems. The expected form is -onium
from a British *-onjon. Some people, indeed, think the Old English form
is derived from *Lu:ndonjo. The Welsh form would seem to support this
also. It has been suggested that the official Latin form arose from
dissimilation of o-o to o-i, or by assimilation of the stressed vowel to
the i/j of the ending.
Bede, whose L1 was Old English and wrote in the late 7th & early 8th
cents CE (and, therefore knew nothing of the late Romano-British name)
always gives the Latin form _Lundonia_ (feminine singular), with the
derived adjective as _Lundoniensis_. He is probably using a form brought
by Augustine & his fellow monks in 597 - i.e. this is the form used in
6th cent Rome. Indeed, in his letter to Augustine in 601, Pope Gregory
wrote "Lundoniae ciuitatis" [genitive] 'of London city.'
As for Lo:nd-/ Lu:nd-, we simply do not know its etymology. This has
not, of course, prevented all sorts of proposed etymologies :)
>> Madrid
>
> Manasong ("Town at the river Manzanares")
> /,ma.na.'sON/
Except the river wasn't called Manzanares when Madrid was named. It
seems that the city's name is derived from the Mozarabic form _Matrit_.
the Arabic name for both the river & the city was, I believe, Majrīṭ.
These names are ultimately derived from _Matrice_, a name given in the
2nd cent BCE to the early settlement and to the river.
It is tempting to see a connexion between _Matrice_ and the stem _matr-_
(mother), but I do not know enough about the early toponyms of Iberia.
Certainly _Madrid_ is not so different the modern Spanish _madre_
"mother" :)
I do not know when the river was renamed or where the name _Manzanares_
comes from. But there are two town in Spain bearing that name:
Manzanares in Ciudad Real, and Manzanares el Real (a medieval town near
Madrid).
--
Ray
==================================
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB}
Messages in this topic (60)
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1b. Re: Transcription exercise
Posted by: "Carsten Becker" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Sep 29, 2006 6:26 am (PDT)
OK, thank you very much, Ray et. al., for explanation! I'll take that into
consideration and will post corrected translations later.
C.
Messages in this topic (60)
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2a. Point of View and Empathy
Posted by: "Christopher Bates" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Sep 29, 2006 6:42 am (PDT)
This is a cross post from the ZBB, about a subject that I've spent the
last day or so obsessing about. :)
-----------------------------
So I've been thinking a lot about Point of View and Empathy ever since
it briefly came up in a conversation I was having by email with Thomas H
Chappell. I also thought that it might be an interesting area of
experimentation for a conlang... a project to make a non-insane,
non-sexist version of Laadan.
In Person, Anna Siewierska links logophoricity and long distance
reflexives as being related to point of view (in particular,
logophoricity is a way of keeping the original speaker's point of view
in indirect speech). For instance, she gives these examples from
Japanese of long distance reflexives:
(80)
(a) Yamada wa kare o nikunde iru onna to kekkoniste simatta
Yamada TOP him ACC hating is woman with marrying end up
(b) Yamada wa zibun o nikunde iru onna to kekkoniste simatta
Yamada TOP self ACC hating is woman with marrying end up
"Yamada ended up marrying a woman who hated him"
Anna Sierwierska quotes Kuno as saying:
Semantically, these two sentences are different in that while (80a) is a
sentence in which the speaker gives an objective description of what
happened by placing himself at a distance from Yamada, (80b) gives the
impression that the speaker is omniscient and has identified himself
with Yamada. The latter sentence ordinarily implies that Yamada knew at
the time of marriage the woman he married hated him, or that he later
came to know it.
Closely linked to POV is, I think, the point in space-time that acts a
referent point. Devices or uses that may, IMO, reflect a change of POV are:
(i) "relative" tense (or rather, tense not relative to the present),
that is, use of tense markers relative to a contextually specified time
and location rather than the current time and location. This occurs in,
for example, Barbareño according to Mithun in "The Languages of Native
North America".
(ii) "relative" location (for lack of a better term). That is, words
like "come" or "go" usually situation motion relative to the current
location of the speaker, but in English and many other languages they
may also locate motion relative to some contextually specified location.
I am unsure if all, or even the majority, of languages allow this, or
whether any language has special verb forms or morphology to mark the
different between speaker centric current place motion vs motion
relative to some other time and place
There are also various other factors (in fact, most things in
linguistics) that could potentially involve point of view. An issue that
occured to me in English is which referent, exactly, secondary
predications of emotion are attached to. For instance:
the king left the room disgusted
seems to me to ordinarily require that either the king's or the room's
point of view is adopted. If I try adding "bloody", which, as a
perjorative, normally indicates a positive lack of empathy, then the
first reading is blocked for me at least:
??the bloody king left the room disgusted (the king was disgusted)
the bloody king left the room disgusted (the room was disgusted)
It seems to me that giving the emotional state in this way requires
empathy more generally, and often the point of view of the entity
exhibiting the emotion to be adopted. English does not present, in this
situation, any easy, fairly minimal way of indicating the speaker's
emotions when their point of view is adopted as narrator. For instance:
the king left disgusted
CANNOT be read as "the king left (I was disgusted)". The other obvious
alternative:
the king left disgustingly
is too action orientated; that is, it is the manner of the king's
departure which might disgust the speaker, rather than the sentence
simply specifying the speaker's state during (because of) the departure
itself. Generally, in English, one must use an unwieldy construction for
this:
I was disgusted that the king left
OR
I was disgusted when the king left
This also has the unfortunate sideaffect of foregrounding the emotion
and backgrounding the event, which is not at all what we intended (the
leaving should be the foregrounded event). There are languages which
have morphology or particles specifically to specify the speaker's
attitude towards an event. According to Payne, Mapudugun has such a
system of verb morphology:
(81)
(a)θalílaenew "He/she didn't greet me"
(b)talílaenew "Poor me; He/she didn't greet me"
(c)t̪al̪íl̪aen̪ew "That fool didn't greet me"
However, these seem to have the opposite problem: they are fixed as
speaker orientated, rather than being relative to the point of view
adopted.
Finally, a Papuan language Oksapmin actually has verb morphology to mark
point of view adopted during an event:
su-yaa-0
kill-PL.IM.PAST-ACTOR'S VIEW
"they have just killed it" (their viewpoint)
su-yaa-he
kill-PL.IM.PAST-OTHER'S VIEW
"they have just killed it" (someone else's view)
This is apparently used to great effect in telling stories, but it is
unclear what other categories are affected by a change in the viewpoint
adopted.
I am very interested in what devices languages use to mark a new POV,
and to what extent grammaticalized marking can be adjusted to conform to
the new POV rather than the speaker's point of view. English, for
example, for the most part does not permit relative tense, and seems to
have unreliable and limited structures at best for marking a new view
point, or describing things from that viewpoint. I have heard it
suggested that the proximate-obviate distinction in some Amerindian
languages and the Triggers of Tagalog are related to viewpoint and
empathy, although I am not sure I am convinced by either argument.
What do you all think?
----------------------------
Another thing often correlated with Empathy and POV is use of pronouns
vs other forms and even possession. For instance, the following examples
or similar seem to be given in many books:
John's brother hit him (John's POV is adopted)
Bill hit his brother (Bill's POV is adopted)
Bill hit John (neutral POV)
In the top two, one of the participants is anchored or specified in
terms of the other.
----------------------------
In Japanese also the choice of verb forms may reflect empathy in some
cases according to "The Science of Linguistics in the Art of
Translation" (Google Book Search). The following examples are given:
"(3.17) Consider a situation that can be described as follows:
[23] Taroo helped Hanako
The same situation can be described in Japanese in at least the
following three ways:
[24a] Taroo ga Hanako o tasuketa
Taroo SUBJ Hanaka OBJ helped
[24b] Taroo ga Hanako o tasukete yatta
Taroo SUBJ Hanaka OBJ helping gave
[24c] Taroo ga Hanako o tasukete kureta
Taroo SUBJ Hanaka OBJ helping gave
Example [24a] represents an objective description of the situation, and
because of this, it is seldom used in colloquial speech. In [24b], yatta
(subject centred) is used as the matrix verb, coupled with the
continuative form tasukete "helping" of tasukeru "help". This sentence
represents the speaker's empathy towards Taroo: namely, it shows that
the speaker is describing the event by placing himself closer to Taroo
than Hanako. On the other hand, in [24c] the non-subject centred verb
kureta is used. This sentence represents the speaker's empathy with
Hanako: it shows that the speaker is describing the event from Hanako's
angle".
So Japanese seems to have various limited ways of marking empathy and
POV, including choice of verb and long distance reflexives.
Messages in this topic (2)
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2b. Re: Point of View and Empathy
Posted by: "Sai Emrys" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Sep 29, 2006 9:49 pm (PDT)
What about:
"Disgustingly, the bloody king left the room."
That is more acceptable to me and reads as a narrator's general emotive comment.
I find this subject quite interesting though and will be watching.
For 24a-c it seems to me to be a different connotation. Yatta (from
yaru) and kureta (kureru) indicate a favor is being done, and indicate
different relative status levels of Taroo and Hanaka. Whereas just
tasuketa doesn't mention it either way.
- Sai
Messages in this topic (2)
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3. Flight.
Posted by: "Lars Finsen" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Sep 29, 2006 6:43 am (PDT)
I have gotten some work now. These breaks don't last long and I guess
I should be grateful for that. But before I immerse into that stuff
(I really like the English middles), I'd like to make a Gaajan
version of the FLIGHT text. I am not making a precise translation
this time, because Gaajan is designed to express things in what I
perceive as kind of a bronze age frame of mind.
FLIGHT - KABEDE
That evening, I was considering whether I would eat my supper when
the man arrived at our house, hungry and exhausted.
Asusodaen inisatu jat kunalima ij atjo gut, muje kesonke ejenani
sanala jaen. (lit. evening-that-at wonder I-did/had/was-to-it/she/he
supper-my eat I-do/have/am-to-it/she/he-cond hungry, tired man-erg
house-our arrive it/she/he-did/had/was-to-it/she/he-then)
He was tall, with hair dyed blacker than a crow, after the custom of
the North.
This fits poorly into the Gaajan syntax, which requires preceding
attributes and clauses containing verbs, so I'll rephrase a little:
Engen iju, mon sapelamin anganjusa wensag waasu ositu ijues. (tall it/
she/he-was/had/did hair north-loc-gen hab-method-instr black-comp
crow-rel dye-midd it/she/he-was/had/did-and)
These auxiliaries have the meanings 'be', 'do', 'have' depending on
the content of the clause. Obviously the first one means 'was',
because the clause only contains an adjective. The last one means
'did' because it is preceded by a verb. If the clause contains no
verb, but a noun, optionally preceded by an adjective or other
modifiers, the meaning is 'had', but then a transitive auxiliary is
used. If the noun precedes the adjective, the meaning is 'was' again.
Examples (using the present tense):
Engen ju - it(or she, he) is tall.
Osi ju - it dyes.
Keson engen ju - the man is tall.
Keson a - it has a man.
Engen keson a - it has a tall man.
The noun here is always in the absolutive, which is unmarked. Only
when the subject of a transitive action is specified within a clause,
there is need for an ergative marker. Examples:
Kesonke kunali ij a - the man eats the supper.
Kesonke kunali a - the man is the supper.
Kesonke ij ate - the man eats me.
Below I will only mention the relevant meanings in the literal
translations. Also the language has no gender, but I will mention
only the relevant English pronouns in the literal translations below.
While he was washing I had to dry his clothes for him in front of the
fire.
Hutu ijuga sisam jat gapiauni ekokaen iku anjitaila. (wash-refl he-
did-while must I-did-to-it clothes-his fire-before-adv dry I-did-to-
them-for-him-subj)
He ate voraciously and drank a cup of wine which made him sleep.
Guten ij iju ointik minsa mim jas ei jasu. (hungry-adv eat he-did
wine-part cup drink he-did-to-it-and sleep it-did-to-him-rel) I have
also 'eraj' which means 'put to sleep', but it seems I really don't
need it here.
The next morning he warned us to leave that place immediately, as the
floods would soon overwhelm it, and it was almost too late to escape.
Fianik lunden arakis jagai sisam agla junda wedenen joan giula,
ispoanimajke uteti kensun adara kabede susoti juais. (following
morning-at warn he-did-to-it-for-us must we-do-to-it-subj place-that
once-at leave we-do-subj flood(sg)-erg soon overpower fut-it-do-to-it-
caus flight too-late-allat it-was-for-it-and) Hm, hope I got that
right. Note that -en is used both as an adverbial marker and as a
temporal marker.
All five of us mounted the horses we had bought at the last festival
and followed him, but not without wondering fairly seriously whether
he was in fact insane.
Soske idunani ekowe ilin janjinje gasos satilien sukadjai janjigsu
fian jages ara ilpanenika inisatuae jagere bowiu sujen ijujo. (all-
erg 5-our horses mount they-did-to-them last festival-at perf-buy we-
did-to-them-rel follow we-did-to-him-and not serious-adv-direct
wonder-not we-did-to-it-but insane real-adv he-was-cond) Wonder if
I'm handling the double negation right there. Too bad I don't have
any Gaajans to ask.
How lucky we were!
Gida akuju igiu! (how! lucky we-were)
Not two days later, the waters destroyed our house and all the fields
beyond it, and most of our neighbours, who had mocked us fleeing,
were pitiably drowned.
Ara anim asuwe usotagen poweke ejenani soses heautikjomai sab
janjinje osiktauke lagamunantik galawen isnelatu ijunji kabedenani
sunaralai janjesu. (not two days later-at waters-erg house-our all-
and fields-part-yonder-loc-dat destroy they-did-to-them most-those-
erg neighbours-our-part pitiable-adv drown-midd they-were flight-our
perf-mock they-did-to-it-rel)
That's it. And it wasn't so hard! I got a few new words again, and
didn't need to change the grammar (much). (Though I'd like to look
for a different partitive marker.) It's quite strong now I think, and
can handle this kind of stuff. I like this language a lot. It has a
very analytical way with these clauses.
Text in full:
KABEDE
Asusoda inisatu jat kunalima ij atjo gut, muje kesonke ejenani sanala
jani. Engen iju, mon sapelamin anganjusa wensag waasu ositu ijues.
Hutu ijuga sisam jat gapiauni ekokaen iku anjitaila. Guten ij iju
ointik minsa mim jas ei jasu. Fianik lunden arakis jagai sisam agla
junda wedenen joan giula, ispoanimajke uteti kensun adara kabede
susoti juais. Soske idunani ekowe ilin janjinje gasos satilien
sukadjai janjigsu fian jages ara ilpanenika inisatuae jagere bowiu
sujen ijujo. Gida akuju igiu! Ara anim asuwe usotagen poweke ejenani
soses heautikjomai sab janjinje osiktauke lagamunantik galawen
isnelatu ijunji kabedenani sunaralai janjesu.
Hm, doesn't look as much as it felt, really...
Thanks for the exercise. Time to work now.
LEF
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