There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: Some singular plurals (was: Creating conlang grammars using
From: Philip Newton
2. Re: Trigger Systems (was Re: Book on constructive linguistics)
From: Christopher Bates
3a. Re: CHAT: Egyptians and "Asiatics"
From: Andreas Johansson
3b. Re: CHAT: Egyptians and "Asiatics"
From: Lars Finsen
4. Re: Children learning their L1 (fuit: Creating conlang grammars usin
From: Benct Philip Jonsson
5. Re: META: Messages not received or shown on archive page
From: Eric Christopherson
Messages
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1. Re: Some singular plurals (was: Creating conlang grammars using
Posted by: "Philip Newton" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Oct 6, 2006 1:56 am (PDT)
On 10/6/06, R A Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 'Bus' is monosyllabic. Everyone knows monosyllabic words have umlauted
> plurals, don't they? :)
>
> man ~ men
> goose ~ geese
> tooth ~ teeth
> mouse ~ mice
> house ~ hice
(So in our family, at least when talking about hice in the game of Monopoly)
> moth ~ myth
> etc.
>
> So:
> bus ~ bys
Perhaps we need something similar to the German "Gesellschaft zur
Stärkung der Verben" (Society for Strengthening Verbs): a society
which promulgates the restoration of umlaut plurals which have fallen
out of use as well as the introduction of this phenomenon in words
which may not have had it historically.
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (12)
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2. Re: Trigger Systems (was Re: Book on constructive linguistics)
Posted by: "Christopher Bates" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Oct 6, 2006 8:49 am (PDT)
> If your report of Li and Thompson is correct, I cannot agree with it.
> But as you say, one needs to read their book before commenting in more
> detail.
The book is a collection of papers, Li and Thompson are the editors
IIRC. There was one paper on Tagalog, and in particular whether triggers
were subjects or not. That's the paper I was recalling, although it's
been a year or two since I read it.
Messages in this topic (12)
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3a. Re: CHAT: Egyptians and "Asiatics"
Posted by: "Andreas Johansson" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Oct 6, 2006 9:48 am (PDT)
Quoting Lars Finsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Den 5. okt. 2006 kl. 14.26 skrev Andreas Johansson:
>
> > Reading a popular book on ancient Egypt (Barry Kemp's _100
> > Hieroglyphs), I came
> > across a section about the Hyksos, in which a remark was made that an
> > alternative Egyptian name for them was "Asiatics".
> >
> > Now I know that the word "Asiatics" is used in Egyptological
> > literature to refer
> > to peoples from Egypt's NE, but ascribing the usage the ancient
> > Egyptians
> > themselves is surprising. Everything else I've read indicates that
> > "Asia" was
> > originally a Greek name for Anatolia (or parts thereof), and only
> > came to refer
> > to a wider region a millennium or so after the Hyksos period.
> >
> > So, did Kemp just screw up in attributing a such usage to the
> > ancient Egyptians,
> > or is there some actual Egyptian term he is translating as "Asiatics"?
>
> According to Gardiner, Asia (as a name for everything east of the Red
> Sea) was called S-t-t (he gives no vowels, but perhaps we should
> assume e). For Asiatic he has a very guttural word something like Gh-
> h-m. There is another for Asiatics, related to the first one,
> something like St-t-h.
Thanks.
> Like Asia, Hyksos of course is a Greek word,
> not Egyptian. The Egyptian is Heka Khasewet according to the
> Wikipedia article on them.
IIUC, the Greek is derived from the Egyptian in this case.
Andreas
Messages in this topic (4)
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3b. Re: CHAT: Egyptians and "Asiatics"
Posted by: "Lars Finsen" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Oct 6, 2006 9:55 am (PDT)
Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting me:
>
>> Like Asia, Hyksos of course is a Greek word,
>> not Egyptian. The Egyptian is Heka Khasewet according to the
>> Wikipedia article on them.
>
> IIUC, the Greek is derived from the Egyptian in this case.
Yes, of course.
BTW, we have discussed sweet-looking writing systems here, but it
would be hard to make up anything nicer than the Egyptian
hieroglyphs, wouldn't it? I just happened to look up 'hieroglyph
font' on Google, and of course there are several available. Would any
one of you here happen to have some experience with any of them?
LEF
Messages in this topic (4)
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4. Re: Children learning their L1 (fuit: Creating conlang grammars usin
Posted by: "Benct Philip Jonsson" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Oct 6, 2006 1:40 pm (PDT)
Lars Finsen skrev:
> Den 5. okt. 2006 kl. 17.02 skrev R A Brown:
>
>> Exactly! They are not rules in the way that, say, the
>> rules of a club or society are rules. In other words,
>> they are not prescriptive.
>
> Uhmmmm, not sure of that either. The way I see it,
> language for children is a game in which you get along by
> learning the rules, like any other game. If you don't know
> the rules, you just stumble and falter along the way, just
> like in chess or football. Mastery requires very good
> knowledge of the rules, but like in all games, flair comes
> into it as well, and rule-bending. Some bits of language
> evolution (far from all) is caused by the tendency for
> bending the rules that's so inherent in human nature.
>
> LEF
I read the other day that a big part of phone*ic language
change is that as children learn to speak they mimic the
sounds that adults make as well as they can with their
smaller and differently proportioned articulatory organs. As
people grow up and their articulatory organs grow and change
in shape the articulatory movements acquired in childhood
don't cahange accordingly, and so subtle articulatory are
introduced from generation to generation. Some of them no
doubt get 'corrected' as people modify their pronunciation
in order to be better understood, or due to social and/or
geographical mobility, but there is also a part which
remains 'uncorrected' and so change accumulates over
generations.
Change in other aspects of language is probably subject to
similar effects -- not only is there no such thing as '*the*
rules' for a language, but also whatever rules, subject to
social, geographical and individual variation, there are
must be guessed at by children. In extrapolating their own
set of rules from the utterances of their elders small
children are not only conditioned by the quality and
quantity of the input, but also by how their perceptions and
mental processes differ from those of adults. There
certainly is an aspect of rule- bending and play with 'the
rules', but this enters the picture only with older children
and adults.
An example of how children's linguistic perception differs
is the fact that my 8-year-old uses the Swedish word
_knappt_ in the meaning 'not at all' or even 'not'. My
telling him that it really means 'almost not' or 'just
barely' (for which there are other, parallell expressions
which he uses correctly) doesn't cause him to change his
usage. Apparently he has encountered the word without
knowing its meaning, but assumed that its meaning was akin
to _knappast_ 'hardly, not likely', whereafter he's formed
the hypothesis that it was a negation and then stuck to this
hypothesis because of apparently succeeding in making sense
of the utterances and situations where he encountered the
word. There probably enters a measure of obstinacy into the
fact that he won't change his usage in spite of correction,
but it may also be a proportion of immature semantic
perception involved. Every parent has moments when they
realize that children are not merely under-sized or immature
adults; they are fundamentaly *other* in many respects.
--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se
"Maybe" is a strange word. When mum or dad says it
it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
means "no"!
(Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)
Messages in this topic (12)
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5. Re: META: Messages not received or shown on archive page
Posted by: "Eric Christopherson" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri Oct 6, 2006 2:38 pm (PDT)
On Oct 5, 2006, at 5:58 AM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Eric Christopherson writes:
>> ...
>> I just noticed that I have received three replies to the "Creating
>> conlang grammars using prototypes" thread, but never received the
>> original message. Is anyone else noticing missing messages?
>> ...
>
> Maybe it was a temporary mail delivery problem? When our company mail
> server is down for an hour or so and posts cannot be delivered then
> Brown's Listserv sometimes only tries again days later, and maybe the
> post is even lost at times. The mailing list server is quite picky.
>
> I hope it does not happen too often, though.
That must be it. I just got the original message today.
Messages in this topic (4)
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