There are 25 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: painting the door green
From: Eldin Raigmore
1b. Re: painting the door green
From: Jim Henry
1c. Re: painting the door green
From: Jeffrey Jones
1d. Re: painting the door green
From: Rick Harrison
2a. Re: Help with grammatical term
From: Eldin Raigmore
2b. Re: Help with grammatical term
From: Eldin Raigmore
2c. Re: Help with grammatical term
From: Jim Henry
3a. Re: CV metathesis Q
From: Jeffrey Jones
3b. Re: CV metathesis Q
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
3c. Re: CV metathesis Q
From: Benct Philip Jonsson
3d. Re: CV metathesis Q
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
4.1. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
From: Benct Philip Jonsson
4.2. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
From: Philip Newton
5.1. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
From: Eugene Oh
5.2. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
From: Mark J. Reed
5.3. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
From: Philip Newton
5.4. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
From: Mark J. Reed
5.5. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
From: Jim Henry
5.6. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
From: Mark J. Reed
6a. Re: Tonal inflection?
From: Jim Henry
6b. Re: Tonal inflection?
From: Alex Fink
7a. Comitative (was: Help with grammatical term)
From: Fredrik Ekman
8. Glossotechnia playtesting report: simplified deck and experimental n
From: Jim Henry
9a. Re: Painting the door green
From: David McCann
9b. Re: Painting the door green
From: Mark J. Reed
Messages
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1a. Re: painting the door green
Posted by: "Eldin Raigmore" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 24, 2008 1:33 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:49:16 +0200, Lars Finsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>Den 24. aug. 2008 kl. 18.24 skreiv René Uittenbogaard:
>
>> I'm looking for the English grammatical term for what is known in
>> Dutch as the "bepaling van gesteldheid"
>> <http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bepaling_van_gesteldheid>
>> http://tinyurl.com/6eaf8p
>>
>> It is a constituent which is, among others, found in sentences like:
>>
>> He is painting the door *green*.
>> She bought the store *empty*.
>> They applauded *the skin off their hands*.
>
>You must be thinking of the predicative. One of the first (of many)
>things I have learnt on this list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
>Predicative_(adjectival_or_nominal)
>
>LEF
That Wikipedia article has:
"We painted the door white." (adjectival predicative of the object)
given as an example.
So clearly Wikipedia thinks that's what it is; an adjectival predicative of the
object. But that doesn't mean that's the only, or even the best, term to use.
---------------------
Could the term René Uittenbogaard was looking for have anything to do
with "factitive"?
Or "resultative"? (the result of the action is that the door's state ends up
being "green".)
The door is an "incremental theme" in Dowty's sense; one can tell how far
along the action has progressed by how much of the door is green.
Messages in this topic (9)
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1b. Re: painting the door green
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 24, 2008 2:02 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 4:28 PM, Eldin Raigmore
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:49:16 +0200, Lars Finsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>
>>Den 24. aug. 2008 kl. 18.24 skreiv René Uittenbogaard:
>>
>>> I'm looking for the English grammatical term for what is known in
>>> Dutch as the "bepaling van gesteldheid"
>>> It is a constituent which is, among others, found in sentences like:
>>>
>>> He is painting the door *green*.
> That Wikipedia article has:
>
> "We painted the door white." (adjectival predicative of the object)
>
> given as an example.
>
> So clearly Wikipedia thinks that's what it is; an adjectival predicative of
> the
> object. But that doesn't mean that's the only, or even the best, term to use.
The same term in used in Volapük grammar for the case that's used
in contexts like that: predicative case. (It wasn't part of Schleyer's
original Volapük IIRC, but was introduced in ~1931 by Arie de Jong.)
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article
Messages in this topic (9)
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1c. Re: painting the door green
Posted by: "Jeffrey Jones" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 24, 2008 4:24 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:24:54 +0200, René Uittenbogaard
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I'm looking for the English grammatical term for what is known in
> Dutch as the "bepaling van gesteldheid"
> <http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bepaling_van_gesteldheid>
> http://tinyurl.com/6eaf8p
>
> It is a constituent which is, among others, found in sentences like:
>
> He is painting the door *green*.
> She bought the store *empty*.
> They applauded *the skin off their hands*.
>
> The term is used for somewhat different usages as well, but I'm
> looking for the English term for this particular usage. I haven't been
> able to find the term on the English wikipedia. Anyone?
>
> René
It seems different terms are used, but I would call all of these "secondary
predicates". A secondary predicate can be either a resultative (the final state
of a patient) or a depictive (the current state of either subject or object).
Some classic examples are:
Mary hammered the metal flat. (resultative)
John ate the meat raw. (depictive, object)
John ate the meat nude. (depictive, subject)
Like Mark, I took your second example for a depictive; the others are clearly
resultatives.
Jeff
Messages in this topic (9)
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1d. Re: painting the door green
Posted by: "Rick Harrison" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:15 am ((PDT))
This web page
http://www.novalearn.com/grammar-glossary/object-predicative.htm uses the
term "object predicative" ... Wikipedia seems to lean towards "resultative"
in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resultative and if you Google resultative
you will find many relevant webpages.
---
Insert controversial sig.
Messages in this topic (9)
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2a. Re: Help with grammatical term
Posted by: "Eldin Raigmore" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 24, 2008 1:42 pm ((PDT))
On Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:19:18 +0200, Fredrik Ekman
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>What would the grammatical term be for a prefix that replaces the
>preposition "with"? Would "inclusive" do the trick?
>
> Fredrik
Depends on which meaning.
If you mean "in the company of", that's called "comitative".
"I came here with Fred".
If you mean "by means of", that's called "instrumental".
"I opened the door with a key".
See
< http://wals.info/feature/52 >
(Note: "comitative", related to "comity", has only one "m".)
Messages in this topic (7)
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2b. Re: Help with grammatical term
Posted by: "Eldin Raigmore" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 24, 2008 1:43 pm ((PDT))
See
< http://wals.info/feature/52 >
"Comitatitive" has only one "m".
It says:
Prototypically, a comitative relator morpheme is employed to encode
accompaniment. An example is the Inga (Quechuan; Colombia) suffix -hua(n)
in (1a), where the 3rd person plural subject is the accompanee and
alcalde mayor is the companion. An instrumental relator morpheme normally
marks a noun phrase as the instrument used by an agent in a given situation
to carry out the action designated by the lexical verb. An example is (1b),
where the same Inga case suffix connects the 3rd person plural agent with the
instrument caspi stick used to carry out the action of measuring depths.
And goes on to say:
1.2 Differentiation.
The most frequent solution for the encoding of comitatives and instrumentals
obeys a pattern maximally different from that represented by identity.
Differentiation requires (at least) two different relators for comitative and
instrumental, neither of which can replace the other. This type clearly
dominates outside of Europe, although there are also some instances in the
Old World, e.g. (3).
(3) Finnish (Karlsson 1978: 125, 133)
a.
Instrument: "Adessive -llä"
Hän
kirjoittaa
kynä-llä.
s/he
write.3sg
pen-with
S/he is writing with a pen.
b.
Accompaniment: "Comitative -ine"
Läsnä
oli
V. V.
vaimo-ine-en.
near
be.pst.3sg
V. V.
wife-with-poss.3
V. V. was present with his wife.
In Finnish, there are two inflectional cases which divide up the domain of the
single relator of languages of the identity type. The so-called adessive serves
inter alia the function of marking instruments (e.g. kynällä with (a/the) pen
in
(3a)), whereas the inflectional comitative -ine- indicates accompaniment (e.g.
vaimoineen with his wife in (3b)). (In recent years, the inflectional
comitative
has been giving way to an alternative construction with the postposition
kanssa with governing the genitive case. Irrespective of this ongoing change,
the pattern of differentiation has been preserved, because the new
construction is also used exclusively to encode comitative function.) Note that
Finnish and the closely related and immediately neighbouring Estonian opt for
two different solutions: where Finnish employs the pattern of differentiation,
Estonian is characterized by identity.
Messages in this topic (7)
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2c. Re: Help with grammatical term
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 5:58 am ((PDT))
Some languages mark comitativeness with a derivation rather
than a case inflection or adposition (or optionally with a derivation
or an adposition either one); in Greek the preposition "syn"
can be used as a prefix to derive verbs meaning "to do X along with
someone", or nouns meaning "someone who does X in company
with someone", "co-~-er". The Esperanto preposition "kun"
is used in the same way, though it doesn't undergo sandhi
of course as prefixive "syn-" does (at least not phonemic sandhi;
maybe allophonic sandhi before a velar).
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (7)
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3a. Re: CV metathesis Q
Posted by: "Jeffrey Jones" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 24, 2008 8:51 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:54:55 -0400, Carl Banks
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Jeffrey Jones wrote:
>> I've been playing with a sketch where most of the verbs have two basic
>> stems, CVCVC and CVCCV, to which a number of affixes are added. Mostly,
>> I've been working on filling in the specific morphology and on subsequent
>> development (sound changes etc.) but recently, I started wondering
>> exactly how the two stems came about in the first place. Any ideas?
>
>How about elision instead? Stems all started as CVCVCV. In some cases
>second V is elided, others third V. Maybe first vowel after the
>accented syllable (before the Great Accent Shift, of course) disappears.
>
>That's pretty much how I generate words: start with random CV x N and
>apply sound rules designed to yield something that looks sort of Slavic,
>with a decidedly nonregular syllable structure. Only for me elision is
>not based on accent, instead there are some vowel sounds that disappear,
>but they color nearby sounds. (Gee, I wonder if there are any
>historical natlang families we know of that have sounds like that?)
>Probably this wouldn't work for your case though.
>
>Cool example (pasting Unicode, hope it works):
>
>ðYpiHYhækYHura -> þpixkur
>
>
>Carl Banks
Interestingly, I've done something like that for the later stages, including
the
vowel changes. E.g. CV-CVCVC-CV-CV becomes CV'-CCVC-CV'-C. But when I
try to use it to develop the 2 stems in the first place (based on stress
placement*), I get something quite different from my current system. It may
be that what I have just isn't natural.
* such as CVCVCV(C) -> CVCCV(C) and CVCVCV-CV(C) -> CVCVCCV(C),
according to an antepenult stress rule.
Jeff
Messages in this topic (10)
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3b. Re: CV metathesis Q
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:37 am ((PDT))
Hallo!
This discussion reminds me of a well-known phenomenon in
Proto-Indo-European: "Schwebeablaut". Some roots in PIE
show an alternation between the type *CReC- and the type
*CeRC-, e.g. *deiw- ~ *dyew- 'sky, god'.
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Messages in this topic (10)
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3c. Re: CV metathesis Q
Posted by: "Benct Philip Jonsson" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:08 am ((PDT))
Jörg Rhiemeier skrev:
> Hallo!
>
> This discussion reminds me of a well-known phenomenon in
> Proto-Indo-European: "Schwebeablaut". Some roots in PIE
> show an alternation between the type *CReC- and the type
> *CeRC-, e.g. *deiw- ~ *dyew- 'sky, god'.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
>
Called _samprasarana_ [EMAIL PROTECTED]@'sA:[EMAIL PROTECTED]@] 'drawing
asunder'
in Sanskrit, which perhaps is a more convenient word in
English (heck, you already borrowed _svarabhakti_,
and _sandhi_...)
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
c'est qu'elles meurent." (Victor Hugo)
Messages in this topic (10)
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3d. Re: CV metathesis Q
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:17 am ((PDT))
Hallo!
On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:08:36 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> Jörg Rhiemeier skrev:
> > Hallo!
> >
> > This discussion reminds me of a well-known phenomenon in
> > Proto-Indo-European: "Schwebeablaut". Some roots in PIE
> > show an alternation between the type *CReC- and the type
> > *CeRC-, e.g. *deiw- ~ *dyew- 'sky, god'.
> >
> > ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
> >
>
> Called _samprasarana_ [EMAIL PROTECTED]@'sA:[EMAIL PROTECTED]@] 'drawing
> asunder'
> in Sanskrit, which perhaps is a more convenient word in
> English (heck, you already borrowed _svarabhakti_,
> and _sandhi_...)
It doesn't surprise me at all that the Sanskrit grammarians
had a word for it. What regards the putative origins of
schwebeablaut: it is zero grade on first vs. second syllable
of an original bisyllabic form *CVRVC-, or so say the
Indo-Europeanists, according to what I seem to remember
reading somewhere.
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Messages in this topic (10)
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4.1. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
Posted by: "Benct Philip Jonsson" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:33 am ((PDT))
Philip Newton skrev:
> 2008/8/24 Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> On 2008-08-24 Philip Newton wrote:
>>> Probably "δÏκ" in Rhaetian, which
>>> "should be"
>>> [dS] as written, but is conventionally
>>> pronounced [dZ] by those who can do so
>>> (though I'm sure some will say [tS]
>>> instead).
>> I guess Ïκ is [S] then.
>
> Yes, quite right.
>
>> How come it is not spelled ÏÏ, assuming
>> [X] is Ï?
>
> Sound changes turned word-initial *[sk] into
> [S], and so it made (or seemed to make) sense to
> spell [S] with Ïκ everywhere. (Exceptions are
> [Sp] and [St] which are ÏÏ and ÏÏ,
> respectively.)
>
> And Ï does indeed represent [X] (and vice-
> versa), but I'm not sure what that has to do
> with it.
Well, German, as well as Swiss German when
written, writes [S] as _sch_ in most cases even
though historically *sk did not shift to **sX in
the High German consonant shift but became [S] --
perhaps by way of [sX] in a separate shift much
later, not to mention the many consonant clusters
where Middle High German /s_a/, originally spelled
_s_became [S], spelled _sch_ -- _Hirsch_ < MHG
_Hirs_ , _Schnee, Schlange, schmal_ and most every
other MHG /s_a/ + C cluster, and _schreiben_ < MHG
_scrîben_). The Greek-alphabet analog of this
spelling convention would as far as i can tell be
ÏÏ, even if the Old and Middle Rhaetian spelling
were Ïκ, just as OHG/MHG wrote _sc/sk_ but NHG
writes _sch_.
Also, how would you spell loanwords with /sk/? I
reckon there would be tons of such from
Classical/Koiné Greek.
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
c'est qu'elles meurent." (Victor Hugo)
Messages in this topic (174)
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4.2. Re: 'out-' affix in conlangs?
Posted by: "Philip Newton" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 2:13 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 09:33, Benct Philip Jonsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The Greek-alphabet analog of this
> spelling convention would as far as i can tell be
> ÏÏ,
Yes, I expect so.
> even if the Old and Middle Rhaetian spelling
> were Ïκ, just as OHG/MHG wrote _sc/sk_ but NHG
> writes _sch_.
Hm.
> Also, how would you spell loanwords with /sk/? I
> reckon there would be tons of such from
> Classical/Koiné Greek.
Quite possibly, yes.
I haven't thought about pronunciations of borrowings from older
versions of Greek in detail, but my feeling is that what would happen
is that the words would be borrowed by spelling and then pronounced
according to modern rules.
After all, that's more or less what, say, English or German or French
does with borrowings; for example, Greek alpha-iota turns into ae or e
in English (paedagogical/pedagogical) and ä in German (pädagogisch)
and pronounced accordingly; Latin c and even Greek kappa (when
borrowed through Latin c or re-spelled as if borrowed through Latin)
will be pronounced /s/ if appropriate in the target language; etc.
And it's what Modern Greek does, too -- for example, pronouncing
alpha-upsilon as /av/ ([av] ~ [af] depending on context) rather than
/au/ or the like.
So I would expect, say, Ïκηνή to become /'Se:n@/ or something like
that -- also shifting the accent to the front and neutralising the
final vowel to schwa.
I'm not sure yet whether the spelling would be modified to Σκηνε or
whether it would stay Σκηνη, though.
I can imagine the spelling of the endings changing, though, to fit
into the modern inflectional paradigms. (Much as Modern Greek does,
for example, with -ον --> -ο in neuter nouns.) But the root will
probably stay spelled as in the original, simply pronounced
differently.
On the other hand, borrowings from living languages which have /sk/,
I'm not sure what to do. My hunch is to spell them Ïκ as well and
pronounce them /Sk/.
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (174)
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5.1. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
Posted by: "Eugene Oh" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 1:32 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:28 AM, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > /E/ does not occur before /n/
>
> It does in my 'lect; "hen", "pen", etc. have no diphthongalization...
>
> Where [E] can't occur for me is before /g/ or /N/.
>
So what happens to words like "peg" or "length"? How do you pronounce them?
Additionally I don't understand Jim's comment about the prohibition of /E/
before /n/: "pen", "men", "glen", "fen", "when"...?
Eugene
Messages in this topic (174)
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5.2. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
Posted by: "Mark J. Reed" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 3:54 am ((PDT))
YAEPT alert!
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Eugene Oh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:28 AM, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> > /E/ does not occur before /n/
>>
>> It does in my 'lect; "hen", "pen", etc. have no diphthongalization...
>>
>> Where [E] can't occur for me is before /g/ or /N/.
>>
>
> So what happens to words like "peg" or "length"?
Diphthongalized in the direction of [ej]. The word "peg" rhymes with
"Haig" for me in casual speech, although when speaking carefully I
reduce it back to [E].
> Additionally I don't understand Jim's comment about the prohibition of /E/
> before /n/: "pen", "men", "glen", "fen", "when"...?
In some dialects, appaently including Jim's, the above
diphthongalization applies before /n/ as well.
I think Jim's description and use of phonemic notation might be
confusing; this "prohibition" is really a sound change, where a bunch
of words that are historically in DRESS have moved over to FACE in
some lects. I imagine Jim used slashes instead of brackets to
indicate that he was talking broadly about the English "short E" sound
that characterizes DRESS rather than narrowly about the particular
realization of that sound.
The whole effect would be just an allophonic variation - /E/ gets
realized as [ej] before (/n/ and) /g/ and /N/ - if not for the fact
that /ej/ is otherwise a separate phoneme, with many minimal pairs
such as "wreck"/"rake" (which example indicates that velarity is not
the important thing about the /g/ and /N/ environments).
--
Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (174)
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5.3. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
Posted by: "Philip Newton" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 4:41 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:53, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> YAEPT alert!
>
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Eugene Oh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:28 AM, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>
>>> > /E/ does not occur before /n/
>>>
>>> It does in my 'lect; "hen", "pen", etc. have no diphthongalization...
>>>
>>> Where [E] can't occur for me is before /g/ or /N/.
>>
>> So what happens to words like "peg" or "length"?
>
> Diphthongalized in the direction of [ej]. The word "peg" rhymes with
> "Haig" for me in casual speech, although when speaking carefully I
> reduce it back to [E].
>
>> Additionally I don't understand Jim's comment about the prohibition of /E/
>> before /n/: "pen", "men", "glen", "fen", "when"...?
>
> In some dialects, appaently including Jim's, the above
> diphthongalization applies before /n/ as well.
My guess would, instead, have been a pen-pin merger: /E/ merging with
/I/ before /n/ rather than diphthongising. (And leading to
circumlocutions such as "ink [EMAIL PROTECTED]" and "stick [EMAIL PROTECTED]"
to distinguish the
two.)
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (174)
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5.4. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
Posted by: "Mark J. Reed" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 4:52 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My guess would, instead, have been a pen-pin merger: /E/ merging with
> /I/ before /n/ rather than diphthongising. (And leading to
> circumlocutions such as "ink [EMAIL PROTECTED]" and "stick [EMAIL PROTECTED]"
> to distinguish the
> two.)
Yup, that's true of my regiolect, though not my idiolect. Apparently
not the case a ways north where Jim is. :)
--
Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (174)
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5.5. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:47 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:53, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> YAEPT alert!
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:31 AM, Eugene Oh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 1:28 AM, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > /E/ does not occur before /n/
........
>>> Additionally I don't understand Jim's comment about the prohibition of /E/
>>> before /n/: "pen", "men", "glen", "fen", "when"...?
>>
>> In some dialects, appaently including Jim's, the above
>> diphthongalization applies before /n/ as well.
>
> My guess would, instead, have been a pen-pin merger: /E/ merging with
> /I/ before /n/ rather than diphthongising. (And leading to
> circumlocutions such as "ink [EMAIL PROTECTED]" and "stick [EMAIL PROTECTED]"
> to distinguish the
> two.)
Yes, exactly. When I said /E/ doesn't occur before /n/ and tends
in borrowings to turn into /i/, I didn't mean that in native words it
diphthongizes (or maybe triphthongizes) like /&/ before /n/, I meant
it's realized as [I]; sorry I wasn't clear.
ObConlang: I do have /En/ ~ /In/ ~ /&n/ contrast in gzb.
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 7:49 AM, Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Yup, that's true of my regiolect, though not my idiolect. Apparently
> not the case a ways north where Jim is. :)
I don't think I'm much if any farther north than Mark as far as current
lodging goes: Duluth vs., if I recall correctly, Marietta? both northern
suburbs of Atlanta at roughly the same latitude. As far as the origin
of my 'lect, well, that's complicated: Atlanta, Decatur, Metairie
(a western suburb of New Orleans) and Decatur again all before
I was 10 years old, leading to a weird, possibly unique idiolect with
combinations of influence from two or more southern dialects that
doesn't sound particularly southern in phonology so much as it does
lexically. A Welsh co-worker once asked me if I was Irish, and
more than one person over the years has asked me if I was "British".
YAEPT threads come up on AUXLANG from time to time as
well, though not as often as here...:
On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 10:39 AM, Thomas Alexander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[quoting me]
>> I think you mentioned that you rhyme "get" with
>> "met"; for me "get" rhymes with "pit", both have
>> /I/ while "met" has /E/, roughly the Vp. |ä|.
>
> I keep forgetting that I've never heard you speak
> English. Your Esperanto certainly didn't betray your
> region of origin. From my point of view, that's one
> of the major advantages of sticking to 5 vowels.
> While we all still have accents, they're not blatant
> or such that would hamper communication.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (174)
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5.6. Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.
Posted by: "Mark J. Reed" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 12:16 pm ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Jim Henry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Yes, exactly. When I said /E/ doesn't occur before /n/ and tends
> in borrowings to turn into /i/, I didn't mean that in native words it
> diphthongizes (or maybe triphthongizes) like /&/ before /n/, I meant
> it's realized as [I]; sorry I wasn't clear.
Ah, OK. I misunderstood.
As I said, while I'm familiar with the phenomenon, it's not part of my
'lect. But I didn't realize it was exhaustive and that all /En/s came
out as /In/s. I could have sworn the usual pronunciation in school
was "[pIn] and [pEnsIl]", not "[pIn] and [pInsIl]". Nor do I recall
female chickens being called [hIn]s. But I guess that could have been
phonemic normalization at work in my brain.
--
Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (174)
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6a. Re: Tonal inflection?
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 6:04 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 9:26 PM, deinix nxtxr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jim Henry
>>
>> > fricatives, implosives, clicks. Then figure in voicing,
> aspiration
>>
>> But not nasals or approximants? Interesting.
>
> Nasality could disrupt the usage of voicing, but it's still a
> possibility. I'm not sure I could fit approximants into the
> scheme.
OK, so if voicing is going to be morphologically significant
like tone, then nasals might not work; all voiceless nasals
tend to sound alike to me. Voiceless aproximants like
/j_0/ and /w_0/ sound distinct enough, though, I think.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (9)
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6b. Re: Tonal inflection?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:32 am ((PDT))
On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:15:48 -0400, Dana Nutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Now for consonants. I could have maybe four articulations points:
>labial, alveolar, velar, and uvular. Each will have a stops,
>fricatives, implosives, clicks. Then figure in voicing, aspiration
>and palatization just for a start. Given enough options, I could
>pack a lot into a syllable.
In that framework the possibilities that I'd find problematic are
* clicks. Copy-pasting from a recent off-list conversation:
The thing about clicks is that, in I think every language that
has them except for a few Bantu ones where they're borrowed, they vary
along two dimensions, point of articulation at the front and what sort
of release is going on at the back. To take an extreme example, !Xoo
allows each of labial, dental, lateral, alveolar, and palatal clicks
coarticulated with each of [k_h k k?) g kx) N_0 N_0_<_h N ?N) q q_>
G\] and clusters [gk_h gkx) k_>q_> gq_> G\x].
(well, Damin's another exception, but then it might as well be a conlang.)
So you could have labial and alveolar clicks (i.e. click releases in the
front), and velar and uvular click accompaniments (i.e. coarticulations in
the back), but not all of these of a single kind. You'd be better off, I
think, conceiving of clicks as (as many as) four extra POAs (or more?),
namely labial+velar, labial+uvular, alveolar+velar, alveolar+uvular.
* aspiration. Aspiration's really rare on things that aren't stops.
Occasionally one finds aspirated fricatives, but I've never heard of
aspirated implosives, and on resonants I've never seen aspiration and
devoicing contrasted -- more often they're regarded as two descriptions of
the same thing. For that matter, the orthogonality suggests you mean to
have voiced aspirates; Indic terminology aside, these are better thought of
as breathy voiced consonants (though of course nothing's stopping you from
having them).
On the other hand, neither voiceless approximants or voiceless nasals give
me any difficulty.
Incidentally, which of these features do you mean to be allowed in stems?
They can't _all_ have purely morphological function (can they?)
Alex
Messages in this topic (9)
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7a. Comitative (was: Help with grammatical term)
Posted by: "Fredrik Ekman" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:27 am ((PDT))
Comitative seems to be the bird I was looking for.
On Sun, August 24, 2008 5:45 pm, Mark J. Reed said:
> what exactly is the difference between using your
> prefix and one meaning "and"?
Good question. The prefix in question is "ni-", and it can be found for
instance in the word "ni-golanan" which breaks down thus:
ni- golanan
COM we.REFL
together
If you were to use the "and" prefix (not yet invented), the semantic
meaning would change, perhaps it would not even be a meaningful
combination in this particular case.
Fredrik
Messages in this topic (7)
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8. Glossotechnia playtesting report: simplified deck and experimental n
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:40 am ((PDT))
Yesterday I played Glossotechnia with my brother and some friends in
Athens, using the simplified deck (no Phoneme or Syllable onset/rime
or Phonemic Contrast or Suprasegmental cards) and a simple variant of
the experimental new rules I've been discussing offline with Alex
Fink, Sai Emrys and others. We tried out the conculture rules, where
each player contributes some detail about the culture of the
gamelang's speakers at the end of their turn after coining a new word,
and there were cards in the deck that let you change something about
the culture (normally such contributions have to be additive and
non-contradictory of previous contributions), a First Contact card and
a Revolution card. Instead of drawing translation challenge cards
with subjects and predicates on them to form translation challenge
sentences, we started out by going round once with each player
contributing a goal for people to try to satisfy with sentences in the
game-language, and the other players deciding how many points it would
be worth. We came up with these primary and secondary goals:
* conveying the meaning of a new word entirely with one or more
sentence(s) in the game language, without charades or pictures: 50 pts
* correctly grasping the meaning of such a word from the sentence(s)
another player uses, 20 pts
* construct a sentence of at least four words with internal rhyme, 100
pts
* the first time another player uses a word you created in a sentence
that gets them points, 5 pts per word
* recognizably translate a quotation, 75 pts
* correctly recognize someone else's quote, 45 pts
* create a play on words (spoonerism, pun, etc.) 75 pts
* add a concultural element using the gamelang, 50 pts
* correctly interpret another player's concultural contribution in the
gamelang, 40 pts
Each of those point-values could only be obtained once for each
player. Most of the players got points for coining a word using only
the game language; two got points for translating and recognizing a
quotation respectively; one got points for composing a proverb in the
game language.
The game ran between 3.5 and 4 hours, and lasted 33 turns, if I'm
counting correctly. We tried another experiement where, instead of
keeping one lexicon that gets passed around for different players to
look at, each player maintained their own copy of the lexicon. This
created an interesting situation, the opposite of Kalusa, where the
players were fairly well agreed on the pronunciation of the language
but each one devised their own orthography for it! When I played a
sound shift card to merge /U:/ into /u/, a couple of players were
puzzled because they'd been representing both sounds with the same
grapheme, probably "oo".
I was surprised at the way some players used the sound change cards.
In this deck, where there are no Phoneme cards, the Sound Shift cards
have text like this:
"Specify a sound that occurs in one or more words, another sound
that will replace it, and optionally a limiting context."
Imprimis, several players used this (and the Insert Sound (epenthesis)
card) to affect whole syllables at once, not individual phonemes, and
not surprisingly the shifts they came up weren't particularly
plausible (e.g. /ma/ shifting to /kEl/ all at once). Secundus, they
interpreted "limiting context" to mean, not phonological context, but
semantic or grammatical context; so one player used it to coin a
couple of affixes in addition to the word he coined on his turn,
either "epenthetically" creating a syllable ex nihilo in a certain
semantic context or sound-shifting/deleting a phoneme in the basic
verb suffix /ras/ to get /ra/ past tense and /ras:/ future tense.
The syntax of this game-langauge was the most interesting of any I've
seen in a game with non-conlangers; three different Secondary Word
Order cards were played, resulting at once point in this syntax:
VSO for questions
OSV for statements with a feminine human subject
SOV for statements with a masculine human subject
SVO for statements with a nonhuman or inanimate subject
Late someone sent the OSV card to the discard pile and made
SOV used for any human subject. (In a few hours someone will post
pointing out an anadewism for this unique-as-far-as-I-know syntactic
marking of gender.)
The conculture devised during the game was more interesting than the
game language, not surprisingly; and, what's better, people's
contributions to the conculture were tied into the game-language more
often than I expected. (Sai, Alex and I wondered if this element
might wind up creating two virtually unrelated games running in
parallel, but it didn't happen, at least not on this occasion with
these players.) For instance, one player used an "extend meaning"
card to polysemify (polyseminate?) the word for "thief" to mean
"lover" as well, and then told a racy story about why the word has
that double meaning in this culture. She later explained the loss of
syntactic gender as a social-engineering decree by the priestesses of
the language academy. Another player described an aspect of the
speakers' religion as involving devotion to a totem animal similar to
an aurochs, and later coined a word for said animal. I think about 10
out of 33 turns involved a concultural addition tied into the
game-language or a new word or syntax change that closely tied into
the conculture.
Feedback from the playtesters:
Everyone said the syntax cards and sound change cards come up too
often relative to other cards in this deck, and the resulting
too-frequent changes in syntax and lexicon make it harder to follow
what's going on. One player dropped out several turns before the end,
having become bewiildered by one sound shift too many that, he
suspected, left his lexicon inconsistent with other players'; he said
the frequent sound-shifts made it hard to learn the words already
coined and be ready to use them in sentences. They suggested several
ways to expand the deck and balance the proportions:
* more Constraint cards (which let you oblige another player to coin a
word of specified part of speech or in a specified semantic domain
on their next turn), and more varied: some constraint cards have a
specific part of speech or semantic domain printed on them, others
are wildcards and let the player using them specify what kind of
word the target player has to coin.
* cards that allow you to coin two related words on your turn instead
of one; maybe some of them are general and some specify the
relationship between the two words, e.g. antonym, synonym, verb and
related tool or agent or patient nominalization, etc.
* more Free Pass cards (letting you use English to define a
word/affix) specialized for classes of morpheme that are hard to
convey with charades or drawings: grammatical affixes, adpositions,
conjunctions, maybe abstract nouns/verbs/modifiers.
* cards to let you create a polysemous word on a single turn by doing
two separate charades or pictures for its two more or less unrelated
meanings
* more Culture Change cards, e.g. New Technology and War
I mentioned the possibility of adding cards for core words such as the
Natural Semantic Metalanguage word list, and they liked the idea; we
decided it would probably make sense to have about 10 cards with 6
concepts each on them, and let the player choose which concept to coin
a gamelang word for when they play it, rather than double the size of
the deck with 60 individual NSM concept cards.
One player suggested some rule or card mechanics to slow down or
discourage changes of syntax. We came up with a possible solution:
remove the Secondary Word Order cards from the deck and allow adding a
secondary word order any time you have a syntax card in your hand, but
require use of a rare Change Word Order card to replace one word order
with another.
Alternatively, there could be a second mini-deck with just three cards
marked Subject, Object, and Verb, which are laid out in a random order
to start with. In the main deck there would be "change word order"
cards to swap the order of any two adjacent constituents. (Maybe this
mini-deck could have cards for Indirect Object and Locative/Temporal
Complement, etc., as well...?) But that doesn't allow for secondary
word orders for questions, subordinate clauses, etc., except with a
syntax wildcard perhaps.
All the players liked the free-formedness of word-coining without
reference to a set of phoneme and syllable structure cards in play.
One said, "I feel like our language showed our personality more than
when we had to put sounds together." Some (all these players had
played at least once before, some two or three times) said it was
the best Glossotechnia game they'd been in yet.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article
Messages in this topic (1)
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9a. Re: Painting the door green
Posted by: "David McCann" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:41 am ((PDT))
On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 18:24 +0200, René Uittenbogaard wrote:
> I'm looking for the English grammatical term for what is known in
> Dutch as the "bepaling van gesteldheid"
> It is a constituent which is, among others, found in sentences like:
>
> He is painting the door *green*.
> She bought the store *empty*.
> They applauded *the skin off their hands*.
The terms I'm used to are "co-predication", or "secondary predication".
Incidentally, I avoid going to Wikipedia for terminology: I see so many
faults relating to things I know, that I'm not inclined to trust them
for things I don't. After all, any idiot can register and post!
The construction seems to be largely confined to European and Australian
languages. Its characteristics are that
1. The subject of the co-predicate is unexpressed. In "He is painting
the door green", it is the same as the object of the primary predicate;
but in "He came home drunk", the same as the subject.
2.The secondary predicate is dependent grammatically on the primary one,
but their relationship is not explicit. The door will be green after the
painting, but the store was empty before the buying.
Rather different, of course, is "They elected him secretary", where
"him" and "secretary" both depend on the same verb, and "secretary" is
the objective complement.
Messages in this topic (2)
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9b. Re: Painting the door green
Posted by: "Mark J. Reed" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:56 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 11:37 AM, David McCann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Rather different, of course, is "They elected him secretary", where
> "him" and "secretary" both depend on the same verb, and "secretary" is
> the objective complement.
I don't think that's different at all; it feels like a resultative of
the same form as the door painting. After the action of "They elected
him [to the office of] secretary", the person referred to by "him" is
now the secretary, when he wasn't before.
--
Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (2)
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