There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: conlang cards
From: Amanda Babcock Furrow
1b. Re: conlang cards
From: Jim Henry
1c. Re: conlang cards
From: Logan Kearsley
2a. Re: A Self-Segmenting Orthography
From: MorphemeAddict
3a. Re: Making a memorable English phrase for 80 bits of data
From: Jim Henry
4a. Re: Natlang question
From: Padraic Brown
5a. Re: A Series of Musings on Unusual Features
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
Messages
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1a. Re: conlang cards
Posted by: "Amanda Babcock Furrow" [email protected]
Date: Tue Dec 20, 2011 7:17 pm ((PST))
On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 09:06:25PM -0500, Mia Harper (Soderquist) wrote:
> I am still getting mine together too. When I realized it might take me
> a bit to get my act together, I decided I'd write them out as "Happy
> New Year" cards. :)
I have just sent mine out today! :) I've been enjoying getting the cards
from more sensible people than myself who actually got them out early.
My husband says I get the best holiday cards.
Senders, recipients, remember to upload photos to the gallery on
exchange.conlang.org!
tylakèhlpë'fö,
Amanda
Messages in this topic (5)
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1b. Re: conlang cards
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Tue Dec 20, 2011 7:20 pm ((PST))
On 12/20/11, Patrick Dunn <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm very much enjoying the cards I'm getting. I'm afraid, however, mine
> won't be out until the end of the month.
I sent the last of mine a few days ago. I just got a card from James
McCleary, and it's a thing of beauty. I'll scan it at some point, if
he hasn't already done so, but I don't have access to a scanner just
now.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (5)
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1c. Re: conlang cards
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Dec 20, 2011 9:09 pm ((PST))
On 20 December 2011 20:17, Amanda Babcock Furrow <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 09:06:25PM -0500, Mia Harper (Soderquist) wrote:
>
>> I am still getting mine together too. When I realized it might take me
>> a bit to get my act together, I decided I'd write them out as "Happy
>> New Year" cards. :)
>
> I have just sent mine out today! :) I've been enjoying getting the cards
> from more sensible people than myself who actually got them out early.
> My husband says I get the best holiday cards.
Mine's going out tomorrow. The one I got is making for a great bit of
deciphering fun. I kinda underestimated the impact of a cruddy finals
schedule on my ability to get stuff in the mail.
I think I shall have to start on next year's cards as soon as
Christmas is over, just to make sure I've got plenty to contribute to
a greater level of participation.
-l.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2a. Re: A Self-Segmenting Orthography
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Tue Dec 20, 2011 7:47 pm ((PST))
On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> On Tuesday 20 December 2011 19:56:23 And Rosta wrote:
>
> > David McCann, On 20/12/2011 16:22:
> > > On Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:31:56 -0500
> > >
> > > MorphemeAddict<[email protected]> wrote:
> > >> Re: white space, I haven't been able so far to decide whether white
> > >> space is over-rated, or languages such as Thai (and Chinese), which
> > >> don't separate individual words by white space, simply do their users
> > >> a disservice.
> > >
> > > The fact that white space (that great Irish contribution to
> > > civilisation) spread throughout Europe, even to Greek, Armenian, and
> > > Georgian, seems to suggest that it was a Good Thing.
> >
> > Is it white space per se, or just the orthographic marking or
> > word-boundaries, or even just the ready identifiability of word
> > boundaries?
> >
> ForExample,CamelCaseIsFairlyEasyToRead,AndWouldPresumablyBeEvenEasierIfOne
> > WereUsedToIt.
> >
> > My own hunch is that the useful thing is the readily visible word
> > boundaries, of which white space is a particuarly visible but also
> > extravagant example.
>
> Right. White space is only *one* way of marking word boundaries;
> it could just as well be done with interpuncts (AFAIK, several
> languages of ancient Italy did that) or, as you say, with CamelCase
> or anything like that. The recently discussed (though for other
> reasons) Phaistos Disk has dividing lines between some of its
> glyphs (not that we know whether those dividers actually mark word
> boundaries or not, but that is at least a plausible hypothesis).
>
> Right. That's why I specified Thai and Chinese, which don't have such
dividers.
stevo
> --
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
> http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
> "BÄsel asa Äm, a Äm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Ämel." - SiM 1:1
>
Messages in this topic (24)
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3a. Re: Making a memorable English phrase for 80 bits of data
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Tue Dec 20, 2011 7:56 pm ((PST))
On 12/20/11, Sai <[email protected]> wrote:
> "divide it into 10 8-bit numbers
> and make a 10 word phrase from 256 common words that the desired word
> class for that slot".
You could make shorter phrases by using a template with fewer slots
and a larger number of possible words in each slot. And maybe some
tricks like generating appropriate articles/prepositions on output,
and ignoring them on input. So for instance you could have a simple
transitive sentence with a locative/temporal phrase, for four slots;
e.g.
Mary ate glass on Tuesday.
The barber sliced the dictionary in Denmark.
-- where selecting the name of a day of the week or holiday determines
that "on" precedes it, while selecting a place-name or season or
month-name determines that "in" precedes it, etc., and selecting a
common noun rather than a proper name determines that it gets a "the"
in front. I expect you could come up with plenty of agentive nouns,
transitive verbs, miscellaneous nouns, and place/time words to account
for 80 bits worth, rather than having ten slots with only 256
possibilities for each.
> Feel free to use tricks like having multiple phrase templates or the
> like.
Maybe the initial word of the sentence determines which template is
being used. For instance, if the initial word is "the", it's
noun-transitive_verb-noun-locative, but if it's "a/an", then it's
adjective-noun-intransitive_verb-locative, and if it's anything else,
it's name-transitive_verb-adjective-noun. Hmm, to have the template
itself represent two bits of data we need a fourth template. Maybe we
can allow it to start with a preposition, for
locative-adjective-noun-intransitive_verb?
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (5)
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4a. Re: Natlang question
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Tue Dec 20, 2011 8:20 pm ((PST))
--- On Tue, 12/20/11, Peter Cyrus <[email protected]> wrote:
> No, in a nor'easter, the winds are
> coming from the northeast.
Right -- it's the storm *itself* that moves to the northeast, not the
winds per se.
Padraic
>
> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 5:10 AM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > --- On Mon, 12/19/11, Larry Sulky <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Has that sort of happened in English?
> >> When old salts talk about westerly
> >> winds, are they referring to winds coming FROM the
> west?
> >> I've always been confused about that.
> >
> > Same with a Noreaster, which appears to be the
> direction the winds are
> > going TOWARDS.
> >
> > And then there's the Santa Anna Wind, which doesn't
> really seem to have
> > a particular direction, but is quite a blow all the
> same.
> >
> > Padraic
> >
> >>
> >> On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 5:20 PM, Dale McCreery
> <[email protected]>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> > I donât know an example, but can give a
> situation
> >> how it could have
> >> > happened. Say you have words for north and
> south
> >> winds (commonly a more
> >> > basic term than the directions themselves) -
> and the
> >> words for the
> >> > directions are built on them - except with
> the
> >> structure "where the X wind
> >> > goes" instead of "where the X wind comes
> from".
> >> People stop referring to
> >> > the winds, instead just say the directions,
> and then
> >> simplify the compound
> >> > constructions back to the root words they
> were built
> >> from, and the switch
> >> > is complete.
> >> >
> >> > -muskwatch-
> >> >
> >> > > Does there exist a natlang where the
> words for
> >> north and south swapped
> >> > > meanings?
> >> > >
> >> > > Koppa Dasao
> >> > > ___
> >> > > Norway isn't the solution, but the
> appendix
> >> that's cut out!
> >> > >
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> *Another world is not only possible, she is on her
> way. On
> >> a quiet day I
> >> can hear her breathing. -- Arundhati Roy*
> >>
>
Messages in this topic (11)
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5a. Re: A Series of Musings on Unusual Features
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Wed Dec 21, 2011 12:39 am ((PST))
On 21 December 2011 02:15, Logan Kearsley <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Thought #1: Musings on Ad-things.
>
> Adpositional phrases frequently behave a lot like adjective and adverb
> phrases. So, how might the categories be combined?
>
>
Moten doesn't have anything that look like adverbs. All those are rendered
with adverbial phrases, so that is a way to combine them :) .
>
> Thought #2: Musings on Pronouns
>
> Pronouns can be analyzed as bare determiners that don't require
> nominal complements, rather than as nominals themselves (at least in
> languages where pronouns can't take additional determiners, which is
> all the ones I can think of right now). But, what if they were generic
> determiners that could take nominal complements? Then, e.g., your 3rd
> person masculine nominal pronoun would just be the 3rd.m.nom article
> with an empty nominal; the second person might be the same as a
> vocative determiner. This derives from thinking about how you could
> re-acquire universal case marking on English nouns by simply
> juxtaposing the appropriately-cased pronouns.
>
>
In Moten pronouns are just nominals nearly like any other (the main
differences are how they handle definition and number). So you can add
nominals (turning them into adjectives) to pronouns as needed, and even the
personal pronouns can be used as determiners. See this link:
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/2009/12/moten-part-ii-nouns-and-pronouns.htmlfor
more info.
> Or, what if pronouns actually were just regular nominals? (This is
> inspired by that Conlangery episode on the table of correlatives.)
> Then you could get a nice unambiguous system for using just one word
> to cover interrogatives, indefinites, and definite pronouns
> distinguished by their determiners. So "who" -> "who", "a who" ->
> "some/anyone", "the who" -> "he/she/it".
>
>
Although in Moten pronouns are syntactically just nominals, their
morphological behaviour is not totally regular. In particular, they can
never take the definite article, and some of them cannot take plural
declensions even when they have a plural meaning.
> Going off in a different direction, lots of languages have 'unusual'
> demonstratives, but how about just regular personal pronouns that
> encode things like absolute location or some other physical state;
> like "2ndP Climbing a Tree" vs. "2ndP on the Ground" vs. "2ndP
> Indoors", or "3rdP Wet Due to Rain" vs. "3rdP Dry Oustide" vs. "3rdP
> Dry Because of Being Indoors".
>
>
Could be extended as a classifier-like system: sheets of paper cannot
easily be kept upright, so they would always be referred to using the "3rdP
Lying Down" pronoun :) .
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (2)
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