There are 16 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Verbs as locative verbnouns
From: Hugo Cesar de Castro Carneiro
1b. Re: Verbs as locative verbnouns
From: Roman Rausch
1c. Re: Verbs as locative verbnouns
From: Hugo Cesar de Castro Carneiro
2a. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
From: Fredrik Ekman
2b. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
From: Puey McCleary
2c. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
From: Gary Shannon
2d. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
From: Puey McCleary
2e. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
From: Gary Shannon
3. Update on the Romantic Lang
From: Logan Kearsley
4a. New Year's Thoughts
From: Puey McCleary
4b. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Gary Shannon
4c. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Puey McCleary
4d. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Jim Henry
4e. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Michael Everson
5a. Yet another Wacky way to "discover" a conlang
From: Gary Shannon
5b. Re: Yet another Wacky way to "discover" a conlang
From: MorphemeAddict
Messages
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1a. Re: Verbs as locative verbnouns
Posted by: "Hugo Cesar de Castro Carneiro" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 7:07 am ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Nikolay Ivankov <[email protected]>wrote:
> By the way, when I've been discussing my language last time, the people
> here told me that verblessness is an ANADEW: there are Welsh with only one
> "to be" verb aand Tagalog with only verbnouns.
>
> Hm-m, I think the verbless language is something too popular by now. Maybe
> it worth thinking about something nounless?
>
I see, but I think that verblessness is the only way to create my [closed
word classes]-less language. Involuntarily I came to this concept, I really
didn't want to create a new Kēlen. I have already read about this language
and I was trying to make nouns and verbs very distinguishable, but I had to
accept verbnouns as a truth in my conlang as it was the only way to create
non-relative subordinate clauses.
And about nounlessness, I think you'll end up with the same verbnouns, but
only with a different name (maybe nounverbs :-P). Verbnouns/nounverbs are
simply a merge from nouns and verbs, therefore verblessness and
nounlessness will probably bring you to almost the same result.
Messages in this topic (12)
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1b. Re: Verbs as locative verbnouns
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jan 4, 2012 4:41 am ((PST))
>Today I was thinking that the static verbs could be interpreted as a
>locative/inessive case, e.g. I am free. > My state in freedom. In my
>conlang state-1SG.POSS freedom-LOC.
>And the dynamic verbs could be interpreted as an allative case, e.g. I
>escaped. > I set(made) myself free. > My making of my (own) freedom, or My
>making towards (my) freedom. In my conlang make-1SG.POSS freedom-ALL.
This is practically identical to how things are expressed in Talmit: Stative
verbs are states, a separate part of speech (your verbnouns). They are
marked by postpositions in my case, but by a set which is separate from
nouns. So you have the stative case (being in a state), the destinative case
(changing into a state), a origative case (stop being in a state), a
mutative state (intermediary state) and several others by compounding.
The difference is though, that I keep dynamic verbs as verbs and have a
morphology to convert from one to another. Volitional action is expressed by
verbs, involuntary by states. The subject is marked differently depending on
whether the predicate is a state or an action:
I-NOM.STAT freedom-STAT 'I am free'
I-NOM.ACT freedom<PAST>-DEST 'I became free'
I-NOM.ACT VB.freedom<PAST> 'I set myself free'
>In dynamic verbs people say the state to which one thing turns.
>E.g. He set himself free. This means he managed to move from nonFree state
>to free state.
I ran into difficulties with that, as it seemed to me that not every action
can be described in terms of change of state. What do you do about 'to eat',
for example? Inventing a word 'state of eating' seemed like cheating because
there is nothing stative about it.
So I have simplex verbs, destative verbs and verbless constructions with the
destinative case.
>Example 1 (Ablative): make-3SG.POSS freedom-ABL > his making (to some other
>state) from my freedom (state) > his making of removing me from my freedom
>state > he removed me from my freedom.
Yupp, in Talmit that would be:
he-NOM.ACT me-ACC freedom-ORIG
>Example 2 (Vialis) ring telephone-GEN bath-VIA-1SG.POSS > the ringing of
>the telephone through my bathing state > the phone rang while I was taking
>a shower.
Here 'ring' would a verb in Talmit (not sure about bathing), but since it
starts ringing and the narrative hasn't reached the point of answering it,
the telephone changes into a state of ringing and you have to convert it
into a state:
I-NOM.STAT bath-LOC when, telephone-NOM.ACT ring-CMPD-state-DEST
>So one can say "my book is blue" as "state book-GEN-1SG.POSS blue-ASS" (ASS
>representing the associative case, equivalent to English preposition "as").
>This can roughly be translated as "The state of my book as blue".
Why do you need to explicitly bring the word 'state' into it and create a
new case? Colours are just states in Talmit:
I-GEN book-NOM.STAT blue-STAT, lit. 'My book is in blue'
As far as I know it's basically the same in Welsh: _Mae'r llyfr yn glas_.
>So this would be something like state/being-1SG.POSS ASS-building
>COMP-GEN-language. (My state/being as a creator of languages).
Again, professions are just states in Talmit:
I-NOM.STAT language-creator-STAT, lit. 'I am in conlanger'
I believe Middle Egyptian just uses the preposition 'in' for such statements.
Anyhow, since I've realized that I don't have to demolish verbs entirely (I
admit it was also my thought at first) or implement any other feature
radically, for that matter, I'm much more zen about conlanging. ;-)
Messages in this topic (12)
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1c. Re: Verbs as locative verbnouns
Posted by: "Hugo Cesar de Castro Carneiro" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jan 4, 2012 6:13 am ((PST))
On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Roman Rausch <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I ran into difficulties with that, as it seemed to me that not every action
> can be described in terms of change of state. What do you do about 'to
> eat',
> for example? Inventing a word 'state of eating' seemed like cheating
> because
> there is nothing stative about it.
> So I have simplex verbs, destative verbs and verbless constructions with
> the
> destinative case.
>
>
First of all, there is no distinction between verbnoun and nouns. There is
only verbnouns, if it is a noun or a verb is a matter of interpretation.
There are only 5 special verbnouns that indicate the beginning of a
statement, one for each kind of statement (static/sensory -
being/state/perceiving, changing of state - turning/becoming,
intentional/voluntary action - making/doing/executing, mantainance
(voluntary and static) - keeping/mantaining, and dynamic actions with no
subject (natural events that change the current state) - surging (the
surging of clouds in the sky, the surging of snow on the roof of my house
etc).
So, as eating is a voluntary action (except if one is asleep, faint,
unconscious... whatever... and another person inserts some food in his/her
mouth), so it would be something like "My making of my nutrition" or
something like that (Maybe "My making of nutrition", implying that the
nutrition is that of the agent of this action -- in this case, the speaker
of the sentence). In the unconscious case it would be something like
"His/her making of my nutrition" (in this case no possessive determiner
suffix can be omitted as the agent of the action and the one that gets fed
are not the same).
I used these special verbnouns in order to create periphrastic structures
and to make it easier to create sentences. My influence was japanese "suru"
(to make/to do) and turkish "et-" (to make/to do).
> >Example 2 (Vialis) ring telephone-GEN bath-VIA-1SG.POSS > the ringing of
> >the telephone through my bathing state > the phone rang while I was taking
> >a shower.
>
> Here 'ring' would a verb in Talmit (not sure about bathing), but since it
> starts ringing and the narrative hasn't reached the point of answering it,
> the telephone changes into a state of ringing and you have to convert it
> into a state:
> I-NOM.STAT bath-LOC when, telephone-NOM.ACT ring-CMPD-state-DEST
>
>
Maybe I wrote this sentence wrongly as there is an event (the phone
ringing), maybe I'll need to use one of the 5 special/reserved verbnouns.
Maybe turning/becoming, as it is a change of state, or I'll have to create
a possessive determiner for indefinite pronoun, in order to create: "one's
making of the telephone's ringing through my bathing" (One made the
telephone ring (he/she called me), while my bathing was occurring).
> >So one can say "my book is blue" as "state book-GEN-1SG.POSS blue-ASS"
> (ASS
> >representing the associative case, equivalent to English preposition
> "as").
> >This can roughly be translated as "The state of my book as blue".
>
> Why do you need to explicitly bring the word 'state' into it and create a
> new case? Colours are just states in Talmit:
> I-GEN book-NOM.STAT blue-STAT, lit. 'My book is in blue'
> As far as I know it's basically the same in Welsh: _Mae'r llyfr yn glas_.
> >So this would be something like state/being-1SG.POSS ASS-building
> >COMP-GEN-language. (My state/being as a creator of languages).
>
> Again, professions are just states in Talmit:
> I-NOM.STAT language-creator-STAT, lit. 'I am in conlanger'
> I believe Middle Egyptian just uses the preposition 'in' for such
> statements.
>
>
I created the associative case in order to be able to translate sentences
like "I used sth. for sth., I interpreted X as Y, He is seen as a Z, She
looks just like someone else, and so on.
The use of the associative case here is to simply distinguish "The blue
book" from "The book is blue".
Messages in this topic (12)
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2a. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
Posted by: "Fredrik Ekman" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 10:12 am ((PST))
Puey McCleary wrote:
> For instance, isnt the Mangani language (the language of
> the Great Apes) the ancestor of all human languages? Do the White Apes of
> Barsoom speak Mangani?
At least two writers have exploited that idea. Both Stuart Byrne in Tarzan
on Mars (an intended but unpublished pseudo-official sequel to Burroughs'
books) and Bruce Jones in Tarzan/John Carter: Warlords of Mars (a comic
mini-series from Dark Horse) let Tarzan communicate with the white apes
through Mangani language. Burroughs also makes clear that the white apes
have a language of their own, so why not?
Yet, I doubt if Burroughs intended Mangani and Barsoomian to be related.
He indicated that Barsoomian is a language that does not change, and that
it has always been the language of the Martian humans, since the beginning
of time.
So I, for one, am going to keep the two languages well apart.
> It does strike me that Barsoomian, Mangani, Amtorian, and
> even the language of Pellucidar shared a similar phonaesthetic.
Absolutely. I have long wanted to make an analysis of Burroughs' use of
certain sounds and combinations in the fantasy names of villains. I think
that would yield some very interesting results, especially if one were to
focus on his later stories, which seem to be more uniform in this regard.
Burroughs had no real knowledge of phonotactics. He just used words that
he liked, and the result was that his languages are fairly internally
consistent, but also fairly alike. Yet, Burroughs clearly did intend them
as separate languages.
> Den Valdron wrote a couple of speculative essays on the
> language of Barsoom.
Speculative, indeed. Also highly imaginative. Fun reading, but not very
useful. Valdron speculates wildly about Barsoomian evolution (which
Burroughs says did not exist), but without any real knowledge about
language evolution in general.
> And of course, John Carter was always finding lost cities
> and new worlds on Barsoom, and it is entirely possible that the other
> stories we have about Mars are just other valleys in Barsoom.
Valdron and many others like to mix up the early Mars stories by different
authors. I prefer to be a boring purist and say that "Burroughs is
Burroughs". If a word or a grammatical concept is missing in Barsoomian,
and if it exists in another Martian language, and if it fits into
Barsoomian patterns as we know them, then I see nothing wrong with
borrowing that word or concept, but I personally find it impossible to
reconcile these worlds and languages into one and the same.
Fredrik
Messages in this topic (16)
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2b. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 4:35 pm ((PST))
Burrough�s naming �sthetics were for me, even as a child,
one of the joy of reading his series, whether of Barsoom or of another
world. Usually the names of his main characters are very well chosen. Who
can forget the stern chieftain Tars Tarkas, the incomparable Princess Dejah
Thoris, or Thuvia, the Maid of Mars? Even the name Barsoom conjures up a
different feeling than the word Mars.
(Otis Kline�s and Lin Carter�s pastiches of Burroughs tried
to imitate this naming �sthetic, but less successful I think. But that�s
another topic. Robert E Howard conjures up a very different feeling by
taking names from mythology and history and keeping them the same or just
tweaking them a little.)
Burrough�s naming abilities even extend unto modern names
in English. For instance, John Carter is a very strong name, plus it�s fun
that the immortal savior of Barsoom should just happen to have the initials
J. C.
If I remember right, in the original manuscript, our
ape-man was called Zan-tar. Burroughs was wise to cross that out and
reverse the syllables. I�m sure that in some alternate universe (perhaps
the Volap�k universe) all of the first draft names of main characters were
kept. So in that universe Count Wampyr came to London for all types of
mischief, Sherringford Holmes solves mysteries, and Pansey O�Hara says
�Tomorrow is another day.�
I think a thorough study of all of Burroughs� languages
would be just fantastic.
Den Valdron�s essays are definitely fun. Perhaps they are
a bit linguistically na�ve, but perhaps they can supply some inspiration.
Now, there�s nothing wrong with being a �boring
purist.� That�s
a suitable tool for what one may want to produce. I would liken that,
perhaps, to a first person told story. Such a literary device is wonderful
for certain types of stories, especially when used well, but it also has
its drawbacks. John Carter herself was a first person narrator, and
sometimes he may say less than he knows, or perhaps the manuscript itself
may not be entirely consistent. I am a little rusty on my Barsoom, but I
get the feeling that there may be inconsistencies as the story goes on.
Sticking just to the canon, though, there are certainly
many directions one may go.
For instance, we don�t actually read John Carter�s
manuscript. We read the manuscript that Burroughs, the fictional
character, produced from Uncle Jack. And it is entirely possible that
Nephew Edgar simplified things or altered them for the benefit of an
English language reader.
For instance, we don�t know the difference between �u� and
�oo.� What about �c� and �k?� What is �x� supposed to be? �j� and
�dj?� Perhaps
Barsoomian is a tonal language, and Nephew Edgar just chopped that off. Is
�th� the �th� in �th,� or an aspirated t? Do �xode� and �thoat� rhyme? Are
those spellings for us, or do they represent two syllable words. What
about �ll?� I think we only get that with Llana of Gathol � and are we
even considering the last two Barsoom books canon? That�s a whole other
decision to be made. The tone of Llana is different to the earlier books,
and John Carter and the giant was written by Burrough�s son, I thought.
This ambiguity, even within the text, can allow one to take
many directions.
There may be evidence, even in the first couple of books,
that names were changed. For instance, we�re given these Martian female
names:
Dejah
Sola
Thuvia
Phaidor
It strikes me that one of these is different. Phaidor may
actually represent a Martian name (what does �ph� represent in this case?).
One reason that argument can be made is because the first three are view
point characters and we�re meant to sympathize with them. Phaidor is a
little different. So the actual Barsoomian names for Sola and Thuvia could
be SolV or ThuviV where �V� represents some vowel. Nephew Edgar just
changed that to �a� to make them suitably feminine names for the reader
(this is the reverse of what Tolkien did in changing the Hobbitish name
Bilba to Bilbo).
�Dejah� is unique because we�ve got that �h at the
end. Perhaps
there was some other consonant at the end, but Nephew Edgar just silently
changed that to make the name sound more princessly. Or perhaps �ah is
meant to represent a vowel with a certain tone, or a glottal stop, or any
number of things.
And so, even just sticking to the first three books, there
are many avenues that one can take to create the language of long, lost
Barsoom.
Personally, I�m waiting for a Barsoomian translation of the
first three books. That would be so much fun!
Messages in this topic (16)
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2c. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 5:33 pm ((PST))
Just an amusing side note: I have a word file of words that I have
collected, programatically, over the last ten or twelve years from
many different English language corpus sources. I was browsing the
master file yesterday and was amused, in light of this thread, to
notice that "dejah" and "thoris" were both in my master word list,
along with "barsoom", and dozens of other unique words from the
series.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Puey McCleary <[email protected]> wrote:
> � � � � � � � �Burrough�s naming �sthetics were for me, even as a child,
> one of the joy of reading his series, whether of Barsoom or of another
> world. �Usually the names of his main characters are very well chosen. �Who
> can forget the stern chieftain Tars Tarkas, the incomparable Princess Dejah
> Thoris, or Thuvia, the Maid of Mars? �Even the name Barsoom conjures up a
> different feeling than the word Mars.
Messages in this topic (16)
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2d. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 5:36 pm ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just an amusing side note: I have a word file of words that I have
> collected, programatically, over the last ten or twelve years from
> many different English language corpus sources. I was browsing the
> master file yesterday and was amused, in light of this thread, to
> notice that "dejah" and "thoris" were both in my master word list,
> along with "barsoom", and dozens of other unique words from the
> series.
>
Awesome! Are there any other unique words from other non-Burroughs series?
Messages in this topic (16)
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2e. Re: Barsoomian units of length (was: Barsoomian Project)
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 5:42 pm ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Puey McCleary <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:33 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Just an amusing side note: I have a word file of words that I have
>> collected, programatically, over the last ten or twelve years from
>> many different English language corpus sources. I was browsing the
>> master file yesterday and was amused, in light of this thread, to
>> notice that "dejah" and "thoris" were both in my master word list,
>> along with "barsoom", and dozens of other unique words from the
>> series.
>>
> Awesome! Are there any other unique words from other non-Burroughs series?
I don't know how I would find out if that's the case. I did notice
"caspak" from the Edgar Rice Burroughs "Land That Time Forgot.", so I
must have run that book through the extraction program at some point.
Most of the texts I ran came from Gutenberg.
--gary
Messages in this topic (16)
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3. Update on the Romantic Lang
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 12:12 pm ((PST))
I have been more productive in conlanging in the last month than I
think I have in the last several years put together, and most of that
in the last week and a half. I've managed to generate a vocabulary of
~250 words in less than a week (depending on what you count as a
separate lexeme... it could be as little as 20, if you're really
conservative, but I prefer the bigger estimate), and though this is
partially due to motivation to work on this particular language, it's
more the approach taken to it, I think. So, I wanted to give a little
overview of the process, and then some of the new features that have
come out of it.
I am trying to ensure that I don't think about any decision longer
than it takes to get to a point where the results of that decision are
needed to say something. So, wherever I or my fiance have existing
opinions about something, or come up with neat ideas ahead of having
to actually use them, those things get decided a-priori, which
provides a good deal or planning and guidance to the development of
the language. However, if we want to say something and don't know how,
it gets made up on the spot. So far, we've been conscientious enough
not to accidentally introduce horrible inconsistencies that way, but I
suspect that will start happening as we try to develop fluency.
Already, I introduced one bit of grammar in the dictionary, and then
noticed a couple of days later that I had been consistently saying it
"wrong", so I just changed the documentation, 'cause actual usage is
canonical. We've made one retroactive change so far, as a matter of
aesthetics- through an accident of derivational morphology, the word
for "romantic love" (a very important word in this language!) ended up
sounding just absolutely horrible to my ear, so the relevant paradigm
slot got updated.
I'm quite convinced that part of the reason this works so well is that
we've got a very powerful derivational morphology to work with right
off the bat, so it's fairly easy to think up a word that you need
without having to think up a whole new root; and, when you do think up
a whole new root, you get up to 20 additional words "for free" (though
some of those have very confusing or not-obviously-useful literal
meanings, and it takes some thought later to figure out what those
words actually should be used for; e.g., [j\eK\asa] "the good place
for cuddling" == "couch")
Among the non-pre-decided issues is pretty much everything about
phonotactics. While there are a-priori rules about how to resolve
disallowed consonant clusters that result from derivational
morphology, there are no a-priori rules about what constitutes a
disallowed cluster. Prosody and allophony are also being left up
entirely to what happens to fall out of our speech. I'm thinking in a
couple of months (or whenever we get sufficient fluency that I feel
like the data is worth something), I'll go ahead and do a formal
analysis of what the rules have turned out to be.
This langue-based approach is not something that is available to the
typical conlanger, and I feel like it's even significantly different
having two people negotiate the language than the few instances of an
individual going with the "once I write it, it's canon" approach. The
distinction between internal history and external history is
effectively dissolved- the history of whatever changes we decide to
make to the language is the same as the history of how the language
develops internally.
Some of the interesting things that have cropped up "on their own", or
as a result of spur-of-the-moment decisions:
The clusters /tk/ and /kt/ are disallowed in the same syllable (or
possibly the same word; for now it's ambiguous whether the relevant
environment is syllable boundaries or word boundaries). This doesn't
seem to apply to /gd/, though. That might just be due to lack of
examples, though; voiced consonants are rarer than unvoiced
consonants.
Stress is not lexical, nor is strictly phonological; stress mostly
falls on the first syllable of a root. This has a tendency to break
down only for instrumental nominatives, which flip-flop between normal
and terminal stress. I'm not sure how that's going to work itself out.
There's some complex vowel allophony going on (probably a result of
the fact that we're both native English speakers), such that while
there are only 5 vowel phonemes, there are at least 12, possibly 13,
vowel phones so far. Basic allophony is conditioned by being in a
stressed open syllable (the environment for canonical pronunciation)
vs. not, but there's some additional stuff going on to distinguish
sequences of vowels that have been reduced to diphthongs from vowels
followed by underlying glide consonants.
One interesting bit of prosody is the tendency to lengthen (with no
change in quality) vowels in clause-terminal syllables. This turns out
to be a redundant marker, along with the verb-phrase-terminating
particle "des", for valency-changing operations.
In the lexicon, we've ended up with 5 different words for "love"
(loosely based on C.S. Lewis's classifications), 4 different ways to
say that you miss someone or something with shades of meaning that are
really difficult to explain in English, a set of interrogative verbs
(which allow you to ask things like "what did you do?" with a single
word), and only two interrogative pronouns, with the rest being
rendered by prepositional phrases (though I'm feeling a bit of
pressure to eventually insert some more basic interrogatives). Also,
while there are verbs meaning "to be an example of a set" and "to be
equivalent to", there's also a zero-copula construction. Since there's
no verb there, if there's no other sentential particle to mark the
start of a clause, a last-resort complementizer "at" was introduced.
Unlike the English complementizer "that", though, "at" can be used on
top-level clauses just to clarify that this is in fact a clause, and
not just a noun phrase.
Nouns have inflections for singular, plural, negative (no or none of),
and non-particular, inspired by the particular / non-particular
distinction in Blackfoot. This is similar to definiteness, but not
quite exactly the same- it depends only on the speakers knowing what
he's on about, nothing to do with the discourse.
The initial idea for a possessive ended up only being used with
personal relationships at first, which left the door open to
introducing a second genitive construction and re-analysing the first
as strictly relational or associative, thus providing a distinction
between "my" as in "I actually own it" and "my" as in "I have some
relationship with it". The addition of an objective marker to handle
topicalization and valency changing operations then pretty much gave
us a genuine 4-case phrase-level case system; all of the markers are
phrase-level clitics, just like the English possessive.
As with the copula, while there is a verb for "to possess something",
the verb "to have" is more easily expressed with a zero-verb
construction and one of the possessive cases:
Mi - amriwa. -> "I am (someone's) fiance" / "I'm engaged."
Mir amriwa. -> "My fiancee."
At mir amriwa. -> "I have a fiancee."
On that note, this language seems to be absolutely clitic obsessed.
About half of all grammatical features are indicated by things that
I'm pretty sure are clitics.
Interpreting those as cases allowed for preposition-multiplexing, so
we've managed to get by so far with a grand total of 2 prepositions,
adding logically-connected meanings to them distinguished by object
case.
Another very productive clitic is "ni" (pretty much stolen wholesale
from Russian, but with somewhat different usage). Attached to the
beginning of an interrogative phrase, it forms indefinites
("something(s)" for singulars and plurals, "nothing" for negatives,
and "anything" for non-particulars, though the semantic spaces
correspond closer to Russian pronouns than to English). Attached to a
verb phrase, it turns the whole thing into an adverbial phrase where
any interrogatives can be replaced with the equivalent "-ever" forms;
or, if there are no interrogatives present, it forms the subjective.
E.g.,
Res vu ki? -> "Whom do you love?"
Res vu niki. -> "You love someone (and I know who)."
Res vu nikin. -> "You love someone (I don't know who)." / *"You love anyone."
Ni res vu ki. -> "Whoever you love..."
Ni res vu niki. -> "You would love someone."
As for those valency changing operations:
The basic word order is V-S-(O1-(O2))
All verbs have lexically determined valency, but the language allows
for free pro-dropping. Since subordinate clauses typically have a null
complementizer, some indication is needed that a clause has terminated
so you don't accidentally think the next clause in the discourse is a
complement to the previous verb. That's usually handled by
clause-terminal vowel lengthening,as mentioned, or with an explicit
verb-phrase-terminal particle "des". In a totally unmarked sentence, a
single missing argument must be the subject ( V-(O1-(O2)) ), and two
missing arguments must be the subject and first object ( V-(O2) ). For
most cases, depending on the derivational class of the verb, there
will be a corresponding lower-valency form that could've been used,
but the higher-valency with pro-drop implies that referents for the
missing roles do exist and are simply unstated, while the
lower-valency verb does not.
The first object, however, may be marked with objective case; in a
marked sentence, the word order gets much more complicated, and allows
for fronting for topicalization and dropping of things out of order.
Possible arrangements include:
(S)-V-(O1-(O2))
O1-V-(S-(O2))
O2-V-S-O1
When an argument is fronted, this can result in ambiguity about the
clause boundary, requiring the usage of "at" to resolve that
ambiguity.
Additionally, the reflexive can theoretically be used as a
sort-of-passive to promote second objects to subject position; this
ought to be useful since there are no verbal derivations that produce
a verb with a thematic focus as a subject, so this basically allows
for promoting focuses in ditransitive sentences, though I've never
actually used the reflexive yet.
If the original subject role is indicated by an oblique argument
(prepositional phrase), then the subject will be re-interpreted as
solely having the role indicated by the position of the reflexive.
E.g.,
Vadu mi vu yerrasa. -> I show you the couch.
Show me you couch.
Vadu yerrasa vu se iza mi. -> The couch is shown to you by me.
Show couch you REFL. because-of me.
Yerrasa vadu mi vug. -> *The couch*, I show you.
Couch show mi you-OBJ.
Yerrasa vadu vu se iza mi. -> *The couch* was shown to you by me.
Couch show you REFL. because-of me.
And without the oblique agent:
Yerrasa vadu vu (des). -> *The couch* catches your eye.
The reciprocal has turned out to be more common so far than the
reflexive and thus has a single-segment representation in the form of
a verb suffix.
Tense and aspect are kinda neat, too. There's a basic
perfective/imperfective distinction that's lexicalized and can be
altered with prefixes, much like Russian. However, unlike Russian, the
present-tense interpretation of a perfective is not implied future,
but rather emphatic "right now! and only once."
There is the capacity to distinguish perfect and imperfect as well,
but that turns out to be very very tensy and not aspecty at all,
unlike English; and it come with prospectives as well as
retrospectives built-in, so I've taken to calling them "spectives" in
general. A set of 5 sentence-initial particles (derived from
contractions of phrases meaning "It was that...", "It is that...", "It
will be that...") indicate spectives in different tenses, and the
actual tense of the sentence tells you whether its retrospective or
prospective. These aren't used as frequently as the English perfect
construction, though, because you get much the same effect by assuming
the the temporal reference for an embedded clause is the time of the
matrix clause, not the time of utterance (that is, after all, how the
spective particles were derived).
-logan.
Messages in this topic (1)
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4a. New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 5:00 pm ((PST))
I hope everyone is having a good new year so far.
Last year, in his excellent �smiley� award for Okuna, David
Peterson wrote:
�As conlanging itself is still a young art, I don't think
we've seen a masterpiece yet. Okuna approaches that threshold, though.�
I was wondering whether others thought that there is not
yet a conlang masterpiece. I myself could probably be argued either way.
How exactly would one define a conlang masterpiece? In
what ways must a conlang fulfill its stated or implied purpose in order to
be considered a masterpiece? For instance, if one were to argue that
Esperanto or Quenya were masterpieces, they would have different criteria.
Perhaps there are several conlang masterpieces out there,
but there has not yet been written a grammar and lexicon which themselves
are a work of art. In that case, it�s not so much the language that�s the
deficiency but one�s craft in writing (or something else).
Or perhaps the conlang masterpieces that already exist have
not yet been used to their full potential. These conlangs have not yet
been used both for translation and for the composition of original,
substantial text. (How much did Zamenhof actually translate into Esperanto?
Hamlet, some of the Hebrew Bible, perhaps some fables. Would Zamenhof�s
work be a good model on what one must produce for the sake of completeness?)
Perhaps one reason (one may argue) that we have not yet
produced a masterpiece is because our art is so young that we don�t even
have sufficient vocabulary to describe it. Perhaps when photography was
first developed, one used terms from painting before a new vocabulary was
made. Even though we may call a film actor and a stage actor an �actor,�
I�m sure there are different terms for these disciplines. The creation of
language is of course a linguistic process, but for some people it is also
related to fiction, and as such, it cannot quite be described using either
the tools of pure linguistics, nor the tools of pure literature.
Just some thoughts.
Messages in this topic (5)
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4b. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 5:37 pm ((PST))
Every single one of my conlangs was a masterpiece for at least a week
or two before slowly devolving into "not bad", followed by "this isn't
working out at all", followed by "maybe I can fix it up at some
unspecified future time," followed by "Oh, I vaguely remember that
piece of garbage."
--gary
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Puey McCleary <[email protected]> wrote:
> � � � � � � � �I hope everyone is having a good new year so far.
>
> � � � � � � � �Last year, in his excellent �smiley� award for Okuna, David
> Peterson wrote:
>
> � � � � � � � ��As conlanging itself is still a young art, I don't think
> we've seen a masterpiece yet. Okuna approaches that threshold, though.�
>
> � � � � � � � �I was wondering whether others thought that there is not
> yet a conlang masterpiece. �I myself could probably be argued either way.
>
>
Messages in this topic (5)
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4c. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Puey McCleary" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 7:14 pm ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Every single one of my conlangs was a masterpiece for at least a week
> or two before slowly devolving into "not bad", followed by "this isn't
> working out at all", followed by "maybe I can fix it up at some
> unspecified future time," followed by "Oh, I vaguely remember that
> piece of garbage."
>
> -gary
>
I really like what you did with Txtana a year or so ago. In my mind it had
a unique sound and seemed to fit well with Burroughs. Perhaps one day
you'll dust it off and translate the rest of "The Land that Time Forgot?"
Anyway, I think Txtana was fun.
Messages in this topic (5)
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4d. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 7:30 pm ((PST))
On 1/3/12, Puey McCleary <[email protected]> wrote:
> I was wondering whether others thought that there is not
> yet a conlang masterpiece. I myself could probably be argued either way.
> Or perhaps the conlang masterpieces that already exist have
> not yet been used to their full potential. These conlangs have not yet
> been used both for translation and for the composition of original,
> substantial text.
Certainly there are many conlangs out there whose grammar looks
fascinating, but where the available corpus is disappointingly small.
And there are conlangs which are more interesting because of their
extensive corpus than they would be if you just looked at the grammar
in isolation; Vabungula comes to mind. On the gripping hand, I tend
to consider a given size of original corpus more impressive than a
translated corpus two or three times as big. Original writing shows
how the conlang functions within its own conculture, while extensive
translations demonstrate that the language is fairly complete and
capable of expressing a wide range of things. In original writing,
you can work around the language's incompleteness and limitations in
ways that aren't possible with translation.
> (How much did Zamenhof actually translate into Esperanto?
> Hamlet, some of the Hebrew Bible,
He translated the entire Hebrew Bible, though much of it wasn't
published until after his death.
> perhaps some fables.
Andersen's Fairy Tales, to be exact; and not only those, but Charles
Dickens "The Battle of Life", Molière's "George Dandin", "Ifigenio en
Taŭrido" by Goethe (not sure what the original German title was), "La
Revozoro" (Ревизор) by Gogol, and several other things.
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkoj_de_L._L._Zamenhof
> Would Zamenhof’s
> work be a good model on what one must produce for the sake of completeness?)
I don't see why anyone else would want to translate those exact works
into their conlang -- if for no other reason than that if you're just
going to translate one short Dickens work, why not "A Christmas
Carol"? -- but the general principal of "translate early, often and
copiously" is a good one.
On the other hand, Rick Harrison once suggested that one ought to
refrain from translating stuff into a new conlang until one has
explored its native idioms and modes of expression through extensive
original writing; else one is too strongly tempted, in translating, to
calque the idioms of the source language. I think he may be on to
something, at least re: artlangs, though perhaps not with respect to
auxlangs or certain types of engelangs.
> Perhaps one reason (one may argue) that we have not yet
> produced a masterpiece is because our art is so young that we don’t even
> have sufficient vocabulary to describe it. Perhaps when photography was
We have a lot of terms for types of conlangs, but relatively few for
conlanging techniques and for specific traits of conlangs (e.g.,
"self-segregating morphology" or "verb-drop"). We borrow a lot of
terms from general linguistics -- certainly a lot of terms for traits
of languages in general can be applied to conlangs, too, but we
probably need more specific terms as well.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Messages in this topic (5)
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4e. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Michael Everson" [email protected]
Date: Wed Jan 4, 2012 1:54 am ((PST))
On 4 Jan 2012, at 03:30, Jim Henry wrote:
> I tend to consider a given size of original corpus more impressive than a
> translated corpus two or three times as big. Original writing shows how the
> conlang functions within its own conculture,
Not all conlangs have concultures though. Certainly the auxlangs do not, and
romlangs like Talossan live in the real world (Wisconsin in that case). So for
many conlangs
> while extensive translations demonstrate that the language is fairly complete
> and capable of expressing a wide range of things. In original writing, you
> can work around the language's incompleteness and limitations in ways that
> aren't possible with translation.
Of course not everyone can write fiction
>> (How much did Zamenhof actually translate into Esperanto? Hamlet, some of
>> the Hebrew Bible,
>
> He translated the entire Hebrew Bible, though much of it wasn't published
> until after his death.
The New Testament is available in Volap�k. Bible translation takes a lot of
stamina. Last year I published the Bible in Cornish (the revived language).
What a lot of work, translating, typesetting, correcting (four times). Even on
the last day before we published the book we were still tinkering with some of
the place-names on the map.
>> Would Zamenhof�s work be a good model on what one must produce for the sake
>> of completeness?)
>
> I don't see why anyone else would want to translate those exact works into
> their conlang -- if for no other reason than that if you're just going to
> translate one short Dickens work, why not "A Christmas
> Carol"? -- but the general principal of "translate early, often and
> copiously" is a good one.
I never hesitate to recommend "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", which is
available in more and more conlangs as time goes on. :-)
> On the other hand, Rick Harrison once suggested that one ought to refrain
> from translating stuff into a new conlang until one has explored its native
> idioms and modes of expression through extensive
> original writing;
Not everyone enjoys extensive original writing though. Some people enjoy
translation.
> else one is too strongly tempted, in translating, to calque the idioms of the
> source language.
That's true for natlangs too.
> I think he may be on to something, at least re: artlangs, though perhaps not
> with respect to
> auxlangs or certain types of engelangs.
Good point.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Messages in this topic (5)
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5a. Yet another Wacky way to "discover" a conlang
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 11:08 pm ((PST))
Here's a crazy idea for building a "conlang":
Go to Google translate and pick some language that you know nothing
about, say Maltese.
Then put in a bunch of sentences of various kinds and translate them.
For example:
This is a sample translation. -> Din hija traduzzjoni tal-kampjun.
This is a sample of translation. -> Dan huwa kampjun ta 'traduzzjoni.
John gave the red book to Mary. -> John taw il-ktieb aħmar lil Marija.
Now since machine translation isn't really all that good, what comes
out probably won't always be correct Maltese (or whatever), but that
doesn't matter, because the next step fixes that.
Just so it won't really just be Maltese (or whatever), you do a
character encoding, replacing vowels (and clusters) for vowels (and
clusters) and consonants (and clusters) for other consonants (and
clusters). In other words, a simple substitution cipher to relex
Maltese:
A -> O; E -> U; I -> A; O -> E; U -> I; AW -> AI; IE -> OI
D -> M; N-> R; H -> K; J -> TR; TR -> PL; ZZJ -> KW; T -> B; L -> N; K
-> S; MPJ -> KY; KT -> KR; B -> J; ħM -> TH; R -> GH; ... etc.
This is a sample translation. ->
Din hija traduzzjoni tal-kampjun. ->
Mar katro plomikwera bon-sokyir.
John gave the red book to Mary. ->
John taw il-ktieb aħmar lil Marija. ->
John Bai an-kroij othogh nan Marija.
Now, regardless of whether the intermediate step was correct Maltese
or not, the final product, after enciphered relexing, is STIPULATED to
be absolutely correct for the new conlang. So all that's left is to
figure out, from your translated samples, how the grammar works, and
write a grammar that describes that language.
Then, not only do you end up with an interesting conlang with a
complex grammar, but you have the added bonus that Google translate
can do translations into your conlang, assuming you can automate the
substitution cipher to turn Google's half-baked Maltese into a correct
translation into your conlang.
Using that approach it would be a piece of cake to create a
significant corpus in your conlang. You could translate all of Poe,
Shakespeare, Edgar Rice Burroughs, as fast as you could type them into
Google translate. In fact, a program with a web interface could feed
any book to Google translate, one sentence at a time, and the do the
substitution cipher on what came back and crank out translations into
the new "conlang" by the thousands. Just think, I could be the first
conlanger to translate the entire Old and New Testament into my
conlang! Ah, the feeling of power! :-)
--gary
Messages in this topic (2)
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5b. Re: Yet another Wacky way to "discover" a conlang
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 3, 2012 11:34 pm ((PST))
Another way to create (a sketch of) a conlang:
Take a known language, e.g., English, and switch the parts of speech of the
verbs and nouns, then make whatever grammar adjustments are required to
make it work.
John gave the red book to Mary.
N V+PAST N N > V N V
V
I tried to work out a reasonable interpretation, but couldn't in such a
short time. Perhaps others can make it work.
stevo
On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 2:08 AM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Here's a crazy idea for building a "conlang":
>
> Go to Google translate and pick some language that you know nothing
> about, say Maltese.
> Then put in a bunch of sentences of various kinds and translate them.
> For example:
>
> This is a sample translation. -> Din hija traduzzjoni tal-kampjun.
> This is a sample of translation. -> Dan huwa kampjun ta 'traduzzjoni.
> John gave the red book to Mary. -> John taw il-ktieb aħmar lil Marija.
>
> Now since machine translation isn't really all that good, what comes
> out probably won't always be correct Maltese (or whatever), but that
> doesn't matter, because the next step fixes that.
>
> Just so it won't really just be Maltese (or whatever), you do a
> character encoding, replacing vowels (and clusters) for vowels (and
> clusters) and consonants (and clusters) for other consonants (and
> clusters). In other words, a simple substitution cipher to relex
> Maltese:
>
> A -> O; E -> U; I -> A; O -> E; U -> I; AW -> AI; IE -> OI
> D -> M; N-> R; H -> K; J -> TR; TR -> PL; ZZJ -> KW; T -> B; L -> N; K
> -> S; MPJ -> KY; KT -> KR; B -> J; ħM -> TH; R -> GH; ... etc.
>
> This is a sample translation. ->
> Din hija traduzzjoni tal-kampjun. ->
> Mar katro plomikwera bon-sokyir.
>
> John gave the red book to Mary. ->
> John taw il-ktieb aħmar lil Marija. ->
> John Bai an-kroij othogh nan Marija.
>
> Now, regardless of whether the intermediate step was correct Maltese
> or not, the final product, after enciphered relexing, is STIPULATED to
> be absolutely correct for the new conlang. So all that's left is to
> figure out, from your translated samples, how the grammar works, and
> write a grammar that describes that language.
>
> Then, not only do you end up with an interesting conlang with a
> complex grammar, but you have the added bonus that Google translate
> can do translations into your conlang, assuming you can automate the
> substitution cipher to turn Google's half-baked Maltese into a correct
> translation into your conlang.
>
> Using that approach it would be a piece of cake to create a
> significant corpus in your conlang. You could translate all of Poe,
> Shakespeare, Edgar Rice Burroughs, as fast as you could type them into
> Google translate. In fact, a program with a web interface could feed
> any book to Google translate, one sentence at a time, and the do the
> substitution cipher on what came back and crank out translations into
> the new "conlang" by the thousands. Just think, I could be the first
> conlanger to translate the entire Old and New Testament into my
> conlang! Ah, the feeling of power! :-)
>
> --gary
>
Messages in this topic (2)
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