There are 12 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: New Blog Post: Moten Part VIII: Surdéclinaison, Def inition
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
1b. Re: New Blog Post: Moten Part VIII: Surdéclinaison, Def inition
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
2a. Re: agent of an antitransitive verb
From: yuri
3a. OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Albic!)
From: David Peterson
3b. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
From: yuri
3c. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
From: David Peterson
3d. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
From: Alex Fink
3e. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
4a. Re: New Blog Post: Moten Part VIII: Su rdé clinaiso n , Def ini
From: Ralph DeCarli
4b. Re: New Blog Post: Mo ten Part VIII: Su rdé clinaiso n , Def in
From: And Rosta
5. absolute pitch
From: MorphemeAddict
6a. Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Albic!) (was: New Blog Po
From: Roman Rausch
Messages
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1a. Re: New Blog Post: Moten Part VIII: Surdéclinaison, Def inition
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 4:05 pm ((PDT))
On 20 March 2012 23:40, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:16:30 -0400, Roman Rausch <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >>but somehow surdeclinaison has
> >>been ignored so far, despite the fact that its distant cousin
> >>Suffixaufnahme is a well known denizen here...
> >
> >Yeah, what's actually the difference between the two? "Suffixaufnahme" is
> >when all the words in a noun phrase receive the case ending, not just the
> >head noun; while surdeclinaison is more general?
> >(Sorry - I'm writing in ascii, so no accent aigu..)
>
> I think the distinction being drawn is as follows.
>
> Suffixaufnahme is when modifiers of a noun must _agree_ in case, even if
> they're already case-inflected NPs (or something else complex):
> "(I gave it) to a man from Bilbao" man.DAT Bilbao.ABL.*DAT*
>
That's basically it: Suffixaufnahme is a phenomenon of *agreement*, and
happens only in languages that have word marking, i.e. all participants in
a noun phrase must be marked for the function of that noun phrase.
Suffixaufnahme just takes that rule without exception, i.e. it marks all
participants for the function of the phrase, even if they are already
inflected.
> Surdéclinaison is when modifiers of a noun must take _the basic case for
> modifiers to a noun_, typically genitive, even if they're already
> case-inflected NPs (or something else complex):
> "(I gave it) to a man from Bilbao" man.DAT Bilbao.ABL.*GEN*
>
>
That's only one aspect of surdéclinaison, converting adverbial phrases into
noun modifiers. Surdéclinaison has many other aspects, including but not
limited to:
- nominalisation of noun modifiers (to make the equivalent of "at the
neighbour's").
- nominalisation of relative clauses (to render "the one that..." or
"whoever/whatever/...").
- formation of adverbial subclauses by inflecting conjugated verbs using
noun cases (I will discuss that in my next post).
- all kinds of restricted patterns and one-offs, which can be used to
create new lexical items (for instance, in Moten the word for "week" is
_negesizdan_, which is actually an inflected form meaning "for seven days").
And I'm sure you could imagine many more things to do. Those are just the
patterns of surdéclinaison that appear in Moten (and similarly in Basque).
That's the power of surdéclinaison: it's far broader than Suffixaufnahme,
to which it bears only a passing similarity (I'm nearly sure they are
actually incompatible: Suffixaufnahme requires word marking, surdéclinaison
seems to require group marking, i.e. marking NPs for function only once, a
the edge of the phrase).
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (3)
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1b. Re: New Blog Post: Moten Part VIII: Surdéclinaison, Def inition
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:30 am ((PDT))
On 20 March 2012 21:59, Logan Kearsley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Indeed, I am no longer confused as to the distinction between
> surdeclinaison and suffixaufnahme!
>
>
Great! Although those two features look superficially similar, they are
actually quite different in use.
> > And also as usual, comments are more than welcome. In this case, I'm
> mostly
> > interested in knowing whether anyone has ever tried their hands at
> > including surdéclinaison in a conlang of theirs, and how it works in that
> > conlang. Also, I'd like to know whether the explanations on my post are
> > understandable.
>
> I thought so. In particular, I think you found a rather elegant
> solution to the problem of disambiguating adjectival and adverbial
> prepositional phrases / oblique noun phrases.
>
>
Well, all the honour goes to Basque for inspiring me :) .
> On 20 March 2012 06:49, A. da Mek <[email protected]> wrote:
> [...]
> > (in my conlangs), there is not so great distinction between inflexion
> and
> > derivation. Inflected forms are considered as compounds with grammatical
> > roots. Cases are considered as adverbs derived from substantives and
> > participles as adverbs derived from verbs.
>
> That reflects my juvenile understanding of cases rather well; I had to
> go learn Russian before I really 'got' why case inflection was not
> just a fancy name for adverb derivation. Having discovered what cases
> are actually for, I sometimes ponder creating a language that actually
> does work that way on purpose.
>
>
I'm not sure it's so "juvenile" after all :) . If you look for instance at
some of the Latin adverbs, there are definitely indications that those used
to be declined noun phrases. So case inflection can definitely result in
adverb derivation, definitely diachronically, but also synchronically as
well. And it's not as if the difference between inflection and derivation
is so clear-cut.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (3)
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2a. Re: agent of an antitransitive verb
Posted by: "yuri" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 4:18 pm ((PDT))
On 21 March 2012 06:18, Roman Rausch wrote:
> Question: Is it completely unthinkable to mark the agent of an
> antitransitive verb in the same way as the agent of a passive verb? For
> example:
>
> passive:
> (1) He was killed [by a horse].
>
> antitransitive:
> (2) *The clothes dried [by the sun].
> (3) *The stew was boiling [by Peter].
No. It is not unthinkable. If it makes sense to you, do it.
If it turns out to be unique to your conlang, who cares, as long as
your conlang is consistent within itself and it makes sense to its
creator.
Yuri
Messages in this topic (2)
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3a. OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Albic!)
Posted by: "David Peterson" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 5:14 pm ((PDT))
This is completely off topic, but worth bringing up. I've noticed recently this
trend of marking with a gave accent the main vowels of words that are being
stressed or emphasized, like so:
On Mar 20, 2012, at 12:03 PM, Alex Fink wrote:
> He's vèry free with the speculation.
That's pretty cool and intuitive, but could we possibly *not* do that and
instead use asterisks or nothing? The reason is that if you search for the
string "very" (using this example only) in the Conlang Archives, it won't
return this message. Now "very" isn't the most important word in that message,
but if this practice expànds, pretty soon we'll be dropping grave accents on
impòrtant words, and we'll try to search for those words in the àrchives, and
we won't be able to find them (or we'll be left guessing if the word we're
searching for should instead also be spelled with a grave accent on the tonic
syllable). It'd be better if we used a method for emphasis that leaves the
string in tact so we can avoid this problem.
Just my two cents.
David Peterson
LCS President
[email protected]
www.conlang.org
Messages in this topic (8)
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3b. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
Posted by: "yuri" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 5:40 pm ((PDT))
On 21 March 2012 13:14, David Peterson wrote:
> This is completely off topic, but worth bringing up. I've noticed recently
> this
> trend of marking with a gave accent the main vowels of words that are being
> stressed or emphasized, like so:
>
> On Mar 20, 2012, at 12:03 PM, Alex Fink wrote:
>
>> He's vèry free with the speculation.
>
> That's pretty cool and intuitive, but could we possibly *not* do that and
> instead use asterisks or nothing? The reason is that if you search for the
> string "very" (using this example only) in the Conlang Archives, it won't
> return
> this message.
A better solution would be a search algorithm that replaces accented
letters with their base letter before making the comparison.
If it is possible to do a case insensitive search then it's possible
to do an accent insensitive search. Such a feature is also important
on a list where languages are discussed.
I know that when I search for a famous person on Wikipedia I can type
the name without the accents and it still gets found, so someone has
solved this problem before.
Yuri
Messages in this topic (8)
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3c. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
Posted by: "David Peterson" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 7:12 pm ((PDT))
On Mar 20, 2012, at 5:40 PM, yuri wrote:
> A better solution would be a search algorithm that replaces accented
> letters with their base letter before making the comparison.
> If it is possible to do a case insensitive search then it's possible
> to do an accent insensitive search. Such a feature is also important
> on a list where languages are discussed.
>
> I know that when I search for a famous person on Wikipedia I can type
> the name without the accents and it still gets found, so someone has
> solved this problem before.
No question this would be a better solution, but I don't think that's something
we have any control over: the Conlang Archives search utility does what it
does. I haven't tried using google to search the conlang archives (e.g. "very
conlang archives"), but certainly google does just this with its searches.
David Peterson
LCS President
[email protected]
www.conlang.org
Messages in this topic (8)
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3d. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 7:30 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:14:07 -0700, David Peterson <[email protected]> wrote:
>This is completely off topic, but worth bringing up. I've noticed recently
this trend of marking with a gave accent the main vowels of words that are
being stressed or emphasized, like so:
>
>On Mar 20, 2012, at 12:03 PM, Alex Fink wrote:
>
>> He's vèry free with the speculation.
A trend! Has anyone other than me actually been doing that lately? I did
pick this practice up from the list, who knows how many years back, when
more Dutch folk were active -- I think it was said that it's more regularly
done in Dutch. But that was then and I haven't noticed it now. Am I just
glossing over the other current instances?
>That's pretty cool and intuitive, but could we possibly *not* do that and
instead use asterisks or nothing? The reason is that if you search for the
string "very" (using this example only) in the Conlang Archives, it won't
return this message. Now "very" isn't the most important word in that
message, but if this practice expànds, pretty soon we'll be dropping grave
accents on impòrtant words, and we'll try to search for those words in the
àrchives, and we won't be able to find them (or we'll be left guessing if
the word we're searching for should instead also be spelled with a grave
accent on the tonic syllable). It'd be better if we used a method for
emphasis that leaves the string in tact so we can avoid this problem.
Bending over to suit our technology, delightful! But it fits right in with
the use of CXS on the list and all that, I suppose. Anyway, sure, since you
ask I'll strive to remember to avoid string-disfiguring transformations here.
>I haven't tried using google to search the conlang archives (e.g. "very
conlang archives"), but certainly google does just this with its searches.
The archives are very conlang, aren't they? V e r y conlang indeed. :-p
Alex
Messages in this topic (8)
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3e. Re: OT: Grave Accent (Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Alb
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 21, 2012 12:43 am ((PDT))
On 21 March 2012 03:30, Alex Fink <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> He's vèry free with the speculation.
>
> A trend! Has anyone other than me actually been doing that lately? I did
> pick this practice up from the list, who knows how many years back, when
> more Dutch folk were active -- I think it was said that it's more regularly
> done in Dutch.
Correct, but in Dutch it's more commonly the acute accent that is used
rather than the grave accent.
>
> Bending over to suit our technology, delightful! But it fits right in with
> the use of CXS on the list and all that, I suppose.
How long are we going to suffer Brown not to update their listserv
software? I understand that they graciously allow us to use it, but still,
we're in 2012! There's such a thing as software obsolescence! Are they
planning to leave the listserv as it is for the next 30 years too?
> Anyway, sure, since you
> ask I'll strive to remember to avoid string-disfiguring transformations
> here.
>
> >I haven't tried using google to search the conlang archives (e.g. "very
> conlang archives"), but certainly google does just this with its searches.
>
> The archives are very conlang, aren't they? V e r y conlang indeed. :-p
>
>
We're all very conlang here :P .
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (8)
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4a. Re: New Blog Post: Moten Part VIII: Su rdé clinaiso n , Def ini
Posted by: "Ralph DeCarli" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 6:42 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:24:32 -0500
Adam Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Charlie Brickner <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:21:17 -0500, Adam Walker
> > <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > >Child: Gah! You're the meanest mom in the world. You're always
> > >no texting-ing me. I can't have any fun!
> > >
> >
> > Speaking of which: "to text' often doesn't have a past tense in
> > the spoken language. I watch two of the courtroom shows and I
> > always hear, "He text me...." I guess "texted" is too difficult
> > to say.
> >
> > Charlie
> >
>
>
> Indeed. I rarely hear the -ed past used with "to text." I use
> it, at least when I'm being careful, not sure about otherwise, but
> hearing it is rare. The most common conjugation is clearly:
>
> I text, I am texting, I text, I have text
>
> Adam
Are we sure they aren't saying 'texed'?
Ralph
--
[email protected] ==> Ralph De Carli
The four types of love.
Platonic - I like you,
Erotic - I want you,
Agapic - I worship you,
Aortic - I heart you.
Messages in this topic (9)
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4b. Re: New Blog Post: Mo ten Part VIII: Su rdé clinaiso n , Def in
Posted by: "And Rosta" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 21, 2012 12:57 am ((PDT))
Ralph DeCarli, On 21/03/2012 01:41:
> Adam Walker<[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Charlie Brickner<
>>> Speaking of which: "to text' often doesn't have a past tense in
>>> the spoken language. I watch two of the courtroom shows and I
>>> always hear, "He text me...." I guess "texted" is too difficult
>>> to say.
>>
>> Indeed. I rarely hear the -ed past used with "to text." I use
>> it, at least when I'm being careful, not sure about otherwise, but
>> hearing it is rare. The most common conjugation is clearly:
>>
>> I text, I am texting, I text, I have text
>
> Are we sure they aren't saying 'texed'?
If the ing-form really is _texting_, then the choice between the ed-form being
_text_ or _texed_ is arbitrary; but maybe the verb is regular, the stem is
always _tex_, and the ing-participle is _texing_; as a stem, _text_ is
phonologically irregular, so _tex_ would be a natural regularization. All my
students have _text/texed_ for the ed-form, but I haven't checked on what the
stem is for them. (I of course say _texted_, but I was born in the 1960s not
the 1990s.)
--And.
Messages in this topic (9)
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5. absolute pitch
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 21, 2012 3:55 am ((PDT))
Are there any languages or peoples that use or require absolute pitch?
stevo
Messages in this topic (1)
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6a. Re: Superdeclension in Quenya? (and in Old Albic!) (was: New Blog Po
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 21, 2012 5:43 am ((PDT))
>ACH Y FI!!! This is totally against the spirit of Quenya.
>Even the most liberal "reconstructionsists" won't admit this
>as Neo-Quenya, but dismiss it as unwarranted speculation.
>Quenya is not a loglang!!!!!!! This is just outrageous.
>Under these circumstances, there is no reason to assume that any
>of the "superdeclined" "Quenya" forms in Appleyard's article could
>be actual Quenya.
Calm down, bydd popeth yn iawn. :-) The document is quite old, and even
though Appleyard's speculations are often too much, he actually had some
right hunches.
>That sounds interesting, but are such forms attested in Tolkien's
>corpus, or is Mr. Appleyard speculating into the blue here?
As I said over in the surdeclinaison thread, the closest thing which comes
to it are some Early Qenya forms in PE14:47:
- kirya-sse-a 'what is on board ship' (ship-LOC-ADJ)
- ere-sse-a 'lonely' (single-LOC-ADJ)
- i ner elda-llu-va 'the man from the Elves (ART man elf-ABL-ADJ)
- kaima-sse-a 'a-bed' (bed-LOC-ADJ)
Since these are adjectives, they could theoretically be nominalized and
inflected further.
Messages in this topic (8)
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