There are 8 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: <w> = /u/
From: Eric Christopherson
1b. Re: <w> = /u/
From: Eric Christopherson
2a. Re: what sort of semantic properties of arguments do verbs inflect f
From: Zach Wellstood
3.1. Re: Japanese pronouns (was: Bernard Comrie, The World's Major Langua
From: Roman Rausch
3.2. Re: Japanese pronouns (was: Bernard Comrie, The World's Major Langua
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
4a. Re: A Portrait of the Conlanger as a Young Man
From: Roger Mills
4b. Re: A Portrait of the Conlanger as a Young Man
From: Allison Swenson
5. Tagalog-English dictionary
From: George Corley
Messages
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1a. Re: <w> = /u/
Posted by: "Eric Christopherson" [email protected]
Date: Sun Sep 9, 2012 12:01 pm ((PDT))
On Sep 9, 2012, at 1:13 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Sep 2012 14:14:29 -0500, Matthew Boutilier <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> the *weirder* question is why, in Germanic (and, i'm sure, elsewhere), the
>> following arrangement seemed sensible:
>> <uu> = /w/
>> <u> = /u/
>> my 'instincts' would flip them, with the longer sound corresponding to the
>> longer symbol. unless the consonantality of /w/ suggested itself as more
>> prominent for the orthography. but, such is life.
>
> I've also been puzzled by this. It comes up (surely) independently in the
> Avestan script which uses _ii_ and _uu_ for respectively [j] and [w]. My
> only guess as to why this correspondence might suggest itself is that,
> intervocalically, glides like to do the ambisyllabic thing of being a
> diphthong offglide of one syllable and the onset of the next, so you write
> them once for each syllable. But it could always be just "double for a
> secondary value".
Yiddish-adapted Hebrew script does this too for /v/ and /j/.
Messages in this topic (5)
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1b. Re: <w> = /u/
Posted by: "Eric Christopherson" [email protected]
Date: Sun Sep 9, 2012 12:15 pm ((PDT))
On Sep 9, 2012, at 2:00 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> On Sep 9, 2012, at 1:13 AM, Alex Fink wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 8 Sep 2012 14:14:29 -0500, Matthew Boutilier
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> the *weirder* question is why, in Germanic (and, i'm sure, elsewhere), the
>>> following arrangement seemed sensible:
>>> <uu> = /w/
>>> <u> = /u/
>>> my 'instincts' would flip them, with the longer sound corresponding to the
>>> longer symbol. unless the consonantality of /w/ suggested itself as more
>>> prominent for the orthography. but, such is life.
>>
>> I've also been puzzled by this. It comes up (surely) independently in the
>> Avestan script which uses _ii_ and _uu_ for respectively [j] and [w]. My
>> only guess as to why this correspondence might suggest itself is that,
>> intervocalically, glides like to do the ambisyllabic thing of being a
>> diphthong offglide of one syllable and the onset of the next, so you write
>> them once for each syllable. But it could always be just "double for a
>> secondary value".
>
> Yiddish-adapted Hebrew script does this too for /v/ and /j/.
Sorry -- it does this only with doubled vav for /v/. Doubled yod is either /ej/
or /aj/, depending on diacritics.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2a. Re: what sort of semantic properties of arguments do verbs inflect f
Posted by: "Zach Wellstood" [email protected]
Date: Sun Sep 9, 2012 12:13 pm ((PDT))
>
>
>> Good stuff. For Livagian I currently have inflections for nonthird
> person, for 6 degrees of spatial deixis (based on +/-near me, +/-near you),
> which also double as degrees of (in)definiteness, for taboo/unmentionable,
> for ineffable, for thing pointed to, for thing demonstrated, for good thing
> and for bad thing.
>
>
Oh, interesting! I didn't know if there were any other conlangs that
observe spatial deixis in that way. In łaá siri, those conjugations also
help in distinguishing proximate/obviative distinctions and relevance to
the discourse.
Zach
--
<Say 'Yes' to Conlanging! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlang>>
ra'aalalí 'a!
Messages in this topic (6)
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3.1. Re: Japanese pronouns (was: Bernard Comrie, The World's Major Langua
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" [email protected]
Date: Sun Sep 9, 2012 2:02 pm ((PDT))
>> Japanese pronouns behave just like ordinary nouns, except that
>> they take the plural marker -tachi if appropriate, which is
>> usually not used with nouns (I don't know, though, whether
>> pluralizing nouns is *forbidden* or just *not common practice*).
>As I explained earlier in the original thread, further analysis of "-tachi"
>shows that it's used on pronouns the same way as it's used on any noun used
>as an identifier, i.e. a name, or a word like "okyakusan", meaning
>"customer", and used by shop owners to talk to their clients. So this usage
>is not due to a grammatical difference between pronouns and common nouns,
>but simply to the fact that pronouns, by definition, are always used as
>identifiers.
There is also the plural suffix _-ra_ which I have never seen used with nouns
like _okyakusan_, but only with pronouns and demonstratives.
>And pluralising common nouns is possible in Japanese, just not commonly done.
Really? How?
>I have no problem imaging "hanatachi", "nekotachi", or "inutachi" in a
>childern's
>story. So as Christpohe says, just not common practice.
But using _nekotachi_ *is* common practice when the context asks for it. It's
not plural, but associative plural. _Nekotachi_ would be a cat and other
animates somehow associated with the cat, in the same group with it (not
necessarily cats themselves). There is even a WALS chapter on it:
http://wals.info/chapter/36
Messages in this topic (40)
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3.2. Re: Japanese pronouns (was: Bernard Comrie, The World's Major Langua
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Sun Sep 9, 2012 2:20 pm ((PDT))
On 9 September 2012 23:02, Roman Rausch <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> There is also the plural suffix _-ra_ which I have never seen used with
> nouns like _okyakusan_, but only with pronouns and demonstratives.
>
>
Not completely true. I've seen common nouns pluralised with "-ra". However,
that happens only in archaic texts and I believe in some Japanese dialects.
So once again it's not a foolproof way of distinguishing nouns and
pronouns, although its use on nouns is nearly extinct in standard Japanese.
> >And pluralising common nouns is possible in Japanese, just not commonly
> done.
>
> Really? How?
>
>
"-tachi".
> >I have no problem imaging "hanatachi", "nekotachi", or "inutachi" in a
> childern's
> >story. So as Christpohe says, just not common practice.
>
> But using _nekotachi_ *is* common practice when the context asks for it.
> It's not plural, but associative plural.
Yes, but also used as simple plural (when the group associated with "neko"
is only made of cats), and totally optional when used that way, unless
"neko" is used as an identifier, in which case it is *mandatory* when
talking about the group associated with "neko". Just as with other
identifiers like pronouns.
> _Nekotachi_ would be a cat and other animates somehow associated with the
> cat, in the same group with it (not necessarily cats themselves). There is
> even a WALS chapter on it: http://wals.info/chapter/36
>
Exactly. And that's *exactly* how it used on pronouns as well. "Bokutachi"
isn't "more than one I", it's "me and others associated with me". That's
associative plural. So once again, not a distinction between nouns and
pronouns. They behave exactly the same when used with "-tachi".
Really, what you are saying is validating my point, i.e. that nouns and
what we call pronouns in Japanese really are grammatically behaving in
exactly the same way, to the point that there is no reason to even talk
about a separate subset of nouns called "pronouns". They're all just nouns,
and the pronominal functions is just that, a *function*, that can be taken
by many nouns, some more often than others, purely based on semantics, i.e.
meaning. Whether a speaker refers to their listener as "anata" or "sensei"
doesn't make a single grammatical difference. They're both used as
identifiers in this case, and thus behave grammatically exactly in the same
way. Ergo, there isn't a separate category of pronouns, just an
"identifier" function that can be applied to nouns.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (40)
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4a. Re: A Portrait of the Conlanger as a Young Man
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Sun Sep 9, 2012 4:11 pm ((PDT))
--- On Wed, 9/5/12, Jörg Rhiemeier <[email protected]> wrote:
At this point I'd like to let folks know that I created an article at
Frath Wiki -- http://www.frathwiki.com/My_First_Conlang -- for anyone
who wishes to torture the Conlanging world with their first attempt or
two at making a language!
=================================================
I too have written up a one-page essay (MS Word) on my intro to conlanging and
first efforts, but I'm not sure how to upload it to Frathwiki. If I send it to
someone more adept, could you upload it, please?
Messages in this topic (20)
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4b. Re: A Portrait of the Conlanger as a Young Man
Posted by: "Allison Swenson" [email protected]
Date: Mon Sep 10, 2012 5:20 am ((PDT))
A bit late to the party, but oddly enough I was around 11 or 12 when I
started my first conlang as well! I'm giving away my youth here, but it was
really because I saw the Lord of the Rings movies (well, the first one,
anyway), read and was instantly hooked on the books, and was fascinated by
Tolkien's languages. So of course the first thought into my head was to rip
off his work!
The language was nothing more than a relex of English and never got much
farther than a list of vocabulary, but I continued to work on it off and on
throughout middle school and ended up with quite a list. Now that I think
about it, I believe I actually did have a very small number of full
sentence translations, but I haven't the faintest idea how conjugation or
anything else worked. Hmm, now I'm intrigued. I may have to do some digging
through some old computers to see if I can turn anything up!
Anyway, while the project was abandoned, a few words (no more than perhaps
a half-dozen) actually have survived into my current project, simply
because they were so familiar to me.
Messages in this topic (20)
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5. Tagalog-English dictionary
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Mon Sep 10, 2012 10:04 am ((PDT))
Does anyone know a really good Tagalog-English/English-Tagalog *online*
dictionary? All the ones coming up on Google are kinda crap.
Messages in this topic (1)
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