There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: Alex Fink
1b. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
2a. Re: OT: Decimal vs. duodeciml (was: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: Charles W Brickner
3a. So, about Ithkuil...
From: selpa'i
3b. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: John Q
3c. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: MorphemeAddict
4a. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
From: Garth Wallace
4b. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
From: Nikolay Ivankov
4c. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
From: Jim Henry
4d. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
4e. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
From: Padraic Brown
5a. Re: Romanization: digraphs vs. diacritics
From: Herman Miller
6a. Re: French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical languag
From: Nikolay Ivankov
6b. Re: French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical languag
From: Nikolay Ivankov
7a. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Ralph DeCarli
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 10:04 am ((PST))
On Sat, 19 Jan 2013 09:43:58 -0800, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>When we "think in words", we are not
>"thinking", we are reiterating what we have already thought without
>words.
>
>If you don't believe that, next time you catch yourself "thinking"
>with a sentence, stop yourself mid-sentence, and you will discover
>that you DO know what the sentence was going to say, even though you
>did not complete the mental uttering of the sentence.
[...]
Perhaps you know this, Gary, but it's a fact not generally appreciated that the
way people perceive their thought processes _varies_ from person to person.
Some people hear their thoughts; some see them diagramatically; some see them
textually(!); some have abstract thought without any sort of sensory quale like
this; some have something else yet. And of course it also varies by task --
myself, I normally have abstract, but I can get auditory when heavily reliant
on short-term memory, or when doing calculations or other formal manipulations
of the sort.
No time now to find a good link about this, but here's a survey Sai was doing a
bit back on the question:
https://plus.google.com/103112149634414554669/posts/irKhFjtbWjt
At any rate, I see no reason why thinking in speech should be regarded as a
"bad habit", as you put it. Where's the harm in it?
Alex
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 10:12 am ((PST))
On Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:02:42 +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>Hallo conlangers!
>
>On Saturday 19 January 2013 18:43:58 Gary Shannon wrote:
>
>> I believe that the opposite it true. We create words for things that
>> are important to us. It happens every day in the sciences, especially
>> biology and biochemistry. When some new organic compound becomes
>> important, instead of calling by it's chemical formula, a name is
>> created. The compound did not become important because it has a name,
>> it has a name because it became important.
>
>Yes. When something is important to us, we create a word. When
>something becomes very important to us, we create a shorter word.
>So a "carriage propelled by an engine built into it" became an
>"automobile" and later a "car".
>
>> But then, speaking as a non-linguist, I think Sapir-Whorf is a
>> questionable hypothesis. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to me,
>> because thought is non-verbal. When we "think in words", we are not
>> "thinking", we are reiterating what we have already thought without
>> words.
>
>I think you are correct.
>
>> If you don't believe that, next time you catch yourself "thinking"
>> with a sentence, stop yourself mid-sentence, and you will discover
>> that you DO know what the sentence was going to say, even though you
>> did not complete the mental uttering of the sentence.
>
>Right.
>
>> And you know
>> what the last word of the of the sentence was going to be long before
>> you silently repeated that word to yourself. The words of the sentence
>> were put together to repeat the thought to yourself, but the thought
>> existed before the words.
>
>And often you have a thought and are struggling for the right
>word for it. If thought was in a language, one could not think
>about what you don't know the word for. Also, as someone who
>masters two languages well to the point of being almost equally
>fluent in both, I sometimes remember a train of thought I have
>read somewhere, but do not remember in which language I read it!
>
>All this is evidence that language *reflects* thought rather than
>determining it.
I am Humboldtian in this respect: Language does not simply reflect
thought, but it completes thought. A thought is not finished until it has
been uttered and ideally been returned to you by the hearer. I am pretty
sure that with a bit of imagination, you can find similar "evidence" for the
Humboldtian view.
--
grüess
mach
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: OT: Decimal vs. duodeciml (was: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "Charles W Brickner" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 11:03 am ((PST))
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Leonardo Castro
A base-12 system is closely related to base-60 because 12 x 5 = 60. If three
people buy a package of dozen eggs, they can easily divide them equally.
With 10 eggs, someone would get an extra egg.
In short, the advantage of having more divisors is that you avoid dealing
with non-integer numbers and breaking eggs...
===================================
That makes sense, of course, but I can't help but ask: Suppose 5 people buy
a dozen eggs. :-)
Charlie
Messages in this topic (4)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 11:51 am ((PST))
I have made a few attempts in the past to "learn" Ithkuil; what I really
did was that I read through some of the intro pages and then gave up in
frustration each time. But for some reason, it all seems much easier
this time around. I'm not nearly as confused, and most importantly, I
now believe that it's possible to learn this language. Something which I
highly doubted before.
Now I'll be trying to get the Grammar of Ithkuil from lulu.com, hoping
that shipping to Europe won't cause problems or huge delays.
I'm wondering, however. There seems to be surprisingly little talk about
Ithkuil on the net or on this list. There is no Ithkuil mailing list, no
IRC channel, no youtube videos, no learning resources other than the
Reference Grammar. Even Gua\spi seems to have a bigger web presence, and
it was revived only some months ago by myself. Why is there so little
activity, so little output? There clearly are people out there that have
a serious interest in Ithkuil; I am aware of the reddit and facebook
groups, and that there is a community of Russian enthusiasts, and yet,
it seems that no texts have been translated into Ithkuil (e.g. The
Little Prince).
Is it simply that people are overwhelmed by Ithkuil? Or are they not
motivated enough? Is the general opinion really that it cannot be
learned? Because I actually doubt that. It is a very difficult language,
no question, but other than that, there are polysynthetic natural
languages with similarly complex morphologies, and there are also
natural languages with similarly complex phonologies.
I do think that it would be extremely helpful to have some more didactic
tutorials, preferably written by John Qijada himself, as he is the only
one that can be trusted. I also know how busy life can get, and how
little time there is sometimes left for such things.
I am reminded of a semi-serious suggestion I once made in the Lojban
community: Set out a cash prize for the first (or any) person to achieve
complete spoken fluency in Lojban. The same idea works for any underused
language, like Ithkuil. Of course, Lojban has the LLG behind them, which
could pay this prize (in theory), whereas there is no such institution
for Ithkuil. It would have to be crowd-funded. (As I said, half-joking,
but not entirely)
Lastly, a hypothetical: What would happen if a person did manage to
learn Ithkuil to a decent level, such that they could speak the language
mabye not to 100% of its potential, but well enough to not need a
dictionary, and well enough to converse relatively freely in/about
everyday situations? Would anybody care? Would this person be a "hero"?
I have no idea.
So these are just some of my thoughts about the current state of
Ithkuil. Feedback is appreciated.
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
3b. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:50 pm ((PST))
I've been quoted in the past as saying I thought Ithkuil would be learnable
with years and years of intense study and practice. But what I now believe is
that Ithkuil is potentially learnable ONLY to an extent of fluency commensurate
with natural languages. In other words, one could, through long and intense
study, be able to speak Ithkuil sentences that share a more-or-less one-to-one
correspondence with sentences from natural languages in terms of
lexico-semantic and morpho-syntactic complexity. However, speaking Ithkuil in
such a manner pretty much defeats the purpose of the language. Ithkuil is
designed to allow a speaker to use its morphology to be able to transparently
craft words and sentences to succinctly express thoughts, ideas, concepts, and
describe complex situations that do not exist in natural languages and would
require whole paragraphs to be able to paraphrase (which is why I think it
would be great for poetry). This can be illustrated by the following example:
Imagine an American football game being watched by a stadium full of Ithkuil
speakers. The runner is doing some fancy footwork (shifting back-and-forth in
an unpredictable pattern) that is so fast the opposing defenders miss their
tackles. However, the runner is also beginning to stumble as he runs.
Nevertheless, his stumbling does not prevent him from getting to the end-zone
and scoring a goal. How could the announcer describe what just occurred? With
a single word:
ˇegwapskhanišpams
The above word is impossible to translate literally into English without
resorting to long paraphrase but for the Ithkuil announcer (and audience) it
would be a perfectly natural word to use in describing what has just occurred:
APPROXIMATE TRANSLATION (capturing as much of the overtly expressed semantic
content of the original as possible):
"There’s some super-quick impossible-to-track shifting of direction/position
going on by the runner, as he begins stumbling, yet it doesn’t stop him at all
from reaching/scoring the goal."
It took me about fifteen minutes to piece together the above Ithkuil word after
first thinking about the "scene" I wanted to describe. A "100% fluent" speaker
(e.g., the hypothetical sports announcer) would, in theory, be able to come up
with such a word ON THE SPOT. It is THAT level of fluency which Ithkuil
potentially allows, and it is THAT level of fluency which I now believe is
unattainable. And because of this unattainability, the language fails as a
workable, learnable language on its own terms; at best, it could be learned to
express concepts only at a level more or less equivalent to other languages, in
which case I see no point in bothering. Therefore, in my opinion, Ithkuil's
only real benefit to the world is as a theoretical and (as Dr. Lakoff astutely
observed) artistic construct/endeavor for contemplative purposes only.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
3c. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:57 pm ((PST))
Ithkuil may be learnable by computers or enhanced humans. It's too soon to
give up on it yet.
stevo
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 6:50 PM, John Q <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been quoted in the past as saying I thought Ithkuil would be
> learnable with years and years of intense study and practice. But what I
> now believe is that Ithkuil is potentially learnable ONLY to an extent of
> fluency commensurate with natural languages. In other words, one could,
> through long and intense study, be able to speak Ithkuil sentences that
> share a more-or-less one-to-one correspondence with sentences from natural
> languages in terms of lexico-semantic and morpho-syntactic complexity.
> However, speaking Ithkuil in such a manner pretty much defeats the purpose
> of the language. Ithkuil is designed to allow a speaker to use its
> morphology to be able to transparently craft words and sentences to
> succinctly express thoughts, ideas, concepts, and describe complex
> situations that do not exist in natural languages and would require whole
> paragraphs to be able to paraphrase (which is why I think it would be great
> for poetry). This can be illustrated by the following example:
>
> Imagine an American football game being watched by a stadium full of
> Ithkuil speakers. The runner is doing some fancy footwork (shifting
> back-and-forth in an unpredictable pattern) that is so fast the opposing
> defenders miss their tackles. However, the runner is also beginning to
> stumble as he runs. Nevertheless, his stumbling does not prevent him from
> getting to the end-zone and scoring a goal. How could the announcer
> describe what just occurred? With a single word:
>
> ˇegwapskhanišpams
>
> The above word is impossible to translate literally into English without
> resorting to long paraphrase but for the Ithkuil announcer (and audience)
> it would be a perfectly natural word to use in describing what has just
> occurred:
>
> APPROXIMATE TRANSLATION (capturing as much of the overtly expressed
> semantic content of the original as possible):
>
> "There’s some super-quick impossible-to-track shifting of
> direction/position going on by the runner, as he begins stumbling, yet it
> doesn’t stop him at all from reaching/scoring the goal."
>
> It took me about fifteen minutes to piece together the above Ithkuil word
> after first thinking about the "scene" I wanted to describe. A "100%
> fluent" speaker (e.g., the hypothetical sports announcer) would, in theory,
> be able to come up with such a word ON THE SPOT. It is THAT level of
> fluency which Ithkuil potentially allows, and it is THAT level of fluency
> which I now believe is unattainable. And because of this unattainability,
> the language fails as a workable, learnable language on its own terms; at
> best, it could be learned to express concepts only at a level more or less
> equivalent to other languages, in which case I see no point in bothering.
> Therefore, in my opinion, Ithkuil's only real benefit to the world is as a
> theoretical and (as Dr. Lakoff astutely observed) artistic
> construct/endeavor for contemplative purposes only.
>
> --John Q.
>
Messages in this topic (3)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
4a. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
Posted by: "Garth Wallace" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 2:04 pm ((PST))
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 6:21 AM, R A Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> _brief_ reply in this tedious thread.
>
>
> On 19/01/2013 13:42, Mathieu Roy wrote:
>>
>> <<But what I do not and will not go along with is someone
>> who wants the whole world to speak a particular auxlang
>> or a particular loglang and, as Padraic says, such
>> advocacy is not appropriate on this list.>>
>>
>> Nor will I. I will quote myself "In the end everybody is
>> (or at least should be IMO) free to speak the language
>> they want (except maybe in court?).
>
>
> "except maybe in court" - a little worrying, methinks
Obviously, all court proceedings should be conducted in Maggel. It
would cut down on the number of lawsuits considerably.
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
4b. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 2:27 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 7:57 PM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> FINAL THOUGH: If there were no natural languages, how would you create one
> and why? Do you think it would look like our natural languages and why?
>
Let me bring my two lepta to the pool of not-so-logical languages. I'm not
going to advocate them, I'm just going to explain why I like them.
So, You ask what a language could be, were there no natlangs. I'd say, if
there were natlangs, there won't be organic life. For our genes
are essentially a language, with words, clauses sentences etc. We "learn"
our genes from our parents, we may even "learn" genes from other
"languages" - a parallel gene transport due to viral infections, which is
now used to explain apperance of some similar features in different though
relevant fila of animals. But now, if I'm going to model a language on DNA,
I'll have a language with such a great irregularity, that is impossible for
any spoken languages.
And yet it works. And fascinates.
We may say - well, life is indeed quite irregular and not that good
engineered. We can replace it with something more durable, functional and
efficient. True - and I won't say any word about human/machine ethics, not
at least because it's a list for linguistics. What I'd say, that You most
probably won't be able to _create_ this more efficient life from scratch.
You will _invent_ things.
You will make experiments. You'll come to some intermediate solutions for
partial problems, and to dead ends. Most probably for several times you
will start from older points, influenced by the ideas you've got while
constructing dead ends.
You may end up with some perfect creation, for which noone would be able to
say, how You have came to this design. Yet, there would always be people
that would be interested not only in _what_ you have create, but also in
the _process_ of invention itself, in its origins and development. That is,
there would be people like me.
I love to see things in development. The natural languages are
not-so-logical not because they were poorly designed like that at once. All
the irregularities you see are products of some everlasting process. And
exactly these irregularities let you guess, what was the state of things
before, and before that "before", and so on. It's like opening a window to
other, temporal dimension of a language, and I love this feeling. As when
you start seeing the invisible, and reviving something that is long ceased
to be. And we may do this, because though the languages seem not to be
logical, the _principles of their development_ are.
OK - one may say - so far for natlangs and their history, but why creating
irregular conlangs? Well, remember when Forrest Gump says that you can tell
many about people by looking at their shoes. And after a while we see how
much do his shoes tell about himself. BUT! Forrest Gump is a fictional
character, and his shoes never existed. Yet these are precisely them, among
other things, that give this character his deepness and attract sympathy.
Now, I think of my conlangs as attributes of concultures, and concultures
as protagonists of fiction. And I want my fiction to be a good fiction,
with deep characters, not just dei ex machinae. So I care what languages
could the "wear", and if they "wear" such a language, what made them do it.
And the irregularities - just like the expensive but worn to the final
point running boots on a well-dressed man like Forrest Gump - will serve as
nice hints for others and even for me myself. So that, having another one
glance on a thing that seemed not completely in order for the first time,
we'll be able to say: "A-ha, though it looks weird, its _developmemt_ is
completely _logical_."
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
4c. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:54 pm ((PST))
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Leonardo Castro
<[email protected]> wrote:
> A well-know problem with poetry in Esperanto is that you can only
> rhyme words of the same class. But there are natlangs that only have
This is not quite true: you can rhyme nouns with an elided final -o
with pronouns and other closed-class words. E.g.,
Kion fari? En malgaj'
mi ekfoliumis
vian poemaron, kaj...
poste viv' re-lumis.
(from "Letero al Aleksandro Logvin", by William Auld)
Another aspect of poetry in Esperanto is that it's considered bad form
to rhyme just on grammatical endings and suffixes; it's called
"adasismo".
There's been a lot of good rhymed, metrical poetry written in
Esperanto, especially from the 1920s through the 1950s. Poetry is
still being written in Esperanto, of course, but my impression is that
around the 1960s free verse became fashionable in Esperanto, as it had
in English a few decades earlier.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
4d. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:12 pm ((PST))
On 19 January 2013 23:04, Garth Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Obviously, all court proceedings should be conducted in Maggel. It
> would cut down on the number of lawsuits considerably.
>
That, and the fact (well, mostly a rumour, actually) that a common sentence
in Maggel lawsuits is for the loser to be eaten by the winner. Some very
bad people even say sometimes the sentence is to be eaten alive! That is of
course pure libel (which is one of the crimes that seem to allow for such a
sentence by the way): Maggel speakers don't like steak tartare :P .
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
4e. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:27 pm ((PST))
--- On Sat, 1/19/13, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]> wrote:
> What do you mean you deleted "a whole lot of [my] post"?
I should think it was obvious from the reply you're responding to! I did
actually read your whole, long, and terribly formatted post. I even
responded to about 80% of it, then came to my senses, deleted 90% of that,
and the result is what you got in your mailbox!
> Are you a moderator of the list?
My powers are many and varied, but they have no jurisdiction in this
subreality called Conlang.
> Because I only responded to what other people had written. In
> my opinion, if one want to ban a subject, it would be more
> reasonable to ban both side of the argument, and not just one. No
> offense.
Who said anything about banning anything? I still think your post, with
all its loglang advocacy, would be better suited to a different list.
This is largely why I deleted so much of your post to begin with.
If you are creating a loglang and wish to discuss mechanics and poetics
and things like that here, that would be fine.
> "If there were no natural languages, we wouldn't be able to create one,
> because we'd have no concept of language with which to create."
>
> Yes clearly; I was more asking the question from a though
> experiment point of view.
Maybe there's a misunderstanding? Without natural language, we would not
even be able to experiment with language! There would be no more concept
of "experimental language" in our heads than there is in the heads of mice.
> Mathieu
Padraic
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
5a. Re: Romanization: digraphs vs. diacritics
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:02 pm ((PST))
On 1/19/2013 8:44 AM, Melroch wrote:
> My own shifts in conventions for transcribing Sohlob. I started out over 15
> years ago with an ASCII-based system using<tj sj dj zj> for alveopalatals.
> This was actually sub-phonemic since I decided very early that [ʑ] was an
> allophone of /dʑ/, and<j> was used only in those digraphs. At the same
> time I used<ny hl hr> for single phonemes and<ng> ambiguously for /ŋ/ and
> /ŋg/, justified by the conventions in the 'native' script which was and is
> under-specifying to a high degree.
The ambiguity with "ng" is admittedly one of the drawbacks of
conventions like these including the spelling I use on the map (in names
like "Kerngat" and "Nagmingo"). A name like "Nagmingo" could be
[naɡminɡo], [naɡmiŋɡo], or [naɡmiŋo] (not counting possible variations
in the vowels that aren't distinguished in the romanization).
I've had a number of revisions of Romanized spelling conventions for my
languages; here's an example of Jarda text in the current spelling with
lots of diacritics and one character per phoneme.
Fü margarêl
Têz jêźriag rêlta margai;
ṛŭnma źana gṛamŏd muğa;
virṛa mav pôṛ ļôn xaṛ łômôṛ;
sôṛa bêzlu ṛemag tiṛi?
Compare the original spelling, with digraphs and even one trigraph "thl"
(for /ɬ/).
http://www.valdyas.org/irina/valdyas/ilaini/hanleni_halsen/spreeuw/jarrda.html
> There were also the slightly odd<e> for
> /ɨ/<ae> for /æ/ which was unambiguous because of vowel harmony. I later
> switched to a Latin-1 based convention with<æ c ç j j> instead of<ae tj
> sj dj zj> and this in spite of the fact that /tɕ dʑ/ were digraphs in the
> native script! When Unicode entered the scene I did introduce<ŋ> instead
> of<ñ> in the transcription of the (then) protolanguage Kijeb, and I did
> consider introducing<ñ ŋ ł> instead of<ny ng hl> in Classical Sohlob but
> decided against it because it wasn't clear what I would replace<hr hm hn
> hny hng> with in the sister language Cidilib.
I take it that <hl hr hm> (etc.) are voiceless counterparts of <l r m>?
I've been using "ŕ" for a voiceless alveolar trill in Tirelat, but there
are dialects of Tirelat that have other voiceless sounds, and it might
be convenient to use h- for those. E.g., there's a dialect with /ɥ̥/
(voiceless labial-palatal approximant) which corresponds with /fj/ in
the standard dialect. The main reason I picked "ŕ" for /r̥/ is that there
weren't many precomposed characters with diacritics on an "r". I think
at the time there was just ŕ, ŗ, and ř in most fonts. (These days,
Windows fonts don't need precomposed characters for the Latin alphabet
at least. I can type something like r̈ or r̊ without much concern for font
issues.)
> More recently when writing
> *in Swedish* about the Sohldar universe for a non-conlanger audience I've
> considered following AngloRomance conventions and use<ch sh j zh kh gh>
> rather than<c ç j j x q> -- being mostly concerned about the Cidilib
> placename Jdrig/Zhdrig The problem is that most Swedes would even pronounce
> <j> as [j] when speaking English! OTOH the 'SuedoCyrillic'<tj sj dj zj ch
> gh> might look silly to the audience (AngloRomance rather than Swedish
> expectations in a Swedish audience!) and moreover<sj ch> might be
> misleading. I got so despondent that I considered going for a straight
> transliteration of the native spellings using<ty sy zy zy x q> in Cidilib
> and<tx sx dz zz x q> in CS! Should I even go so far as to use<ă> or<ȧ>
> for /ʁ/ and CS<bb dd gg> for /p t k/ and Cidilib<hb hd dy hg> for /p t tɕ
> k/? Then why not<hh> for /s/ as is actually the case in the native script?
> I think that would introduce bogus alienness were none actually exists and
> make the two conlangs seem more different than they are or would be to
> illiterate native speakers.
I think the "j" can be a problem even for English speakers if it's in a
foreign word or in an unusual position like the end of a word. But I
can't think of a good 1-character equivalent for a sound like English
/dʒ/ even with diacritics. There's always ǯ, but I don't know how common
that character is in fonts. At least "dž" is relatively clear.
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
6a. Re: French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical languag
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:04 pm ((PST))
As to why, it is a tradition. Sometimes even superficially established. I
don't speak French myself, but I know that in the French word _doigt_ there
was nothing like [g] since at least 7th century AD. But /g/ was in the
Latin word _digitum_ that finally gave rise to _doigt_. So the grammarians
included /g/ to keep track of the language's history, although at no point
of the history of French language people seemed to pronounce _doigt_ like
[doigt] (though [dojt] seem to have taken place).
As for other languages, it is more then common. English and AFAIK Danish
may be named as the ones that preserve most oddities, and Russian was like
that before the orthography reforms of early XX century. Virtually every
language, in which the pronunciation of /c/ depends of the next sound are
applying the old norms of Latin, where /c/ was pronounced as /k/ in all
positions.
In fact, as the languages develop, it is inevitable that orthographic norms
start reflecting not an actual pronunciation, but some older version of
language. In a way, all languages do this, the question is, how much.
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
> Are these phenomenon present in a lot of languages? If so, in what way?
>
> Mathieu
>
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] De la
> part de R A Brown
> Envoy� : samedi 19 janvier 2013 10:22
> � : [email protected]
> Objet : French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical language)
>
> On 18/01/2013 19:28, BPJ wrote:
> > On 2013-01-18 19:57, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> >> I don't know if the following is true, but my French
> >> teacher told me that monks in the past were paid by
> >> letters and therefore were adding letters to some
> >> words.
>
> A bit of a myth, methinks. Monks weren't paid.
>
> >> That would explain why a lot of words have for example
> >> the letters "eau" pronounces as "o" (bateau, eau, beau,
> >> chateau, etc.) or simply "au" pronounces as "o" (faux,
> >> taux, etc.) or silent letter at the end (faux, taux,
> >> etc.) or double letters that are indistinguishable from
> >> one letter (balle, sale, association, etc.)
>
> No, it does not explain any one of those things.
>
> > It *is* true that they added letters here and there,
>
> Yes, especially by early printers to justify lines (monks
> could justify them more easily by slightly modifying width
> of letters and spaces).
>
> > but for the most part 'illogical' spellings in French
> > reflect how the words were actually pronounced in the
> > thirteent century.
>
> Exactly! Yes, for the most part modern French spelling
> reflects how the language was pronounced in the 13th
> century. The reason for _eau_ and _au_ now pronounced as
> /o/, is that the spellings represent the pronunciation of
> the 13th century, the modern pronunciation is the result of
> sound changes that have taken place since.
>
> The reason silent letters occur at the end of words is that
> they were not silent in the 13th century, but have become so
> since. The only oddity here is the final -x of some plurals
> where _x_ was mistaken for a common handwritten abbreviation
> of -us.
>
> > Some were meant to approximate the spelling to their
> > Latin counterpart, sometimes mistakenly.
>
> That accounts for geminate consonants.
>
> Others were stuck in by learned or semi-learned people after
> the renaissance; the same thing happened in English. Some,
> as BPJ says, were mistaken, e.g. _s�avoir_ (<-- sapere) with
> the mistaken idea it had something to with Latin _scire_,
> and _dipner_ (<-- VL. *disjun�re) with mistaken idea that
> somehow it was related to Greek _deipnein_! Fortunately,
> the French were, for the most part, more sensible than their
> English counterparts, and dropped nearly all these
> absurdities, e.g. they now write: savoir, d�ner. The only
> common survival that comes to mind is the _p_ in _sept_.
>
> --
> Ray
> ==================================
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com
> ==================================
> "language � began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
> for individual beings and events."
> [Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
>
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
6b. Re: French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical languag
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:12 pm ((PST))
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 12:04 AM, Nikolay Ivankov <[email protected]>wrote:
> As to why, it is a tradition. Sometimes even superficially established. I
> don't speak French myself, but I know that in the French word _doigt_ there
> was nothing like [g] since at least 7th century AD. But /g/ was in the
> Latin word _digitum_ that finally gave rise to _doigt_. So the grammarians
> included /g/ to keep track of the language's history, although at no point
> of the history of French language people seemed to pronounce _doigt_ like
> [doigt] (though [dojt] seem to have taken place).
>
> As for other languages, it is more then common. English and AFAIK Danish
> may be named as the ones that preserve most oddities, and Russian was like
> that before the orthography reforms of early XX century. Virtually every
> language, in which the pronunciation of /c/ depends of the next sound are
> applying the old norms of Latin, where /c/ was pronounced as /k/ in all
> positions.
>
> In fact, as the languages develop, it is inevitable that orthographic
> norms start reflecting not an actual pronunciation, but some older version
> of language. In a way, all languages do this, the question is, how much.
>
Small correction: every language that is written with some sort of abajad
or alphabet. But even only semi-abjad Japanese uses the hiragana-symbol
"ha" to write [wa] of the nominative case, which, AFAIR, reflects its old
pronunciation as [pa].
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 5:48 PM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Are these phenomenon present in a lot of languages? If so, in what way?
>>
>> Mathieu
>>
>> -----Message d'origine-----
>> De : Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] De la
>> part de R A Brown
>> Envoy� : samedi 19 janvier 2013 10:22
>> � : [email protected]
>> Objet : French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical language)
>>
>> On 18/01/2013 19:28, BPJ wrote:
>> > On 2013-01-18 19:57, Mathieu Roy wrote:
>> >> I don't know if the following is true, but my French
>> >> teacher told me that monks in the past were paid by
>> >> letters and therefore were adding letters to some
>> >> words.
>>
>> A bit of a myth, methinks. Monks weren't paid.
>>
>> >> That would explain why a lot of words have for example
>> >> the letters "eau" pronounces as "o" (bateau, eau, beau,
>> >> chateau, etc.) or simply "au" pronounces as "o" (faux,
>> >> taux, etc.) or silent letter at the end (faux, taux,
>> >> etc.) or double letters that are indistinguishable from
>> >> one letter (balle, sale, association, etc.)
>>
>> No, it does not explain any one of those things.
>>
>> > It *is* true that they added letters here and there,
>>
>> Yes, especially by early printers to justify lines (monks
>> could justify them more easily by slightly modifying width
>> of letters and spaces).
>>
>> > but for the most part 'illogical' spellings in French
>> > reflect how the words were actually pronounced in the
>> > thirteent century.
>>
>> Exactly! Yes, for the most part modern French spelling
>> reflects how the language was pronounced in the 13th
>> century. The reason for _eau_ and _au_ now pronounced as
>> /o/, is that the spellings represent the pronunciation of
>> the 13th century, the modern pronunciation is the result of
>> sound changes that have taken place since.
>>
>> The reason silent letters occur at the end of words is that
>> they were not silent in the 13th century, but have become so
>> since. The only oddity here is the final -x of some plurals
>> where _x_ was mistaken for a common handwritten abbreviation
>> of -us.
>>
>> > Some were meant to approximate the spelling to their
>> > Latin counterpart, sometimes mistakenly.
>>
>> That accounts for geminate consonants.
>>
>> Others were stuck in by learned or semi-learned people after
>> the renaissance; the same thing happened in English. Some,
>> as BPJ says, were mistaken, e.g. _s�avoir_ (<-- sapere) with
>> the mistaken idea it had something to with Latin _scire_,
>> and _dipner_ (<-- VL. *disjun�re) with mistaken idea that
>> somehow it was related to Greek _deipnein_! Fortunately,
>> the French were, for the most part, more sensible than their
>> English counterparts, and dropped nearly all these
>> absurdities, e.g. they now write: savoir, d�ner. The only
>> common survival that comes to mind is the _p_ in _sept_.
>>
>> --
>> Ray
>> ==================================
>> http://www.carolandray.plus.com
>> ==================================
>> "language � began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
>> for individual beings and events."
>> [Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
>>
>
>
Messages in this topic (23)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
7a. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Ralph DeCarli" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 3:40 pm ((PST))
On Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:53:18 -0800
Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> ---snip---
>
> Keep in mind that my motive has nothing to do with the study of
> linguistics and everything to do with the engineering of a
> computerized conlang translation program. The reason for the
> method is code efficiency in C++, not "understanding" parts of
> speech. It's a wrench, not a microscope.
>
> For programming purposes the method is extremely useful, but for
> the purpose of describing the algorithm I can't use existing terms
> like "parts of speech" without misleading the reader. Thus the
> need for a new term.
>
> So the question is not "does the method work?" For programming
> purposes, it does. The questions is, what shall I call it?
>
> ---snip---
>
Who would your audience be? Confusing them least would depend on
their background.
I did something (possibly) similar and ended up with
'Objects' (mostly nouns) 'Descriptors' (mostly adjectives and
adverbs) and 'Relationships' (everything else, including verbs). One
might guess that I have a background in data modeling.
I don't know if this will help, but you can see the upshot here.
http://instrumentation.conlang.org/instspeak.html#syntax
Ralph
--
Have you heard of the new post-neo-modern art style?
They haven't decided what it looks like yet.
Messages in this topic (13)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/
<*> Your email settings:
Digest Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/conlang/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
