There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Passive verb: inflection or modifier particle?
From: Padraic Brown
2a. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
From: Padraic Brown
3a. Re: French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical languag
From: Eugene Oh
4.1. Re: The quadrimorphic fabonigraph (was: human language origins)
From: Padraic Brown
5. phonetic values of the 26-letter English alphabet
From: MorphemeAddict
6a. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: selpa'i
7a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: George Corley
Messages
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1a. Re: Passive verb: inflection or modifier particle?
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:30 pm ((PST))
--- On Sat, 1/19/13, Leonardo Castro <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [CONLANG] Passive verb: inflection or modifier particle?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Saturday, January 19, 2013, 12:34 PM
> Back to an old post:
>
> 2012/12/17 Padraic Brown <[email protected]>:
> > --- On Mon, 12/17/12, Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> BTW, "little" as pronounced by most Americans
> sound
> >> as [li4@l] to my ears.
> >
> >> In X-SAMPA, [4] is the alveolar flap, just like how
> the
> >> single "r" is pronounced in Spanish.
> >
> > I see. Yeah, I can see (or hear) the similarity there,
> though I think our
> > [d] is much mushier.
>
> Is there really any difference?
To my ear, quite a lot, actually.
> This Wikipedia article informs that these sounds (Spanish
> "r" and American "tt" of "little") are exactly the same (alveolar flap):
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervocalic_alveolar_flapping
Well we live and learn. Perhaps the WP writer has a different realisation
of "tt" -- or maybe Spanish speakers I've known have had different
realisations of "r"?
Padraic
Messages in this topic (13)
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2a. Re: logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE: Loglan[g] V
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:38 pm ((PST))
--- On Sat, 1/19/13, Garth Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Garth Wallace <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [CONLANG] logical language VS not-so-logical language (was RE:
> Loglan[g] VS Natlang)
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Saturday, January 19, 2013, 5:04 PM
> 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.
Hm. I think Walpole's Maxim need be invoked here. Just a reminder, for
those who slept through their fourth year legal seminar on legal
complexities, it states that there is a directly proportionate
relationship between the increasing complexity of legal language and the
number of lawsuits brought. I would suspect that if Maggel were made the
language of the US court system, we'd see an immediate jump in the number
of lawsuits brought to trial by Americans from the current 3 per person
per year to 142. Clearly, M Grandsire did his job well! (I should note
that it is partially out of fear of the pro-Maggel faction in Washington
that certain members of Congress have proposed various bills making
English, a far easier and simpler language than Maggel!, the official
language of the court system.)
Padraic
Messages in this topic (25)
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3a. Re: French spelling (was: logical language VS not-so-logical languag
Posted by: "Eugene Oh" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:40 pm ((PST))
Sent from my iPhone
On 19 Jan 2013, at 23:12, Nikolay Ivankov <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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].
>
Not necessarily. Same or similar sounding words in Classical Chinese have
diverged in pronunciation despite bein written with the same radical(s). That
could be interpreted as a parallel phenomenon.
>
>> 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
>>> Envoyé : samedi 19 janvier 2013 10:22
>>> À : [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. _sçavoir_ (<-- sapere) with
>>> the mistaken idea it had something to with Latin _scire_,
>>> and _dipner_ (<-- VL. *disjunáre) 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, dîner. 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 (25)
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4.1. Re: The quadrimorphic fabonigraph (was: human language origins)
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:43 pm ((PST))
--- On Wed, 1/16/13, Garth Wallace <[email protected]> wrote:
> > A similar method ("acoustic recall") is mentioned in one of the
> > dialogs in Douglas R. Hofstadter's _Gödel, Escher, Bach_, but
> > in this world at least, it would be utterly monkeywrenched by
> > Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, if I understand those matters
> > correctly.
>
> I don't think you even need to resort to quantum mechanics. The second
> law of thermodynamics ought to take care of it nicely. As Tom Stoppard
> put it, you cannot stir things apart.
Ah, you should try Dr. Gallinus's patented dishomogeniser! Throw some ice
cream in the hopper and get cream, salt and ice out of the little chutes
at the bottom! Throw in a diamond and get a bit of charcoal, a puff of
hot air and a pressure wave from the chutes. Don't even ask about throwing
the cat in the hopper...
Simple to operate too: just set the knob for "greater" or "lesser"
dishomogeneity and you'll end up with larger or more refined beginning
products.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (91)
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5. phonetic values of the 26-letter English alphabet
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 4:44 pm ((PST))
I've been using a normalized system of values for the 26-letter English
alphabet for my conlanging work. This allows me to use all and only these
26 letters.
a e i o u
b p v f m
d t h w n
g k y x q
z s j c
l r
The unusual mappings are
c = Ê
h = θ
j = Ê
q = Å
w = ð
y = ɣ
An apostrophe can be added to this with a value of either h or glottal
stop.
stevo
Messages in this topic (1)
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6a. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 5:46 pm ((PST))
la'o me. John Q .me cusku di'e
> 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.
I suppose that's true, but it's a start. A beginner would first have to
reach this stage, and from there could go deeper and deeper into the
finer nuances and explore the full potential of the language. And even
if this "low-level" use of Ithkuil is unimpressive, there hasn't been
anybody to reach it, to my knowledge.
> 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.
It saddens me a bit to read this. Do you have solid evidence for your
belief or is it more of an intuitive guess? Surely, you understand the
complexity of Ithkuil the best, but I don't want to easily give up my
hopes that "THAT level of fluency" is attainable. Why do you think it's
impossible?
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (4)
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7a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 19, 2013 6:20 pm ((PST))
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>
wrote:
>
> I'm pretty sure all of you are familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. I
> have just watched this video
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GRMNrEo7CRw and
> the
> speaker thinks that having a word for something makes its concept more
> likely to be significant for someone speaking the language (while she says
> that it could also be the opposite: this society have a certain word
> because
> its concept is more important to them). She gives the example of the
> mandarin's word "lao" which would mean "respect for the elderly" (and in
> French there's not even have a word for "elderly": one have to say
> "personnes âgées" instead), and she thinks that this means that respect for
> elderly is more important in China. IMO, I think there is some true to the
> Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but I would like to have your opinions because I am
> not sure of what to think.
I have not heard of this term. There is a word è lao3 that simply means
"old". Are you perhaps talking about å xiao4 "filial piety"?
On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> 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.
>
> 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 do think it's more of a culture-shapes-language thing as you do, but
there seems to be some evidence that language can shape thought. Consider
the way basic color terms affect the perception of color, or the fact that
people who speak languages that lack relative directions have an almost
preternatural ability to remember which way is north even when spending
time indoors. Certainly your language at the very least will make some
distinctions more salient by forcing you to make them more often.
Messages in this topic (6)
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