There are 12 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: selpa'i
1b. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: John Q
1c. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: John Q
1d. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: selpa'i
2a. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
From: James Kane
2b. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
From: J. M. DeSantis
2c. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
From: Rich Harrison
3a. Re: Romanization: digraphs vs. diacritics
From: Herman Miller
4a. Re: Quoting dialog
From: Gary Shannon
4b. Re: Quoting dialog
From: Roger Mills
5a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: John Q
6a. Re: Hypothetical situation (RE: logical language VS not-so-logical l
From: MorphemeAddict
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:34 pm ((PST))
la'o me. John Q .me cusku di'e
> Any Ithkuil formative (i.e., noun or verb) used in a sentence, must
> be declined/conjugated for its full complement of morphological
> categories (eight categories for nouns, 22 categories for verbs).
> However, the majority of nominal/verbal morphological categories have
> zero-marked morphemes for their "default" values.
>
> So just as the verb "sing" in the English sentence "We sing" conveys
> the categories of present tense, indicative mood, and active voice,
> each of which are in its "default" and zero-marked value, so the
> majority of Ithkuil morphological categories have a zero-marked
> "default" value, which is why you see many examples in the Ithkuil
> reference grammar as being "short" and being marked for far less than
> their full complement of morphological categories.
Ah! I see. That's different from saying that those categories are simply
left unspecified. Hmm. Doesn't this mean that Ithkuil doesn't allow
context to take care of tenses for example? If not specifying tense
means that it has the default tense (say, present tense), we can't use
the same form to be vague about tense. I've gotten so used to
context-dependent tenses (from studying Lojban and its sisters, and from
Thai or Mandarin) that I've almost forgotten that my native language
also requires full tense specification for every verb!
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (22)
________________________________________________________________________
1b. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:45 pm ((PST))
Selpa'i wrote:
>Doesn't this mean that Ithkuil doesn't allow
>context to take care of tenses for example? If not specifying tense
>means that it has the default tense (say, present tense), we can't use
>the same form to be vague about tense.
______________________
Correct (although your choice of tense as an example could be better in regard
to Ithkuil, as the language has no such category, the nearest equivalent being
Perspective and Aspect). Ithkuil categories must be overtly specified (albeit
often by their default zero-marked forms/values) as opposed to being inferred
from context.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (22)
________________________________________________________________________
1c. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:50 pm ((PST))
Selpa'i wrote:
>Ah! I see. That's different from saying that those categories are simply
>left unspecified. Hmm. Doesn't this mean that Ithkuil doesn't allow
>context to take care of tenses for example? If not specifying tense
>means that it has the default tense (say, present tense), we can't use
>the same form to be vague about tense.
__________________________________
A good example can be found in reading through the Anna Kerenina example from
the "Texts" page of the Ithkuil website, in which I walk the reader through the
entire sentence-formation process at both a lexico-semantic level and then the
morphological level, including the mandatory assigning of values for all the
morphological categories to the sentence's nouns and verbs. Many of the
categories are determined to have their default zero-marked values.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (22)
________________________________________________________________________
1d. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 4:17 pm ((PST))
la'o me. John Q .me cusku di'e
> Selpa'i wrote:
>> Doesn't this mean that Ithkuil doesn't allow context to take care
>> of tenses for example? If not specifying tense means that it has
>> the default tense (say, present tense), we can't use the same form
>> to be vague about tense.
>
> ______________________
>
> Correct (although your choice of tense as an example could be better
> in regard to Ithkuil, as the language has no such category, the
> nearest equivalent being Perspective and Aspect).
Right.
> Ithkuil categories
> must be overtly specified (albeit often by their default zero-marked
> forms/values) as opposed to being inferred from context.
It is humbling to face eight categories for nouns and *22* categories
for verbs, all of which are mandatory. I have to admit: It's a serious
challenge. A very serious challenge. But I'm still not convinced it's
impossible :P (A case of denial maybe haha)
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (22)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
Posted by: "James Kane" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:50 pm ((PST))
I'm not entirely in love with how all the nouns end with consonants.
As for making names, there are long names all around the world, even
European names are often three or four syllables such as Gabriella or
Sebastian. If it really concerns you, there could be smaller or
truncated roots used only in names or the names might be from older
forms of the language or other languages and might have shortened over
time.
On 1/21/13, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just so you know, I've saved it for future reference when I have more
> time to look at it. :-) --gary
>
> On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 10:41 AM, J. M. DeSantis <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>> I know it was probably lost in the feed with all of these other
>> conversations going, but would anyone mind looking over the post I made
>> early on Saturday morning and offering some feedback?
>>
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> J. M. DeSantis
>> Writer - Illustrator
>
--
(This is my signature.)
Messages in this topic (11)
________________________________________________________________________
2b. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
Posted by: "J. M. DeSantis" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:22 pm ((PST))
On 1/20/2013 6:50 PM, James Kane wrote:
> I'm not entirely in love with how all the nouns end with consonants.
It's funny you say that. I feel the same way in regards to Italian's
habit of nearly everything ending with a vowel. I find it's almost too
"neat" and organised, as it were. But I understand you. Again, it's not
something I typically am doing with my conlangs. Just something I was
playing with. Normally I'd have endings besides a set of six letters
divided between two noun classes (or prefixed noun classifiers, such as
in Swahili, which I'm using in another of my conlangs).
Sincerely,
J. M. DeSantis
Writer - Illustrator
Official Website: jmdesantis.com <http://www.jmdesantis.com>
Messages in this topic (11)
________________________________________________________________________
2c. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
Posted by: "Rich Harrison" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:33 pm ((PST))
> Some of the language, to me, sounds very good to my ear, though, as
> usual with my conlangs, I find concentrating on the language first
> results in awkward names. Whereas, creating names first, makes the
> language difficult to build properly.
Do names have to mean something in your languages? Can't names just be
arbitrary, semi-random, pleasant sounding strings of phonemes?
Messages in this topic (11)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
3a. Re: Romanization: digraphs vs. diacritics
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 3:52 pm ((PST))
On 1/20/2013 3:39 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> On Sunday 20 January 2013 00:02:28 Herman Miller wrote:
>
>> 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).
>
> In my romanization of Old Albic, _ng_ is always /ŋ/; the sequence
> /ŋg/ is transcribed _ngg_, /ŋk/ is _ngc_, and /ng/ does not occur
> (a nasal preceding a stop always assimilates to the latter's POA).
>
> Of course, in the native script, there is a letter for /ŋ/ (also
> letters for /ɸ/, /θ/ and /x/, so no digraphs are needed at all).
I just noticed a fourth possibility with the name Kerngat, since the "n"
could be part of an "rn" digraph, which would make it [keɳɡat].
Many of the languages on Sarangia are written in alphabets that could be
described as featural, although sound changes over time might complicate
things. So the languages that have /ŋ/ as a phoneme probably all have a
way to write the sound with a single character (as Tirelat does).
I've used "ñ" to write the /ŋ/ sound in Tirelat, but currently I just
use "ŋ". (If I'm going to use an inconvenient character in the first
place, I might as well use one that won't be misread.)
Messages in this topic (11)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
4a. Re: Quoting dialog
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 4:19 pm ((PST))
I've been wondering about long stretches of non-dialog myself. My
first thought was to indent dialog and non-dialog differently, or to
have different margins, so that narrative text is full width and
dialog text is in a narrower block, like the HTML "blockquote" tag.
Here's a sample I threw together. I think it looks useable:
http://fiziwig.com/conlang/quotes.html
--gary
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> --- On Sun, 1/20/13, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
--snip--
>
> It is indeed an interesting reversal. How much sense would such a system
> be if most of a text is unquoted material -- in other words, lots of
> sections of non-quote prose will require brackets.
>
> Not saying I don't like it, just more curious about the practicality.
>
> Padraic
>
>> --gary
>
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
4b. Re: Quoting dialog
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 4:49 pm ((PST))
Even so, it's a little hard to tell when she stops speaking.......
--- On Sun, 1/20/13, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Gary Shannon <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Quoting dialog
To: [email protected]
Date: Sunday, January 20, 2013, 7:19 PM
I've been wondering about long stretches of non-dialog myself. My
first thought was to indent dialog and non-dialog differently, or to
have different margins, so that narrative text is full width and
dialog text is in a narrower block, like the HTML "blockquote" tag.
Here's a sample I threw together. I think it looks useable:
http://fiziwig.com/conlang/quotes.html
--gary
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> --- On Sun, 1/20/13, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
>
--snip--
>
> It is indeed an interesting reversal. How much sense would such a system
> be if most of a text is unquoted material -- in other words, lots of
> sections of non-quote prose will require brackets.
>
> Not saying I don't like it, just more curious about the practicality.
>
> Padraic
>
>> --gary
>
Messages in this topic (5)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
5a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:08 pm ((PST))
The 1996 John Gumperz and Stephen Levinson book "Rethinking Linguistic
Relativity" is a good survey of the evidence supporting the weak version of the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (12)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
6a. Re: Hypothetical situation (RE: logical language VS not-so-logical l
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Sun Jan 20, 2013 5:14 pm ((PST))
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 5:43 PM, Herman Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/20/2013 10:23 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
>
> The thing is: what does "easy to learn" mean? My experience with learning
>> languages (I'm fluent in three, conversational in another three) and with
>> talking to other people learning languages, is that "easy to learn" for
>> languages boils down to one thing, and one thing only: *familiarity*. The
>> closest the language is to a language you already know (it needed be your
>> native language, by the way), the easier it is to learn, especially in
>> terms of getting the sounds right, but the same is true for grammar and
>> lexicon. And *that* *is* *all*. In my experience, it's easier to learn a
>> language riddled with irregularities, if its structure is close to what
>> you
>> already know (especially if the irregularities are also similar), than it
>> is to learn a 100% regular language with an alien grammar.
>>
>
> I agree that familiarity is a major factor in languages being easy to
> learn, but I do think there are other factors. I think if you pick a
> selection of non-IE languages, say Burmese, Hawaiian, Navajo, Quechua,
> Swahili, Telugu, and Yidiny, and try learning them, I think you'd find a
> lot of similarity in how learners rank the difficulty of learning them.
> Specifically I'd predict that Navajo would be near the "hard to learn" end
> of the scale for most people, on account of the complex verb morphology.
> (The tones, nasalized vowels, and unusual consonants would also make things
> difficult, but that's more a matter of familiarity.) Hawaiian would
> probably be closer to the easier end of the scale.
>
> Ultimately it's possible that all languages are about equally hard to
> learn at the highest level, but not all learning curves are equally steep.
> Some languages start out hard and probably don't get much harder over time,
> while others are easier to learn at a basic level but get harder as you
> learn more of the idiomatic details.
>
When I was in high school (early 70s), this was how French and Spanish were
characterized, with French having a steep learning curve that leveled off
relatively quickly and Spanish having a gentle learning curve that didn't
level off until much later. The cause of this difference was claimed to be
the high number of idioms in Spanish.
stevo
Messages in this topic (8)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
