There are 7 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
From: selpa'i
2.1. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: selpa'i
2.2. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
From: Jim Henry
3a. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
From: Alex Fink
4a. Re: OT: Decimal vs. duodeciml (was: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: Roman Rausch
5a. Re: An ambiguous sentence
From: John Q
6a. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Ralph DeCarli
Messages
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1.1. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:34 pm ((PST))
la'o me. David Peterson .me cusku di'e
> This has been bothering me for a little bit, so I wanted to respond.
>
> On Jan 20, 2013, at 10:44 AM, selpa'i <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Well maybe it would make an interesting article if a person had not
>> only tried, but also succeeded. Just "Person X is trying to learn
>> Ithkuil" doesn't sound very interesting until there is some
>> evidence that Person X is actually making noteworthy progress. (Not
>> to mention how anticlimactic it would be to announce in the next
>> article that Person X failed!)
>
> I could not disagree more. Provided you could detail what it is
> you're attempting, what specific challenges you're having, what you
> attempt to do to overcome them, etc., it would prove a *very*
> interesting article, even if you could claim no success in the
> endeavor. Indeed, if you *did* fail in your estimation, the record
> would validate the entire endeavor!
Yes, certainly. My worry in such a situation however would be that an
article that explains how someone failed at learning Ithkuil could
easily make people believe that it's *proof* for Ithkuil being
unlearnable. I don't want that.
I agree with the rest though you said above though.
> This, I think, is one of the problems with conlangers learning from
> each other. Those of us who've been on the Conlang-L for a while (and
> the same would be true of any other single forum that one conlanger
> could keep track of) have seen others struggling with different goals
> or attempts at a conlang, trying different tacks, eventually
> succeeding, etc., and I think anyone who is able to follow that
> experience gains invaluable insight into the endeavor. That insight,
> though, generally doesn't go beyond those who were paying attention.
> It is fantastic that the Conlang Archives are public, but that's only
> so helpful if you don't know what you're looking foreven if you just
> want to browse.
> [...]
> As a result, when new conlangers emerge in one of the many, many
> venues now on the internet, they end up retreading many of the paths
> that have been tread before. While that experience isn't worthless,
> it's not necessary. The catalogues of those early endeavors, though,
> are all but inaccessible, even if they're available.
Okay, now this seems to be going in different direction entirely. I'm
not sure how much of it was directed at me specifically, but I'm not at
all new to conlanging. Also, for me, learning Ithkuil would not be a
conlanging activity (at least not chiefly), but simply a language
learning activity, no different from learning Aymara for instance. The
only difference between learning a natural language and Ithkuil - and
the reason that makes it interesting - is that Ithkuil is believed to be
unlearnable. The possibility of proving this belief wrong is what
motivates me, just as it did with Fith (though I ended up creating my
own LIFO stack conlang instead of learning the actual Fith).
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (32)
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2.1. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:41 pm ((PST))
la'o me. John Q .me cusku di'e
> The terms Cr, Ca, Vr, etcetera, are merely terms in a formula like in
> algebra. The letters "r", "a", etc. should actually expressed as
> subscripts to make it more clear they're just forumulaic terms (but I
> got lazy doing my HTML to turn them into subscripts). So "Cr" does
> not mean "any consonant followed by the consonant r" but rather "the
> root consonsantal form" which can be, for example, -p- or -ks- or
> -fkl- or -mstw-, etc. "Vr" means the vowel associated with the root"
> and can be forms like -a- or -ei- or -io-, etc. The term "Ca" is
> completely arbitrary and simply means the consonantal form that goes
> in Slot X of an Ithkuil formative and carries five morphemes
> (configuration, affiliation, perspective, extension, and essence),
> with forms as simple as -p- or -f- all the way to forms such as
> -rthw-.
Oh! Okay, thank you very much. This clears up a lot of confusion. I had
no idea they were supposed to be subscripts! I can't wait to get the book.
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (32)
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2.2. Re: So, about Ithkuil...
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 3:02 pm ((PST))
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Melroch <[email protected]> wrote:
> Similarly the fact that modern spoken Esperanto has no clear
> division between compounding and derivation or indeed between derivation
> and subordination may be an example of such grammar reduction with an
> efficiency gain.
Could you expand on that?
The distinction between roots and affixes seems to have been abandoned
around the 1920s -- that's the earliest I know of when affixes start
getting used as stand-alone words, or we see compounds built purely of
"affixes" with no "roots". I can sort of see you would consider that
a "grammar reduction" along the same lines as the limited subset of
Sanskrit you describe; it simplifies the morphology if we don't need
to distinguish between unlike types of morpheme (although it's not
quite that simple; some of the original "affixes" are still arguably
affixes, with special rules for use that aren't just an application of
the general compounding rules). But I'm not sure what you mean by "no
clear division between .... derivation and subordination".
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Messages in this topic (32)
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3a. Re: A Practice Conlang - For Your Enjoyment & Critiques
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 3:19 pm ((PST))
On Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:10:11 -0500, J. M. DeSantis <[email protected]> wrote:
>On 1/20/2013 8:33 PM, Rich Harrison wrote:
>>> 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?
>
>Well, everyone may correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the
>impression that all names, the world over do have some meaning behind
>them, even if from older forms, parent languages or borrowings from
>other languages. If there are exceptions to this rule, I'd certainly be
>willing to hear them.
That's certainly the norm. But, for instance, Black names in the US, for
instance, often _are_ complete inventions. To me, this is a reasonably logical
short step from the status quo of the surrounding culture, with so many of the
sources being Biblical and of etymology completely unrecoverable to the
unHebrewed layman, others Classical and nearly as unrecoverable, and so our
names seem to have no non-onomastic meaning.
But I don't think this could arise without some kind of culture-mixing
disruption like this, or else at least a long long semantics-effacing history
(if all your peers' children are named "Wind" or "Fortitude" or "God has smiled
on us", are you really going to name yours "Shaniqua"?) And I think
meaningless names are over-represented in artlangs, accordingly.
Alex
Messages in this topic (15)
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4a. Re: OT: Decimal vs. duodeciml (was: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:20 pm ((PST))
>That makes sense, of course, but I can't help but ask: Suppose 5 people buy
>a dozen eggs. :-)
I'd say the probability that people buy eggs together decreases with the amount
of people, so it's more important have the first integers as divisors. Hence 2,
3, 4 is better than 2, 5. Base-60 would be even better with 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but
requires too many characters and names for the numbers if it is to be used
strictly. So base-12 is kind of the optimum.
Messages in this topic (6)
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5a. Re: An ambiguous sentence
Posted by: "John Q" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:30 pm ((PST))
I think there are even more interpretations of the sentence if you associate
"after midnight" as being the time that the police get their orders rather than
the time the drinking is supposed to stop.
--John Q.
Messages in this topic (10)
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6a. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Ralph DeCarli" [email protected]
Date: Mon Jan 21, 2013 4:44 pm ((PST))
On Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:32:39 -0800
Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
I had to think about this for a bit. I would be worried that "Bob
eats asparagus [with a fork]" might imply that bob was eating the
fork. In this sentence the meaning is clear, but those university
cops drinking after midnight a few days back might be a bit confused.
Also, if I automate sentence construction, I want the user to
completely describe the subject before moving to the verb and
completely describe the verb before moving to the object.
Your method, of course, would depend on your goal.
Ralph
> On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 3:37 PM, Ralph DeCarli
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > --snip--
> > > 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.
>
> Realistically, my main audience would probably be my own future
> self, when I go back in ten years to try to understand the code.
>
> > 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.
>
> That looks interesting.
>
> I was wondering too how useful it might be to go to the opposite
> extreme of what I had proposed and just tag words as "part of a
> noun phrase" (which would include nouns, pronouns, adjectives,
> articles, quantifiers, demonstratives,...), or "part of a verb
> phrase" (including verbs, adverbs, auxiliaries,,,). Beyond that,
> the third part of speech might be "connectors" like pronouns,
> conjunctions, commas, and some other stuff (?)
>
> So there would only be three parts of speech: Nouny, Verby, and
> Connectors. A tagged sentence might look like:
>
> All/N sorts/N of/C strange/N articles/N were/V arranged/V
> on/C the/N shelves/N
>
>
> In fact, it seems like no meaning is lost when the contiguous
> like-tagged groups are permuted (internally):
>
> Sorts/N all/N of/C articles/N strange/N arranged/V were/V
> on/C shelves/N the/N
>
> I notice in your web page you included the prepositional phrase
> "with a fork" as part of the verb. I think I might apply it as a
> global modifier to the whole sentence:
>
> Bob eats asparagus [with a fork] [in the park] [under the
> elm tree] [beside his friend Sally]
>
> That way the prepositional phrases all get tacked to the sentence
> with "connectors" as in:
>
> NVN CN CN CN CN
>
> --gary
--
[email protected] ==> Ralph L. De Carli
Have you heard of the new post-neo-modern art style?
They haven't decided what it looks like yet.
Messages in this topic (15)
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