There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
From: selpa'i
1.2. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
From: Gleki Arxokuna
1.3. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
From: Gleki Arxokuna
1.4. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
From: Charles W Brickner
1.5. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
From: G. van der Vegt
2a. Re: Natlang evolution (was RE: French spelling (was: logical languag
From: Melroch
3a. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
From: Tim Smith
3b. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
From: A. da Mek
3c. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
From: A. da Mek
3d. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
From: Gary Shannon
4. Developing Discourse Markers
From: Logan Kearsley
5a. Re: single words for concepts for which other languages paraphrase
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
6a. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
From: Leonardo Castro
6b. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
From: Mathieu Roy
6c. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
From: Chris Peters
Messages
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1.1. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
Posted by: "selpa'i" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 5:53 am ((PST))
la'o me. Jim Henry .me cusku di'e
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:19 AM, selpa'i <[email protected]> wrote:
>> If this
>> somehow violates a rule, we will stop or supply English translations)
>
> ce kâ-i blâl-van heÅ. nu srÇ i ĵÄ-ĵwa kÇ i gjâ-krÄ kwÇ syj-i
> ĵÄ-Å-zô de.
>
> ni li ike ala tawa mi. tenpo ijo la jan li toki kepeken toki sin.
>
> Tio ne Äenas min; homoj foje afiÅas en diversaj artaj lingvoj.
>
> I don't have a problem with it, though it's nice to have an English
> summary (if not a full English translation) of non-English posts.
> We've often had people posting in conlangs before, though not as often
> as on the AUXLANG list, where conversations in Esperanto and
> Interlingua and other auxlangs used to be common (as well as posts in
> Spanish and French, and threads where different people were posting in
> different languages).
ni li pona mute tawa mi. pona.
^:i \ji /fto fan ^:i gra ( <-- Gua\spi )
I like that a lot. Thank you.
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
Messages in this topic (42)
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1.2. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
Posted by: "Gleki Arxokuna" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 6:33 am ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Jim Henry <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:19 AM, selpa'i <[email protected]> wrote:
> > If this
> > somehow violates a rule, we will stop or supply English translations)
>
> ce kâ-i blâl-van heÅ. nu srÇ i ĵÄ-ĵwa kÇ i gjâ-krÄ kwÇ syj-i
> ĵÄ-Å-zô de.
>
> ni li ike ala tawa mi. tenpo ijo la jan li toki kepeken toki sin.
>
> Tio ne Äenas min; homoj foje afiÅas en diversaj artaj lingvoj.
>
> I don't have a problem with it, though it's nice to have an English
> summary (if not a full English translation) of non-English posts.
> We've often had people posting in conlangs before, though not as often
> as on the AUXLANG list, where conversations in Esperanto and
> Interlingua and other auxlangs used to be common (as well as posts in
> Spanish and French, and threads where different people were posting in
> different languages).
>
Then let's continue this good tradition given the nature of this mailing
list.
How can one raise interest to the project 'ey support if not by speaking it
and therefore showing that the project is a working one? paunai
*paunai - marker of rhetorical question in lojban
> --
> Jim Henry
> http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
> http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
>
Messages in this topic (42)
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1.3. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
Posted by: "Gleki Arxokuna" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 6:37 am ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 5:19 PM, selpa'i <[email protected]> wrote:
> la gleki cu cusku di'e
>
> ma kibro judri lo fitx gerna cukta i ma kibro judri lo cukta co bangu pe
>> do
>>
>
> judri fa zoi ju.
> http://www.langmaker.com/fith.**htm<http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm>.ju .i
> ku'i za'a dai de'a ka'e se pilno
i zoi ju
http://web.archive.org/web/20120423042442/http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm
ju ka'e se pilno
i ki'e
///
http://web.archive.org/web/20120423042442/http://www.langmaker.com/fith.htm can
be used. Thanks.
.i .a'o ba di'a tolspofu .i pe'i la. fit. cu se gerna lo cinri .i ku'i lo
> sance cu tolmle mutce
lo sance ciste na vajni mi
///
Sound system is not important for me.
.i mu'i ku mi finti lo cnino bangu pe lo simsa gerna zi'e ku'i pe lo melmau
> mutce ke sance ciste .i lo me mi moi na mulno .i ku'i selcme zoi me.
> Nalnuà ntir .me
>
>
> mu'o mi'e la selpa'i
>
> (Apologies everyone, but me and gleki have an agreement to only speak
> Lojban to each other. He asked for the Fith website, and I gave it to him.
> If this somehow violates a rule, we will stop or supply English
> translations)
>
Messages in this topic (42)
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1.4. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
Posted by: "Charles W Brickner" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 6:56 am ((PST))
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Jim Henry
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:19 AM, selpa'i <[email protected]> wrote:
> If this
> somehow violates a rule, we will stop or supply English translations)
I don't have a problem with it, though it's nice to have an English summary (if
not a full English translation) of non-English posts.
We've often had people posting in conlangs before, though not as often as on
the AUXLANG list, where conversations in Esperanto and Interlingua and other
auxlangs used to be common (as well as posts in Spanish and French, and threads
where different people were posting in different languages).
=============================
Perhaps a word in the subject heading that this is Lojban or whatever would be
appropriate. Then those of us not interested could delete the message
immediately and not have to wade through miles of old messsages to find nothing
of interest.
Charlie
Messages in this topic (42)
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1.5. Re: Conlang Writing (was Re: So, about Ithkuil...)
Posted by: "G. van der Vegt" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 8:17 am ((PST))
Generally, this list prefers a wide array of conlangs, each with their own
neat features. Auxlang advocacy is a forbidden topic here, and to 'raise
interest for a project 'ey support' sounds a lot like Auxlang advocacy to
me.
If you want people to be interested in your conlangs, or conlangs you like,
you might wish to converse in a manner that those people can understand. I
personally have neither the time nor the desire to translate posts in a
language I do not speak, whether natural or constructed.
A common way to show the features of a language here are to translate a
text, and to post it complete with an interlinear and the original text
(possibly even with a smooth English translation of the conlang text.) This
would likewise show the language is usable, but lowers the chance people
will just gloss over it because it is no more useful than gibberish to them.
In general though, if your goal is to raise interest for a conlang then
this might not be the venue for it. We're generally not all that interested
in spreading the usage of our languages. It's always fun if people learn
what you made, but for most of us here, that's not a goal.
On 22 January 2013 15:33, Gleki Arxokuna <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 5:47 PM, Jim Henry <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:19 AM, selpa'i <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > If this
> > > somehow violates a rule, we will stop or supply English translations)
> >
> > ce kâ-i blâl-van heÅ. nu srÇ i ĵÄ-ĵwa kÇ i gjâ-krÄ kwÇ syj-i
> > ĵÄ-Å-zô de.
> >
> > ni li ike ala tawa mi. tenpo ijo la jan li toki kepeken toki sin.
> >
> > Tio ne Äenas min; homoj foje afiÅas en diversaj artaj lingvoj.
> >
> > I don't have a problem with it, though it's nice to have an English
> > summary (if not a full English translation) of non-English posts.
> > We've often had people posting in conlangs before, though not as often
> > as on the AUXLANG list, where conversations in Esperanto and
> > Interlingua and other auxlangs used to be common (as well as posts in
> > Spanish and French, and threads where different people were posting in
> > different languages).
> >
>
> Then let's continue this good tradition given the nature of this mailing
> list.
> How can one raise interest to the project 'ey support if not by speaking it
> and therefore showing that the project is a working one? paunai
>
> *paunai - marker of rhetorical question in lojban
>
>
>
> > --
> > Jim Henry
> > http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
> > http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
> >
>
Messages in this topic (42)
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2a. Re: Natlang evolution (was RE: French spelling (was: logical languag
Posted by: "Melroch" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 6:34 am ((PST))
Swedish underwent a somewhat extensive spelling reform in 1907-1908,
getting rid of some but not all silent letters and sanitizing above all the
spelling of /v/. The effect was largely as you and Padraic (minus the
hyperbole) describe it, not least in terms of the fact that public
libraries, most of which didn't exist yet a hundred years ago, either got
rid of what books they had in the old orthography or put them in non-public
storage. University libraries mostly had only closed storage to begin with
and were required to keep all works printed in Sweden anyway so there
wasn't really any change for them. They have a rule not to allow works
older than 100 years on carry-out loan, so all books printed in the old
orthography *incidentally* got less accessible even to scolars as the
century since the reform progressed. However interest in literature older
than half a century probably never was very great, regardless of whether
the reform fell within that period or not. Apart from some classic works of
fiction most literature simply became obsolete in about fifty years due to
their contents becoming irrelevant. Now most classic fiction -- the very
best authors who would't have fallen into oblivion anyway -- were reprinted
as they probably would have been anyway and in the new orthography. It's
interesting to note that Strindberg, who died five years after the reform
and who had been opposed to it, stayed in print in the new orthography and
retained his -- more and more specialist -- relevance up to the present.
*The* great critical edition of his complete works was finished only a few
years ago. He remains read and above all performed (although modern theatre
suffers from a compulsion to 'update' classic pieces) and you will probably
be relieved to hear that under Swedish law mere reediting/respelling
doesn't constitute a new work. Now I very much doubt that there were very
many works from before 1850 worth preserving which haven't stayed in print,
in the new orthography. It's also worth considering that in a 'small'
language like Swedish a great deal of what has been published has always
been translations mainly from German, French and English and the other
Scandinavian languages and the cost of translation was ever much higher
than the cost of orthography change. Also translations age less well than
original texts both stylistically and in vocabulary -- perhaps because us
translators are poorer stylists than the great authors! -- and have to be
redone or at least reedited at least every fifty years. It is worth noting
that the same is true of native literature to a degree. It's style and
vocabulary gets dated, and new editions however respelled have to be
furnished with more or less extensive notes. It's worth remembering that
the largest group of non-specialist/specially interested readers who read
older fiction are teenagers who are required to do so by their school
curriculum and they require lots of notes close at hand because they are
less experienced, specially *uninterested* and easily destracted.
It's also worth noting that if a spelling reform were to be done today most
of the respelling could be done by computers by simple lookup; in most
languages there aren't very many homographs that aren't also homophones,
and the difficult cases could simply be marked up to call a proofreader's
attention. The same isn't true of an explanatory apparatus which would be
the most demanding part of preparing editions of older literature which
would be meaningful to their intended modern audience.
So how do modern Swedes react when encountering the old orthography? First
of all it should be pointed out that personal names were always exempt from
standardization and were exempt from the 1907 reform if the bearer so
wished. You could always call yourself _Victor Lööfgren_ or _Wiktor
Leuwgreen_ as well as _Viktor Löfgren_ (old standard) or _Lövgren_ (new
standard). In fact most people with this name spell it _Löfgren_, and young
kids *will* at first pronounce the _f_ as /f/ but most people will learn
the rules of the old orthography as evidenced by people's surnames by
osmosis. From my historical linguistic and Scandinavophile perspective it
would indeed be desirable if those school kids were given a chance to
encounter at least some amount of text in unreformed orthography as well as
untranslated passages in Danish and Norwegian as well as some Old Swedish
and early Modern Swedish, if only so that they could learn that all
languages gradually change and diverge through changes in pronunciation,
syntax, vocabulary and style, and that the orthographies of the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries lagged seriously behind pronunciation. I'd love to
educate their *teachers* that just as people in the nineteenth century
already pronounced what they spelled _väf_ as we pronounce our _väv_, and
that people in the fourteenth century actually said [wE:v]; nobody ever
said [vE:f]! I've long advocated editions of older literature and sister
language literature in the original orthography with marginal notes on
vocabulary but I don't think it was wrong to reform orthography. Concealing
change is no good way of presenting history, and I think that the eventual
cost of a spelling reform is well offset by the save in time spent on
learning to spell which can be used to learn other things like that
language change is natural, inevitable and neither good nor bad. Or in
learning other languages! Yet I think spelling need not be strictly one
letter <-> one sound if only in order not to needlessly alienate shared and
international vocabulary. In 1906 the word 'what' was spelled <hvad> in all
three Scandinavian languages. Now it's <vad> in Swedish and <hva> in
Norwegian. The pronunciation was all the tine [va] in the east and [kva] or
[wa] in the west of a line cutting across the national boundaries. I'm not
sure that is progress.
/bpj
Den måndagen den 21:e januari 2013 skrev Jim Henry:
> On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
> <[email protected] <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > On 20 January 2013 16:37, Padraic Brown <[email protected]<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> >> Bad social engineering. English with its unreformed orthography allows
> >> the engaged reader to read (though not necessarily understand)
> everything
> >> ever written all the back to the Beginning of History when Julius Caesar
> >> invaded England, thus causing the English language. The more "reformed"
> >> we make an orthography, the harder it will be for anyone brought up on
> >> the new version to read anything in the old version.
> ....
> >> translation into the new orthography. If language informs culture, then
> I
> >> as a Central Planner could determine the way future culture moves by the
> >> nature of the orthographical Reform and the content of the literature
> >> that gets "translated". Or at least make an attempt at the same.
>
> > What a load of nonsense! When orthography is reformed, you don't stop
> > reading old books: they just get reprinted with the new orthography! And
> > any central planner has nothing to say about what does or doesn't get
> > reprinted, since publishing companies are private! If there is demand for
> > it, it will be reprinted.
>
> Padraic is exaggerating for rhetorical effect -- arguably to an
> excessive degree -- but I'd argue that there's a grain of truth in
> what he says. I don't think orthography reform by itself it would
> lead to deliberate political censorship such as he describes, but it
> would reduce the number of old books that are easily accessible to
> readers educated with the new orthography. The more radical the
> orthography reform, the more labor-intensive the transcription into
> the new orthography becomes, and as costs of reprinting old books
> rise, publishers will be more selective about which titles to reprint,
> and reprint fewer of them. Not through political considerations, as
> Padraic argues (unless some completely unrelated political
> developments are going on at the same time, which is possible, but not
> to be blamed on the orthography reform) but for purely commercial and
> pragmatic reasons. You might not have publishers like Dover, for
> instance, doing so many low-cost facsimile editions of old books if
> most readers under 30 were unable to read the old orthography. Such
> publishers and such facsimile editions would still exist, but because
> they would be aiming at a smaller market, they would have to print
> fewer copies of each book and charge higher prices. And the more
> complex the reform, and the more dialectical variation there is in the
> language, the more subjective judgment is involved in transcribing
> from an old chronolect into some modern dialect: so new transcriptions
> would be copyrighted, for the most part, and each publisher that wants
> to do a new edition of a public-domain book might do their own
> transcription, or else pay a license fee to another publisher for the
> right to reprint their transcription.
>
> And libraries, at least local non-university libraries, would probably
> over the course of a generation or less get rid of all or nearly all
> of their old books printed in the old orthography and replace them
> with books (re)printed in the new. That would put a strain on their
> budgets, and libraries already tend to be underfunded. Some books for
> which there's no new-orthography edition would thus be unavailable to
> low-income readers, when without the orthography reform they might
> have been. University libraries would be more conservative about
> keeping old books in the old orthography, but they don't have
> unlimited space and would have to make some hard triage decisions.
>
> Of course, you would probably get people like Project Gutenberg doing
> crowdsourced public domain transcriptions into the new orthography,
> but because such transcription would be far more labor-intensive and
> error-prone and above all more subjective than the current work
> process at Distributed Proofreaders[*], it would be a botleneck and PG
> would produce far fewer books per year than they produce now.
>
>
> [*] -- In general (there are exceptions for particular books), one
> person scans all the pages of the book and uploads the images. Then
> each page is proofread by three different people, then formatted by
> one person, then the formatting is double-checked by a second person.
> Then a post-processor stitches all the pages together and converts
> from the internal DP formatting markup to HTML, ePub, plain text, etc.
> I expect if we had a radical orthography reform, there would be added
> two or three transcription rounds in between the proofreading rounds
> and the formatting rounds; one person transcribes it, then one or two
> people double-check the transcription for errors. And because such
> transcription is sometimes uncertain and subjective (involving
> research and guesswork about how specific words were pronounced in a
> particular author's dialect, for instance, or questions of whether to
> transcribe things based on the way they were pronounced 300 years ago
> or the way they're pronounced now in Britain or the way they're
> pronounced now in the U.S. or....) there would be a lot of arguing
> about transcription judgment calls in the fora. If such transcription
> rounds were to add less than 50% to the average time it takes to
> produce a book, I'd be pleasantly surprised.
>
> --
> Jim Henry
> http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
> http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
>
Messages in this topic (15)
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3a. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
Posted by: "Tim Smith" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 7:11 am ((PST))
On 1/21/2013 10:12 PM, Roger Mills wrote:
> --- On Mon, 1/21/13, Gary Shannon <[email protected]> wrote:
> A brilliant idea!
>
> Surely "cafe" and "cake" should both be pronounced as two-syllable
> words with the accent on the second vowel.
> ==================================================
> Actually, in a 60s British movie (IIRC) I heard "cafe" pronounced [keif]--
> the actors were portraying sort-of tough-guy biker types.
>
> Maybe with enough time that will come to predominate ???? Like Leonardo's
> friends who think "recipe" would be [r@'saip]. Such ~is ['Of@n] ~ ['Oft@n]
> the fate of foreign words in English (and even Engl. words) and probably
> elsewhere.
>
> When I was a kid, I thought for years that "misled" was ['maiz@ld].
>
Actually, something sort of like this happened with Latin in the Middle
Ages, when it was no longer anyone's L1 but remained in everyday use
among an international educated elite. Since it was more written than
spoken, people developed their own local spelling pronunciations, so
that French clerics and scholars pronounced Latin more or less as if it
were French, Germans as if it were German, etc. This is something I
regularly deal with as a singer of early music; when my group sings a
Latin motet or mass, we try to at least approximate the pronunciation
that would have been used in the time and place where it was composed.
One can perhaps imagine some future milieu where several centuries have
elapsed since the collapse of our civilization, and the "ancients" (us!)
have left lots of written records, mostly in English, but no usable
audio or video recordings. (Paper is a lot more robust over the long
run than electronic media.) I suspect that in that situation,
"Classical English" would have lots of local or regional pronunciation
systems, each based loosely on the spelling conventions of the dominant
local L1 (whether that L1 is a descendent of English or something else).
(And since the orthography of English is a lot less transparent than
that of Latin, these regional forms would vary a lot more, both from
each other and from any form of present-day spoken English, than the
regional forms of Medieval Latin did from each other or from Classical
Latin.)
- Tim
Messages in this topic (9)
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3b. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
Posted by: "A. da Mek" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 7:31 am ((PST))
>> the opposite approach to the reform:
>> not to write what is pronounced, but to pronounce what is written.
>
> The problem is "How to convince people to change how they speak?"
The spoken English would of course still be used by its native speakers (and
it will continue to slowly change and if it will survive long enough, it
will split to a family of daughter languages); the reformed language would
be used only as the world auxlang, fixed forever by its unambiguous relation
to the
written form.
Maybe even this reformed language would spawn several dialects, but they
would be in some extent mutually comprehensible, becouse there would be
lossless bidirectional transformation between them.
It could be interesting to create a family of languages which share the same
written form, but differs in pronunciation, although all these
pronunciations are regular.
Here are some of the possibilities:
1) Pronounce everything as in X-SAMPA.
2) As above, with the exceptions of digraphs: <th> [T], <sh> [S], <ch> [C],
<gh> [G]. (IMO this may be the best solution for the world auxlang; the only
flaw I can see is the need to learn to pronounce [q]. BTW, is the letter <q>
used outside the digraph <qu>?) But <ph> shouldnot be [f] if we want to
retain the bidirectional unambiquity. (For the same reason, dialets with <c>
[ts] or <x> [ks] are unsuitable.)
3) The pronounciation closest to the spoken English, but regular.
4) Some fictional mother-, sister- and daughter-languages, for example the
"pre-Grimm" dialect: <f> [p], <th> [t], <h> [k], <wh> [kW], <p> [b], <t>
[d], <k> [g], <b> [bh], <d> [dh], <g> [gh]; or a dialect with the sound
shifts in the opposite direction, thus HG-like.
Messages in this topic (9)
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3c. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
Posted by: "A. da Mek" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 10:55 am ((PST))
>> Surely "cafe" and "cake" should both be pronounced as two-syllable
>> words with the accent on the second vowel.
What accent do you suppose for words with another number of syllables?
Two most common systems in languages with fixed accent is either on the
first syllable or on penult. This can be generalised by the rule that the
stress can be on any syllable other than the ultima. The stressed syllable
has high tone, previous syllables have low tone and the next syllables have
middle tone. The word boundary is marked by transition from middle tone to
low or high tone.
If the language has monosyllables (other than unstressed clitic which can be
treated like affixes), there is no other possibility than allow stress on
the last syllable and then also the transiton from high to low tone is
another posible word boundary. But if end-stressed word is followed by a
begin-stressed word (which cannot be avoided in a cluster of two or more of
monosyllables), there are two immediatelly neighbouring stressed syllables
which is awkward. So I prefer the following system:
1) Words with two or more syllables have a stress on the first syllable.
2) A monosyllable is unstressed (and thus has low tone) unless it is
followed by an unstressed word. (This means that in a group of several
monosyllables, the odd ones, counted from the last, are unstressed and the
even ones stressed. The transition from low to high tone also marks a word
boundary, unlike the systems which allow stress on other syllable than the
first.)
> (Paper is a lot more robust over the long run than electronic media.)
BTW, clay tablets proved to be the most durable media (except carving in
stone, which is however sinificantly more expensive). Humanity should
seriously consider to rewrite the most vital informations onto them before
our civilisation will be destroyed.
Messages in this topic (9)
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3d. Re: Orthography congruous to pronunciation
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:10 am ((PST))
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 10:54 AM, A. da Mek <[email protected]> wrote:
---snip---
>
>> (Paper is a lot more robust over the long run than electronic media.)
>
>
> BTW, clay tablets proved to be the most durable media (except carving in
> stone, which is however sinificantly more expensive). Humanity should
> seriously consider to rewrite the most vital informations onto them before
> our civilisation will be destroyed.
Back in 2010 I proposed this system for casting tiles in fine
porcelain and firing them to the vitrification point to make them even
more permanent.
Here's an explanation: http://fiziwig.com/conlang/neo_cuneiform.html
Thoughts on making it easy to decipher:
http://fiziwig.com/conlang/neo_cune_2.html
And an example of a possible grammar:
http://fiziwig.com/conlang/neoglyph/neoglyphic.pdf
--gary
Messages in this topic (9)
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4. Developing Discourse Markers
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 10:49 am ((PST))
This is a bit of a retrospective thing on an interesting conlanging experience.
In developing Mev Pailom, I focus on conversational usability, which
means new words and new grammar tend to come about as needed to
fulfill a particular discourse function. And since I am a native
English speaker, I like to have functional analogues to the sort of
structures that I use in English, so that I will find them easy to use
and therefore actually use them, so I've been having fun making note
of interesting phrases and word usages in English that I want to
figure out how to copy with the minimum amount of new grammatical or
lexical invention (aiming for minimalism helps to ensure that I don't
do very much direct calquing).
So, over Christmas Vacation I was listening to all of the
back-episodes of Lexicon Valley (an excellent resource for ideas for
interesting things to say), and I realized that I sorely miss the
English ", so..."
So, my first thought was that "so" is kind of the reverse of
"because", and I've got a phrase/compound word for "because"-
<iza-on-at...>, "because-of this, that..."
Trying to reverse the relation of the first and second clause, I get
something like
"<stuff> because-of <reason>" vs. "<reason> and because of that <stuff>"
which comes out in Mev Pailom as <e, iza on,>.
The first cool thing here is that "because" sentences end up being
rendered with a subordinate clause, as is typical, but the reverse
"so" sentences involve simple coordination and no subordination.
Weird!
Now, using that phrase as an actual conjunction, I tend (so far,
anyway) to pronounce it carefully, with the comma-pauses; that makes
it quite distinct in terms of auditory experience, and thus open to
being quite distinct in discourse function, from "because" sentences.
But when it's trailing, it kind of mushes together (I'm guessing just
because the actual compositional meaning of the phrase is irrelevant),
and comes out like /ezo~/, or /ezo:/. So, this is now the official Mev
Pailom equivalent of ", so...": <ezo>. It turns out to be suspiciously
similar-sounding to the English word, but completely by accident!
Next up: how to say "verb1 someone into verb2-ing".
-l.
Messages in this topic (1)
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5a. Re: single words for concepts for which other languages paraphrase
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:55 am ((PST))
Hallo conlangers!
On Monday 21 January 2013 22:35:52 Leonardo Castro wrote:
> 2013/1/21 A. da Mek <[email protected]>:
> >> the Czech author Milan Kundera doesn't understand how non-Czech
> >> languages could possibly do without an equivalent to the Czech word
> >> "litost," to which an English speaker sort of just shrugs when he/she
> >> hears the word translated as "a state of torment created by the sudden
> >> sight of one's own misery."
> >
> > Do not take him too seriously. This is only one of possible meanings, and
> > the
> > more precise word for it would be rather "sebelítost", self-pity.
> > "Lítost" simply means regret, pity or sorrow (there is a German cognate
> > "Leid"); it is not a specialised word for cry in one's beer.
>
> As you said this, I'm encouraged to say that I feel that the
> Portuguese word "saudade" is much more generic than a feeling of
> wistful longing for something one once knew and which might never
> return (as also cited in the original message). It would be very
> natural for me to call my wife now an say "Tô com saudade! Vamos comer
> uma pizza?!" ("I miss you! Let's eat a pizza?!"). But I'm talking
> about Brazil; I don't know about Portugal, Angola, etc.
How many of us have such words in our conlangs? In Old Albic,
I at least have _phanara_, an animate noun derived from the
verb _phana_ 'to shape' (hence also, _phanas_ 'a shape'), which
may be translated as 'gestalt' or 'morphic field'. A _phanara_
is an entity that governs the shape of a particular object by
guiding and informing the _phaneri_ of its parts. _Phaneri_
resonate with each other, especially ones of a similar kind,
and of course with those of the parts they inform.
The whole universe is a huge hierarchy of nested _phaneri_, up
to _Éa_ ('The One') which encloses and informs the entire
universe, and down to imperceptibly small elementary _phaneri_
that make up everything (and can be identified, from a modern
physics viewpoint, with the probability fields of fundamental
particles in quantum mechanics).
The soul (_nâra_) of a living being is also a _phanara_; magic
(_léachvaras_ 'spirit-work') operates by getting one's own soul
into resonance with the _phanara_ of a target and in-forming it
in order to achieve a particular event.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (10)
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6a. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:18 pm ((PST))
I just remembered that there are those who say that a more complex
language is better to train the brain. A friend of mine told me that
someone he knows related French success in Science with the complexity
of its number system ("quatre-vingt dix-huit" for instance).
Até mais!
Leonardo
Messages in this topic (14)
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6b. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
Posted by: "Mathieu Roy" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:30 pm ((PST))
I've heard people saying that since Chinese had shorter words for numbers,
they could count faster. I've also heard people saying Chinese were better
musicians in general because it was a tonal language IIRC. IDK if either of
these claims are accurate.
Mathieu
-----Message d'origine-----
De : Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] De la
part de Leonardo Castro
Envoyé : mardi 22 janvier 2013 23:18
À : [email protected]
Objet : Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
I just remembered that there are those who say that a more complex language
is better to train the brain. A friend of mine told me that someone he knows
related French success in Science with the complexity of its number system
("quatre-vingt dix-huit" for instance).
Até mais!
Leonardo
Messages in this topic (14)
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6c. Re: Loglan[g] VS Natlang
Posted by: "Chris Peters" [email protected]
Date: Tue Jan 22, 2013 2:32 pm ((PST))
> From: [email protected]
>
> I've heard people saying that since Chinese had shorter words for numbers,
> they could count faster. I've also heard people saying Chinese were better
> musicians in general because it was a tonal language IIRC. IDK if either of
> these claims are accurate.
I've heard something related to the music statement: that native speakers of
tonal languages are more likely to have perfect pitch.
Messages in this topic (14)
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