There are 18 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
1b. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: BPJ
1c. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Mathieu Roy
1d. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Charles W Brickner
1e. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Sam Stutter
1f. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Charles W Brickner
1g. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Alex Fink
1h. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Nikolay Ivankov
2a. Theory: "I fok horses"
From: S. Dana Johnson
2b. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
From: Sam Stutter
2c. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
From: S. Dana Johnson
2d. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
From: George Corley
2e. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
From: Charles W Brickner
3a. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Jeff Sheets
3b. Re: Is there a word for this?
From: Gary Shannon
4. USAGE: Symmetric and asymmetric formal and informal pronouns.
From: Leonardo Castro
5a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
From: David Edwards
6a. Re: to be cognate or not to be cognate
From: Alex Fink
Messages
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1a. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 9:44 am ((PST))
Hallo conlangers!
On Friday 25 January 2013 14:13:35 BPJ wrote:
> On 2013-01-25 06:35, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> > That makes me feel like I need to be an expert in every fields to create
> > a language I consider good/logical/coherent/complete; and I think it is
> > the case actually (IMO).
>
> There is no such thing as a complete vocabulary.
Indeed, there is not.
> What
> you need words for is determined by your environment
> and your culture, and both vary/change in time and
> place. Five hundred years ago people living where I
> live had several words for different kinds of plough
> which I couldn't tell apart if my life depended on it,
> but they had no words at all for different kinds of
> computer. Your vocabulary will always mirror your
> experiences, and your interests.
This, too, could not be worded better.
> The difference is that
> in a natlang with thousands or millions of speakers you
> have a greater breadth in interests and experiences,
> but still each individual's vocabulary is limited or
> augmented by their particular biasses.
Right. A natlang works essentially like Wikipedia: there are
thousands of people of the most varied interests and experiences
who each contribute their terminologies to the vocabulary of the
language. Nobody ever masters all the words there are, because
most are specialized vocabulary of the relevant fields, and
nobody deals with all of them.
In a conlang, the author needs to take care of *all* facets of
life if he wants a "complete" vocabulary. This is simply
impossible. Actually, lexicon is the bane of my conlanging
career; the vocabulary of Old Albic is unevenly developed and
advancing only rather slowly, which probably also shows that
I have not yet found the right approach to it!
You have to make do, in practice, with a "general" vocabulary
which covers the most basic terms of various fields of knowledge;
of course, it depends on the imagined culture of the imagined
users of the language. If, for instance, your conlang is meant
to be spoken in the Early Iron Age, it won't have any terminology
for motor vehicles or electronics. If it is spoken in the far
future when people had been traveling among the stars for
thousands of years, it may have pretty short terms for starships
and terminology for the innards of such starships.
> [...]
>
> You can't even judge by an ordinary dictionary: most
> dictionaries contain much vocabulary which is actually
> obsolete but gets included in order to help people
> reading classical literature -- one of the chief uses
> of monolingual dictionaries. OTOH most dictionaries
> lack a lot of vocabulary relevant to specific areas of
> expertise. The common core of vocabulary which is used
> most and by everyone is rather small -- a couple of
> thousand words at the most!
It is IMHO useful to keep a thematic dictionary of your conlang
where words are sorted according to fields of discourse; this
shows better than an alphabetically sorted dictionary which
fields are already well-covered and which need more work. Like
this one:
http://www.zompist.com/thematic.htm
Of course, you need a good set of categories that do not leave
out entire fields of discourse by accident, or you get big gaping
holes in your vocabulary!
--
... 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 (20)
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1b. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 9:49 am ((PST))
On 2013-01-25 14:47, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
>> >The common core of vocabulary which is used
>> >most and by everyone is rather small -- a couple of
>> >thousand words at the most!
>> >
>> >
> I use the following rule of thumb, which is useful to measure both
> advancement in learning a language and in creating one:
> - At 50 words you basically can't really interact with others only in that
> language;
> - At 500 words you can get by in the most basic conversations with natives;
> - At 5000 words you can handle at least 95% of the situations thrown at you
> except discussions necessitating specific jargons;
> - At 50000 words you know the language as well as if not better than most
> natives.
Still the 1000--2000 most common words make up between 80--95%
of running text. Not much help when, as is usual, the remaing
5--20% are crucial to understanding what people are
saying/writing, but still. If you have those 90% covered
by your conlang you have a good vocabulary for a conlang.
I have actively used the lists at
<http://spraakbanken.gu.se/statistik/> for vocabulary building.
I'm sure you can
easily Google similar stuff in other languages...
I like George think your 5000 figure for normal conversation
is way too high. I'd put it between 2000--3000, where you
manage more than 95% of any text (where 'text' may be speech,
though testing these things *is* way easier with reading
comprehension.
Then how do you measure my vocabulary in any one Romance language?
I fully believe that it's stored in my brain as a common
*Romance* vocabulary + rules how to convert into/out of individual
languages. That's also why my reading comprehension is much
better than my hearing comprehension or speaking ability.
Likewise my continuing ability to understand spoken Danish
hinges a lot on my knowledge of how to pronounce written
Danish, allowing me to decode spoken Danish into written
Danish and then into Swedish -- and remember my childhood
dialect's vocabulary is much closer to Danish/Norwegian than
what Standard Swedish is.
IME you can have a rather high degree of reading comprehension
in a language without much speech comprehension. Thus you cannot
measure vocabulary solely by conversational proficiency or vice
versa. If you could I'd understand spoken French! ;-)
/bpj
Messages in this topic (20)
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1c. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Mathieu Roy" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 12:51 pm ((PST))
Do some of your conlangs have a "scientific version" of some words in addition
to the "normal" one?
Is there a specific way in how people can/should coin new words in your
conlangs?
Nikolay <<In Sivarian, there is a fixed amount of 'true' verbs. There are about
10 auxiliary verbs and several dozens of exceptional verbs with synthetic
paradigm.>>
If it won't take too much of your time, I would be interested to know what are
these 10 auxiliary verbs.
George <<I'm very skeptical that 500 words can get you much utility. Maybe
with that much you can negotiate and ask for prices, and maybe order everything
at exactly one restaurant, but not much else. AIUI, conversational fluency is
usually pegged at around 2000 words.>>
Basic English has 850 words, but Odgen "prescribed that any student should
learn an additional 150-word list for everyday work". So maybe 1000 is
relatively sufficient. OTOH, the "Simple English Wikipedia" seems to use 2000
basic words (ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English#Word_lists)
Christophe << Which is exactly what I wrote above: "the most basic
conversations" was supposed to be parsed as "the (most basic) conversations",
not "the most (basic conversations)". So yeah, doing a bit of shopping, asking
for price, saying hello, goodbye and maybe talking generically about the
weather, but not much else.>>
Thanks! Another ambiguity to add to my list of ambiguities to avoid in my
conlang :)
Jörg << It is IMHO useful to keep a thematic dictionary of your conlang where
words are sorted according to fields of discourse; this shows better than an
alphabetically sorted dictionary which fields are already well-covered and
which need more work.>>
I agree. In fact, my conlang will be both at the same time. For example all
words that are animal will start with the same letter, etc.
In respond to what other people have written: I agree that the necessary
lexicon varies in function of where and when one is, but there are still
languages that are spoken in very different cultures in the world such as
French and English. Surely, these are somewhat different version of the
language with some words variation; but I still find this interesting.
-Mathieu
Messages in this topic (20)
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1d. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Charles W Brickner" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 1:09 pm ((PST))
> On 1/24/2013 9:10 PM, Mathieu Roy wrote:
>
>> How did you decide where to stop in the quantity of substantives? For
>> example, if your conlang is to be use on Earth, how many mammals of
>> the 10k that exist did you name and how did you picked?
>
Creating voacbulary is the most enjoyable part of conlanging for me. Senjecas
has a rather complete grammar and I can translate a lot of stuff. Of course, I
can't speak it. But whenever I hear a certain word I wonder "How do you say
that in Senjecas?" For example, Merriam-Webster's word of the day for today is
"satiate". I have that, but a number of synonyms are given and I have to see
if I have them also.
I have two basic dictionaries. The general dictionary (in 4 documents) at
present contains 2,006 entries. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that
that number could be multiplied by 4 or 5 to include all the compounds and
derivatives. The entry for "two" has 40 derivatives, but that's atypical.
The other dictionary is a collection of 34 specialized vocabularies, e.g., food
& drink, buildings and settlements, clothing and jewelry, weather, animal
husbandry, agriculture. The largest one is that of anatomy with 146 entries.
Included in the 34 are 9 taxonomy lists: Mammalia, Aves, Arthropoda, etc. The
largest in this group is that of Plantae with 236 entries.
The Senjecan culture is located in eastern Europe. Most of the entries in the
taxonomy lists are from those ecosystems, including extinct species. But, just
for fun, I've included some species that struck my fancy: jaguar, kangaroo,
manatee, etc. The total number of entries, at present, in these specialized
vocabularies is 1,486. I'm sure that the total Senjecas vocabulary that I have
exceeds 6,000 words.
Charlie
Messages in this topic (20)
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1e. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 2:17 pm ((PST))
Actually, I did quite the same when rebooting Nauspayr/Gyanese/whatever I'm
calling it at the moment - one of my first ports of call for lexicon was local
wildlife and, being set in a sort of alternative-Kurdistan it really enabled me
to go into some serious world building - "discovering" the regional
biodiversity (and hence the local way of life for humans and how they saw their
place in the world) - from the "mundane" real-life flora and fauna (kakuleka =
mulberry) to the native creatures which are extinct in our world (yavwe =
Steller's sea cow) or exist only as cryptids or myths (bunyeke = bunyip - in
this case a species of aquatic mammal, like the killer whale, which has evolved
to fill an ecological niche similar to the crocodile... only much bigger).
The human body is also a good call, along with mythology. Charlie, do you have
a full list of your specialised vocabulary collections I could borrow?
Sam Stutter
[email protected]
"No e na'l cu barri"
On 25 Jan 2013, at 21:09, Charles W Brickner <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On 1/24/2013 9:10 PM, Mathieu Roy wrote:
>>
>>> How did you decide where to stop in the quantity of substantives? For
>>> example, if your conlang is to be use on Earth, how many mammals of
>>> the 10k that exist did you name and how did you picked?
>>
>
> Creating voacbulary is the most enjoyable part of conlanging for me.
> Senjecas has a rather complete grammar and I can translate a lot of stuff.
> Of course, I can't speak it. But whenever I hear a certain word I wonder
> "How do you say that in Senjecas?" For example, Merriam-Webster's word of
> the day for today is "satiate". I have that, but a number of synonyms are
> given and I have to see if I have them also.
>
> I have two basic dictionaries. The general dictionary (in 4 documents) at
> present contains 2,006 entries. I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that
> that number could be multiplied by 4 or 5 to include all the compounds and
> derivatives. The entry for "two" has 40 derivatives, but that's atypical.
>
> The other dictionary is a collection of 34 specialized vocabularies, e.g.,
> food & drink, buildings and settlements, clothing and jewelry, weather,
> animal husbandry, agriculture. The largest one is that of anatomy with 146
> entries. Included in the 34 are 9 taxonomy lists: Mammalia, Aves,
> Arthropoda, etc. The largest in this group is that of Plantae with 236
> entries.
>
> The Senjecan culture is located in eastern Europe. Most of the entries in
> the taxonomy lists are from those ecosystems, including extinct species.
> But, just for fun, I've included some species that struck my fancy: jaguar,
> kangaroo, manatee, etc. The total number of entries, at present, in these
> specialized vocabularies is 1,486. I'm sure that the total Senjecas
> vocabulary that I have exceeds 6,000 words.
>
> Charlie
Messages in this topic (20)
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1f. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Charles W Brickner" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 2:45 pm ((PST))
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Sam Stutter
Charlie, do you have a full list of your specialised vocabulary collections
I could borrow?
=======================
Do you want the names of my specialized dictionaries or the complete
dictionaries?
Charlie
Messages in this topic (20)
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1g. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:18 pm ((PST))
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:51:40 +0100, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>
wrote:
>George <<I'm very skeptical that 500 words can get you much utility. Maybe
>with that much you can negotiate and ask for prices, and maybe order
>everything at exactly one restaurant, but not much else. AIUI, conversational
>fluency is usually pegged at around 2000 words.>>
>Basic English has 850 words, but Odgen "prescribed that any student should
>learn an additional 150-word list for everyday work". So maybe 1000 is
>relatively sufficient. OTOH, the "Simple English Wikipedia" seems to use 2000
>basic words (ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English#Word_lists)
Infer nothing from Basic English. It takes every advantage of English polysemy
and idiom to keep its word count low; it is *not* a list of 850 fundamental
senses, far from it. (It has other oddities that keep it from being a good
resource for conlangers as well, for instance the artificially reduced set of
verbs.)
>Jörg << It is IMHO useful to keep a thematic dictionary of your conlang where
>words are sorted according to fields of discourse; this shows better than an
>alphabetically sorted dictionary which fields are already well-covered and
>which need more work.>>
>I agree. In fact, my conlang will be both at the same time. For example all
>words that are animal will start with the same letter, etc.
And I urge caution here as well. This line of thinking is common enough
(especially in the Wilkins era, but also in things like Solresol in less
straightforward form) that the body plan of language it yields has a name: it's
a _taxonomic language_. But taxonomic languages have a significant flaw in
usability. They give the most similar words to the most similar meanings, and
that means that if I accidentally mishear you a little bit, it will often not
be obvious that the word that got changed was an accident -- instead it will be
far more likely to make a significant difference to the meaning, undetected!
If you do want to do a nearer-usable version of this, something like what
Leonardo's doing in his current project, with (recognisable) prefixes for some
semantic areas but no further structure within that, could work.
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:09:26 -0500, Charles W Brickner
<[email protected]> wrote:
>Creating voacbulary is the most enjoyable part of conlanging for me. Senjecas
>has a rather complete grammar and I can translate a lot of stuff. Of course,
>I can't speak it. But whenever I hear a certain word I wonder "How do you say
>that in Senjecas?" For example, Merriam-Webster's word of the day for today
>is "satiate". I have that, but a number of synonyms are given and I have to
>see if I have them also.
This is strange to me. If you can express "satiate" in Senjecas, why would you
not be able to express its synonyms? Are you adding words to Senjecas in a
one-to-one correspondence with English? Or are you just talking about making
very comprehensive glosses in your dictionary documents?
Alex
Messages in this topic (20)
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1h. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:46 pm ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 9:51 PM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
> Do some of your conlangs have a "scientific version" of some words in
> addition to the "normal" one?
>
> Is there a specific way in how people can/should coin new words in your
> conlangs?
>
> Nikolay <<In Sivarian, there is a fixed amount of 'true' verbs. There are
> about 10 auxiliary verbs and several dozens of exceptional verbs with
> synthetic paradigm.>>
> If it won't take too much of your time, I would be interested to know what
> are these 10 auxiliary verbs.
>
Well, me and my friend were designing the language in such a way that there
would be many oddities, so I'd better say what happens in our source of
inspiration first.
In Irish there are two auxiliary verbs: is = be/ser and tá = be/estar. So
basically one verb is for constant state, and the other for temporal.
Actually both verbs are also cognate to their Spanish counterparts.
In Basque, there are verbs izan ~ be and ukan ~ have. The first is used for
definitions and AFAIR intransitive verbs of analytic conjugation, the
second - for forming analytic conjugation for transitive verbs. In fact,
I've been learning Basque long ago and have almost forgotten everything.
Sivarian is on its way to the paradigm similar to Irish, but is not
completely done with that. We have
- five 'positive' auxiliaries:
- constant state (be);
- temporal state (estar);
- inner state and unconscious/unplanned/uncontrolled actions (want,
feel);
- conscious action (do, think, say etc.)
- changing place/state (go)
-two 'negative' auxiliaries:
- not being in a state (negative to two and partially third)
- not performing an action (negative to last two and partially third)
- still not decided if any 'interrogative' auxiliaries, though I like the
idea.
This system has some similarities to the way the perfect forms of the verbs
are composed in Germanic and Romance languages (like 'il a vu' vs. 'il est
eu', am I right?). In fact, you may form the verbs with the same adverb but
different auxiliaries:
FEEL man hearing = a/the man hears
DO man hearing = a/the man listens
Most of these verbs (though not all of them, otherwise it won't be weird
enough) have their independent meaning as intransitive verbs. So, for
instance, the auxiliary for temporal state has a meaning "to be near", and
possibly its imperative from means "come!", whenever the auxiliary for not
performing an action can have meaning "to be tired".
[snip]
Thank You for the interest,
Kolya
Messages in this topic (20)
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2a. Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "S. Dana Johnson" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 9:48 am ((PST))
Just read about this in Wikipedia. Have checked out Snopes and Etymonline about
the F word. Dutch "fokken" means to breed, transitively, that is. Could this be
a transitive cognate to our own F word? I can't find verification of that
anywhere.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2b. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "Sam Stutter" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 9:53 am ((PST))
I'd heard it came from a Norse word meaning "to stab".
On 25 Jan 2013, at 17:48, "S. Dana Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just read about this in Wikipedia. Have checked out Snopes and Etymonline
> about the F word. Dutch "fokken" means to breed, transitively, that is. Could
> this be a transitive cognate to our own F word? I can't find verification of
> that anywhere.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2c. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "S. Dana Johnson" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 10:05 am ((PST))
I said could this be a transitive cognate to our own F word, but I meant to say
"causative" instead of "transitive"
Messages in this topic (5)
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2d. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 10:12 am ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 12:05 PM, S. Dana Johnson <[email protected]>wrote:
> I said could this be a transitive cognate to our own F word, but I meant
> to say "causative" instead of "transitive"
>
This, of course, makes more sense, as "fuck" is already transitive ("John
fucked a hot girl last night.") The OED does list Dutch "fokken" an one of
many possible Germanic cognates. Nobody seems to have a good answer for
it. I suppose it's difficult to gather evidence because of the word's
taboo nature.
Messages in this topic (5)
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2e. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "Charles W Brickner" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 12:08 pm ((PST))
>From Wiktionary:
Undetermined, but probably from Middle English *fucken, *fukken, of North
Germanic origin, related to dialectal Norwegian fukka (“to copulate; fuck”),
Swedish fokka (earlier "to fuck; thrust; push", nowadays focka (“to fire from
work”)), Swedish fock (“penis”), and Middle Dutch (and Modern Dutch) fokken
(“to breed”). It may go back to the Proto-Indo-European *pug-, *puǵ- ("to
strike"; source of Latin pūgnus (“fist”) among many others), or to
Proto-Indo-European *puḱn-, *pewḱ- ("to sting, stick, stab"; compare German
ficken (“to fuck”)). The word may be attested in an 772 CE charter which
mentions a place called Fuccerham, which possibly means “ham of the fucker” or
“hamm (“pasture”) of the fucker”. The first verifiable use of the word in
English writing appears in Flen flyys and freris, a medieval poem (1495–1505)
containing the pseudo-Latin form fvccant; first listed in a dictionary in
1598.[1] Appeared in Scots as fuck, fuk in 16th century sources,[2] the
earliest being the 1503 poem “Brash of Wowing” by William Dunbar,[3] which
includes the lines: “Yit be his feirris he wald haif fukkit: / Ye brek my
hairt, my bony ane.”
Charlie
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Sam Stutter
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 12:53 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
I'd heard it came from a Norse word meaning "to stab".
On 25 Jan 2013, at 17:48, "S. Dana Johnson" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just read about this in Wikipedia. Have checked out Snopes and Etymonline
> about the F word. Dutch "fokken" means to breed, transitively, that is. Could
> this be a transitive cognate to our own F word? I can't find verification of
> that anywhere.
Messages in this topic (5)
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3a. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Jeff Sheets" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 11:14 am ((PST))
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "constituent" yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_(linguistics)
The set of all constituents then, is all phrases and single words in the
language. As the context becomes more known, the set of potential
constituents is reduced to a subset. Note, however:
The box ___ down.
does not offer a constituent in the technical meaning of the word, but I
still think that that is as close as you are likely to get. About all that
fits there is the subset of verbs that function and fit with the adverb
down, though I'm not putting too much thought into that. However, if you
start with:
The box ___.
You know that any of the following will fit:
came in the mail today.
fell down.
is really rather large and ungainly to transport across the distance of 16
miles by foot both uphill an downhill.
The context allows a much broader set of constituents. However, below
constituents are just the parts of speech. The reason why verbs like
"spoke" don't fit in the first sentence is that they lack some features.
Some verbs will be transitive, and thus require a direct object. Some verbs
are ditransitive and require both a direct and indirect object. In this
case, the feature is more that the verbs must describe movement.
The box slides down.
The box fell down.
The box ran down.
The box jumped down.
The box teleported down.
* The box spoke down.
* The box thought down.
* The box befriended down.
x The box ascended down.
That last sentence feels grammatical to me, though obviously it makes no
sense, but the three marked with * are very much syntactically incorrect
for me. The key thing is that slides, fell, ran, jumped, teleported, and
ascended are all verbs which have the feature of describing motion.
One question I have is, how are you defining/describing the grammar and
lexicon of your language? Are you using a formal grammar notation like the
following?
S -> NP VP
NP -> (Det) N
NP -> NP PP
NP -> Adj NP
PP -> Prep NP
VP -> V
VP -> VP Adv
etc.
You may want to identify that adverbs like "down" must modify a verb with
the feature of "motion", and then for every motion verb, add that feature
to a list of features. Other features you should probably have is the
transitivity of the verb.
On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Ralph DeCarli <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:20:30 -0600
> George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> >
> > Do you consider the instrument or other prepositional elements
> > inherently part of the verb?
> >
> In this specific case I consider the fork to be a data element of
> the 'eating' predicate, if that makes any sense. I tend to think of
> the language in data modeling terms.
>
> A given prepositional phrase could modify the subject, the object or
> the predicate, but it can't modify the entire sentence. I think this
> actually stems from my general fear of 'global variables'.
>
> In other words, I'm really still more of a programmer and a "data
> bigot" than a linguist, so my conlang (or con-patois, more
> accurately) is going to reflect my learned habits.
>
> 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 (19)
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3b. Re: Is there a word for this?
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 12:34 pm ((PST))
This is very interesting. Thanks for posting that link. I'll have to
spend some more time looking into that.
As for my formal grammar, I'm using a parenthetical notation that
allows me to tag/parse a sentence, and then extract both the
production rules and the lexicon directly from a collection of tagged
sentences. Something like this:
Sentence: Bravely the wounded soldier struggled on.
Tagged/parsed:
SNT(RB(Bravely) SNT(ND(DT(the) NJ(JJ(wounded) NN(soldier)))
VBP(VB(struggled) RBP(on))))
Words removed:
SNT(RB SNT(ND(DT NJ(JJ NN)) VBP(VB RBP)))
Rules extracted:
ND(DT NJ)
NJ(JJ NN)
SNT(ND VBP)
SNT(RB SNT)
VBP(VB RBP)
Lexicon extracted:
DT(the)
JJ(wounded)
NN(soldier)
RB(bravely)
RBP(on)
VB(struggled)
Sorted by word:
bravely RB
on RBP
soldier NN
struggled VB
the DT
wounded JJ
And, of course, when the same word shows up with different parts of
speech, all those alternatives would appear in the lexicon. My tags
are borrowed from the Brown Corpus tag set, with several modifications
to fit my specific application. (
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/ccalas/tagsets/brown.html )
--gary
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Jeff Sheets <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned "constituent" yet.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constituent_(linguistics)
>
> The set of all constituents then, is all phrases and single words in the
> language. As the context becomes more known, the set of potential
> constituents is reduced to a subset. Note, however:
>
> The box ___ down.
>
> does not offer a constituent in the technical meaning of the word, but I
> still think that that is as close as you are likely to get. About all that
> fits there is the subset of verbs that function and fit with the adverb
> down, though I'm not putting too much thought into that. However, if you
> start with:
>
> The box ___.
>
> You know that any of the following will fit:
>
> came in the mail today.
> fell down.
> is really rather large and ungainly to transport across the distance of 16
> miles by foot both uphill an downhill.
>
> The context allows a much broader set of constituents. However, below
> constituents are just the parts of speech. The reason why verbs like
> "spoke" don't fit in the first sentence is that they lack some features.
> Some verbs will be transitive, and thus require a direct object. Some verbs
> are ditransitive and require both a direct and indirect object. In this
> case, the feature is more that the verbs must describe movement.
>
> The box slides down.
> The box fell down.
> The box ran down.
> The box jumped down.
> The box teleported down.
> * The box spoke down.
> * The box thought down.
> * The box befriended down.
> x The box ascended down.
>
> That last sentence feels grammatical to me, though obviously it makes no
> sense, but the three marked with * are very much syntactically incorrect
> for me. The key thing is that slides, fell, ran, jumped, teleported, and
> ascended are all verbs which have the feature of describing motion.
>
> One question I have is, how are you defining/describing the grammar and
> lexicon of your language? Are you using a formal grammar notation like the
> following?
>
> S -> NP VP
> NP -> (Det) N
> NP -> NP PP
> NP -> Adj NP
> PP -> Prep NP
> VP -> V
> VP -> VP Adv
> etc.
>
> You may want to identify that adverbs like "down" must modify a verb with
> the feature of "motion", and then for every motion verb, add that feature
> to a list of features. Other features you should probably have is the
> transitivity of the verb.
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Ralph DeCarli <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:20:30 -0600
>> George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > Do you consider the instrument or other prepositional elements
>> > inherently part of the verb?
>> >
>> In this specific case I consider the fork to be a data element of
>> the 'eating' predicate, if that makes any sense. I tend to think of
>> the language in data modeling terms.
>>
>> A given prepositional phrase could modify the subject, the object or
>> the predicate, but it can't modify the entire sentence. I think this
>> actually stems from my general fear of 'global variables'.
>>
>> In other words, I'm really still more of a programmer and a "data
>> bigot" than a linguist, so my conlang (or con-patois, more
>> accurately) is going to reflect my learned habits.
>>
>> 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 (19)
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4. USAGE: Symmetric and asymmetric formal and informal pronouns.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:11 pm ((PST))
I have heard that the distinction between formal and informal pronouns
(the T-V distinction) is kind of symmetric in some languages such as
French and asymmetric in languages such as Japanese and Brazilian
Portuguese.
Let me explain: in French, a student uses a formal pronoun for her/his
professor and vice-versa, while in Japanese the vice-versa part
doesn't work (student uses a pronoun and professor uses other).
Someone told me that the difference is that in French the T-V
distinction is used to keep a distance between people, while in
Japanese it is used to make clear who is hierarchically superior to
whom.
Do you agree with this analysis?
Any comments?
---
Personally, a French professor who is 20 or 30 years older than me has
been calling me "tu" and signing her first name in e-mails. Should I
automatically use "tu" as well or not? (I'm a ~30 years old professor
[as you can infer by my e-mail address].)
Até mais!
Leonardo
Messages in this topic (1)
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5a. Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (was RE: logical language VS not-so-logic
Posted by: "David Edwards" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:15 pm ((PST))
Dr. Lera Boroditsky at Stanford has also done a good deal of research into
linguistic relativity. You can find a lot of interesting evidence to
support it in her papers:
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/
The form of linguistic relativity I find most compelling is not that
language determines thought, but that it *trains* it�i.e., because
languages differ in how they formulate different ideas and which pieces of
information they require to be expressed, they train their speakers to be
more efficient in those particular ways of framing ideas and more cognizant
of those particular pieces of information.
~ David Edwards
Stanford University, Class of 2012
B.S., Symbolic Systems (Natural Language) Candidate
On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 8:08 PM, John Q <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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 (13)
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6a. Re: to be cognate or not to be cognate
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 3:31 pm ((PST))
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:46:46 +0000, David McCann <[email protected]>
wrote:
>On Thu, 24 Jan 2013 12:06:58 -0800
>Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the Romanian. I've been wondering about Ital. chiudere.
>> Shouldn't *claudere have > **clodere, then modern ?chiodere? After
>> all we have cosa < causa, poco < paucus....but I can't summon up any
>> others offhand. My knowlege of Italian developments is scanty; I do
>> know that the "standard" shows a lot of dialect mixing.
>
>The verb cludere turns up occasionally in Latin, alongside claudere;
>it's a back-formation from derivatives like excludere, where the vowel
>weakening is standard.
Nailed it!
obPSA: Remember morphological analogy in your own diachronic conlanging work!
As great as regular (and irregular, c.f. "dialect mixing") sound change is,
it's not the only thing -- and that goes whether you try to apply it morpheme
by morpheme or inflected word by inflected word. You should always at least
sit down with a complete paradigm or five for each word class with sound
changes applied, momentarily clear the ancestor language from your mind, and
think whether you can tweak some forms to bring out regular patterns (be they
historically justified or not). For extra credit, do it in several small
time-steps instead of one large one.
Alex
Messages in this topic (12)
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