There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Herman Miller
1.2. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Roger Mills
1.3. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: MorphemeAddict
1.4. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Jim Henry
1.5. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
2a. Jan19: Vowels, Ablaut, Stem Formation
From: neo gu
2b. Re: Jan19: Vowels, Ablaut, Stem Formation
From: Roger Mills
2c. Re: Jan19: Vowels, Ablaut, Stem Formation
From: neo gu
3a. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
From: J. 'Mach' Wust
3b. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
From: Douglas Koller
4. Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
From: Elliott Lash
5. Fw: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
From: Elliott Lash
6a. Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
From: Alex Fink
6b. Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
From: Elliott Lash
7a. Re: USAGE: Symmetric and asymmetric formal and informal pronouns.
From: Leonardo Castro
Messages
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1.1. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 7:12 pm ((PST))
On 1/25/2013 3:51 PM, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> Do some of your conlangs have a "scientific version" of some words in
> addition to the "normal" one?
I expect so, but the only example that comes to mind is the Tirelat
distinction between "žajvi" (the technical word for "animal") and
"kažŋa" (a more informal word for "animal" or "beast").
> Is there a specific way in how people can/should coin new words in
> your conlangs?
I imagine that it happens the same ways that new words are coined in
most languages, by derivation and compounding, borrowing from other
languages, or arbitrary coinage. Minza did for a while have a set of
syllabic roots called "luakí" that were intended for building new words,
but I decided that I really didn't like how they were turning out. I
kept a handful of luakí-derived words, but without keeping the
individual meanings of the syllables.
Perhaps the Sangari would be more methodical and systematic about
creating new words, and the Zireen would be more haphazard and spontaneous.
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.2. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 8:22 pm ((PST))
--- On Fri, 1/25/13, BPJ <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
RM I've wondered about that too-- Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese (in
descending order)-- but also add in a lot of Indonesian and Proto-IN forms
:-))) Maybe the Indonesian stuff is in a separate folder....
That's also why my reading comprehension is much
better than my hearing comprehension or speaking ability.
RM that could depend also on how we were initially taught-- in high school and
college there was much less attention paid to speaking than reading. (I picked
up French and Portuguese on my own, but mainly by reading). OTOH I learned
Indonesian primarily by conversation, so have some trouble making sense out of
written work.
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! ;-)
RM Absolutely !!
/bpj
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.3. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 3:43 am ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
> --- On Fri, 1/25/13, BPJ <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.
>
> RM I've wondered about that too-- Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese (in
> descending order)-- but also add in a lot of Indonesian and Proto-IN forms
> :-))) Maybe the Indonesian stuff is in a separate folder....
>
> That's also why my reading comprehension is much
> better than my hearing comprehension or speaking ability.
>
> RM that could depend also on how we were initially taught-- in high school
> and college there was much less attention paid to speaking than reading. (I
> picked up French and Portuguese on my own, but mainly by reading). OTOH I
> learned Indonesian primarily by conversation, so have some trouble making
> sense out of written work.
>
I've forgotten how I learned to read my native language (English), but it
seems to me a trivial matter to learn read a language you know fluently.
Even in Chinese or Japanese, there are clues to the pronunciation, so just
guess. Now writing is a different matter all together.
stevo
>
> 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! ;-)
>
> RM Absolutely !!
>
> /bpj
>
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.4. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Jim Henry" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 5:45 am ((PST))
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
> RM that could depend also on how we were initially taught-- in high school
> and college there was much less attention paid to speaking than reading. (I
> picked up French and Portuguese on my own, but mainly by reading). OTOH I
> learned Indonesian primarily by conversation, so have some trouble making
> sense out of written work.
A larger factor, I suspect, is which form of the language we've had
the most chance to practice with over the years. I was originally
taught French in a conversation-oriented course, but since then nearly
all of my use of the langauge has been reading, and I've lost the
little bit of spoken fluency I once had.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org
Messages in this topic (29)
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1.5. Re: Lexicon (proportion and quantity)
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 7:06 am ((PST))
Hallo conlangers!
On Saturday 26 January 2013 00:17:57 Alex Fink wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:51:40 +0100, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>
wrote:
> >[...]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.)
Yep. As Mark Rosenfelder put it in the _Language Construction
Kit_: "Ogden and Richards cheated". Basic English makes very much
use of idiomatic expressions whose meanings cannot be predicted
from the meanings of the simplex words they consist of. And often,
such expressions become very cumbersome, and when it comes to
proper names, everything collapses into shambles. This is a
problem which generally befouls all closed-vocabulary schemes.
It often does not even help to trace back words to their source
languages and translate. First, it may turn out that two words
from different source languages have the same meanings in their
source languages though they are used in different meanings in
English (IIRC, _catatonia_ and _depression_ constitute such a
pair); second, there are many words (especially, but not
exclusively, geographical names) in use where the original
language and original meaning are *unknown*.
> >[...] 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!
Correct - taxonomic languages tend to have an awfully low level
of redundancy: a mishearing, especially one near the end of the
word (where this is more likely than near the beginning of the
word), is likely to yield a valid word that even makes sense in
the context, so the error cannot easily be detected by the result
being either a word that does not exist or one that exists but
does not fit the context.
Also, with many fields of discourse, a meaningful taxonomy is not
easy to arrive at. Most discussions of taxonomic languages I have
read feature words from the realm of animal or plant species,
where we have a good, workable natural taxonomy (but the 17th-
century conlangers did not yet have this taxonomy and thus had to
roll their own, which are often quaintly cranky). Chemical
compounds have been mentioned as an example of a field where a
taxonomic vocabulary is actually in use, but the taxonomic names
are used only for the simplest compounds - they quickly get very
cumbersome and hard to remember, and even chemists use so-called
"trivial names" (i. e., arbitrary names) instead.
A mistaxonomization I like to cite in discussions like this one
is Wilkins's word for 'comet', which is a derivative of 'fire'
- today we know that comets consist mostly of that indeed very
fiery substance we know in our non-taxonomic language as ice ;)
Another problem with taxonomic languages is that if they are not
designed sufficiently cleverly, they run the risk of running out
of word forms when the number of subcategories turns out to be
larger than expected somewhere. You *can* avoid this by using
some kind of "escape sequences", but many taxonomic languages
I have seen do not take this problem into account.
I have realized a while ago that my take on the speedtalk
challenge, Quetch, would turn out to be much like a taxonomic
language when I come to actually build it. In Quetch, all
morphemes shall be exactly one segment long (except proper
names, which are longer but begin and end with a glottal stop,
which does not occur otherwise in the language, not even in
the middle of proper names which are otherwise completely free
in structure). Lexical morphemes and pronouns are consonants
and grammatical morphemes (mostly prepositions) are vowels.
I haven't fixed the word list yet, but I intend to base it on
that of Toki Pona, and expect to need about 100 to 120 consonant
phonemes and 20 vowel phonemes - numbers that are quite large
but not totally out of range. Of course, the language will have
*lots* of compounds, wherein inconvenient consonant clusters can
be broken up with schwas if needed. (The name of the language
itself is an anglicization such a compound: /kʷətç/, meaning
'speak-time-small', i. e. 'speedtalk'.) As compounds are head-
initial, the result will effectively be a taxonomic languages,
and words with related meanings close together in the alphabetical
dictionary.
The "purpose" of this language is, however, not practical usage.
It is just an experiment to try out how well such a beast would
work out, especially what regards the actual length of utterances.
While the lexemes are as short as they can be, you always need
many more than in "normal" languages, and the effects may actually
cancel out.
> 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.
There are even natlangs that at least get close to this, namely
the Bantu languages such as Swahili, where each noun begins with
a class prefix. These classes, however, are very broad (there are
only about a dozen of them, depending on the language), and not
always semantically well-defined.
--
... 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 (29)
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2a. Jan19: Vowels, Ablaut, Stem Formation
Posted by: "neo gu" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 25, 2013 9:05 pm ((PST))
Jan19 derives stems from roots using ablaut. The roots are mostly CVCVC with
some CVC and maybe a few irregular ones. Historically, there are 3 vowels: *i,
*a, and *u. They can appear as the following vowels:
Letter Short Long
i [i] [i:]
e [e] [e:]
æ [E]
a [a] [a:]
o [o] [O:]
u [u] [u:]
The grades determine which vowel appears for a given historical vowel at a
given place in the paradigms.
Grade *i *a *u
1 [i] [a] [u]
2 [i:] [O:] [u:]
3 [E] [i] [o]
4 [a:] [e:] [O:]
0 0/[e] 0/[e] 0/[e]
Grade 0 = 0 or [e] depending on the rules for initial and medial clusters.
The stem paradigms are made up of C's, which tell where the consonants go, and
grade numbers, which tell which vowel grade can appear. An |e| in a paradigm
refers to [e].
Verb Stems
A verb can have up to 5 ablaut stems. For CVCVC roots they are:
(A) C3C0C tæmk- most active forms use this
(B) C0C4C tmok- most passive forms use this
(C) C2C3C timok used for the active infinitive
(D) C0C1C tmuk used for the passive infinitive
(E) C0C3C tmok used as a base for affix-extended stems
For CVC roots they are:
(A) C2C xil-
(B) C4C xal-
(C) C3C xæl
(D) C1C xil
(E) C3C xæl
Tense or aspect may be prefixed; suffixes on the (A) and (B) stems determine
the clause type as well as person and number of the subject (where the clause
type permits). The affix-extended stems may include thematic and reflexive
inversions. Stems (A), (B), and (E) are also used for derived nouns.
Noun Stems
Jan19 nouns are inflected only for number, although historically, there was
also case-marking. There are 3 kinds of nouns: suffixing nouns, prefixing
nouns, and root nouns.
The root nouns form their plurals through either ablaut or suppletion:
Singular Plural
C2C3C tobis C1C0Ce tabse
C3C gis C1C gas
--- gu --- bi
The prefixing nouns for theirs by replacing the prefix (most prefixes being
related to the suppletive nouns). They include the derived patient nominals.
Note the use of verb stem (E).
Singular Plural
C3-C0C3C gosmok C3-C0C3C bæsmok
The suffixing nouns are the most varied. They all form their plurals by adding
|a| if the noun is animate or |u| is the noun is inanimate. The final |e|, if
any, is deleted. The 1st group have noun roots, with minimal suffixes:
Singular Plural
C3C0C-e mæfte C3C0C-1 mæfta
C0C4C-e tmare C0C4C-1 tmaru
C0C1C tmir C0C2C-1 tmira
C1C nix C2C-1 nixu
The 2nd group are derived from verb roots:
Singular Plural
C0C4C-1C smokax C0C4C-eC1 smokexu action nominals
C3C0C-1C sæmkut C3C0C-eC1 sæmketa agent nominals
C4C-1C xelim C4C-eC1 xelemu product nominals
C2C-1C xolal C1C-0C1 xallu instrument nominals
The 3rd group include words derived from nouns:
Singular Plural
C0C2C-VC tmirik C0C1C-0C1 tmirka diminutive
Questions and comments are welcome.
Messages in this topic (3)
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2b. Re: Jan19: Vowels, Ablaut, Stem Formation
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 7:11 am ((PST))
--- On Sat, 1/26/13, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
Jan19 derives stems from roots using ablaut. The roots are mostly CVCVC with
some CVC and maybe a few irregular ones. Historically, there are 3 vowels: *i,
*a, and *u. They can appear as the following vowels:
Letter Short Long
i [i] [i:]
e [e] [e:]
æ [E]
a [a] [a:]
o [o] [O:]
u [u] [u:]
The grades determine which vowel appears for a given historical vowel at a
given place in the paradigms.
Grade *i *a *u
1 [i] [a] [u]
2 [i:] [O:] [u:]
3 [E] [i] [o]
4 [a:] [e:] [O:]
0 0/[e] 0/[e] 0/[e]
-===================================================
What about æ? -- occurs a couple time in exs. below but not listed
here...........
Messages in this topic (3)
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2c. Re: Jan19: Vowels, Ablaut, Stem Formation
Posted by: "neo gu" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 10:22 am ((PST))
On Sat, 26 Jan 2013 07:11:01 -0800, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
>--- On Sat, 1/26/13, neo gu <[email protected]> wrote:
>Jan19 derives stems from roots using ablaut. The roots are mostly CVCVC with
>some CVC and maybe a few irregular ones. Historically, there are 3 vowels: *i,
>*a, and *u. They can appear as the following vowels:
>
>Letter? Short???Long
>i? ? ???[i]? ???[i:]
>e? ? ???[e]? ???[e:]
>栠? ???[E]
>a? ? ???[a]? ???[a:]
>o? ? ???[o]? ???[O:]
>u? ? ???[u]? ???[u:]
>
>The grades determine which vowel appears for a given historical vowel at a
>given place in the paradigms.
>
>Grade???*i? ? ? *a? ? ? *u
>1? ? ???[i]? ???[a]? ???[u]
>2? ? ???[i:]? ? [O:]? ? [u:]
>3? ? ???[E]? ???[i]? ???[o]
>4? ? ???[a:]? ? [e:]? ? [O:]
>0? ? ???0/[e]???0/[e]???0/[e]
>
>-===================================================
>
>What about 濠-- occurs a couple time in exs. below but not listed
>here...........
Hi Roger,
Thanks for taking a look. æ is orthographic for [E] which appears as grade 3 of
*i. (But when I quote your msg, it appears as a box in one place and as a
chinese character in another!)
--
Jeff
Messages in this topic (3)
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3a. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "J. 'Mach' Wust" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 1:30 am ((PST))
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:08:25 -0500, Charles W Brickner wrote:
>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”)).
Swiss dialects have a word _figge_. Older generations still use this
in a non-sexual meaning for 'rubbing', e.g. in _der Schue figget mi_
'the shoe pinches'. While the word is perceived as being identical to
German _ficken_, the _gg_ is not etymologically compatible to English
_fuck_ (or Scandinavian _fokka_ etc.), cf. Swiss German _Egge, Rugge,
Brugg_ to English _edge, ridge, bridge_.
--
grüess
mach
Messages in this topic (7)
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3b. Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 1:47 am ((PST))
> Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2013 04:30:06 -0500
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Theory: "I fok horses"
> To: [email protected]
> Swiss dialects have a word _figge_. Older generations still use this
> in a non-sexual meaning for 'rubbing', e.g. in _der Schue figget mi_
> 'the shoe pinches'. While the word is perceived as being identical to
> German _ficken_, the _gg_ is not etymologically compatible to English
> _fuck_ (or Scandinavian _fokka_ etc.), cf. Swiss German _Egge, Rugge,
> Brugg_ to English _edge, ridge, bridge_.
I suppose "fidgeting" could be part of sexual congress, put it's not really
whipping up a very fulfilling image.
I do, however, like the idea of "It fidgets me in the shoe." for "The shoe
doesn't fit right."
Kou
Messages in this topic (7)
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4. Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
Posted by: "Elliott Lash" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 6:09 am ((PST))
This did not go to the list, so i am forwarding it now.
Messages in this topic (1)
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5. Fw: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
Posted by: "Elliott Lash" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 6:13 am ((PST))
I am trying once again to forward the message that I sent to a private sender
to the list, here it is:
Hi, thanks for your interest. The article is actually inflectedted but not to
the same extent as in German.
You see two forms in the sentences given.
De See würe of den Esset ernören.
De and den.
There is also a genitive, dez or des. This is from. *tadi, withe the silinestic
genitive suffix -di.
There is no accusative form of the article, as you can see in the second
sentence given. This is because silinestic accusatives ended in -n, which is
lost at the end of words in Germanic language and therefore also in this ersatz
Germanic Lang. The German accusative article den is from a form with a final
vowel, as you can tell from its old English cognate, thone, with th replacing
thorn. I couldn't replicate this in the fake Germanic Lang.
I also couldn't create gender distinctions, as that is
completely foreign from silinestic.
The word 'of' is supposed to evoke auf in German. In fact both have similar
etymologies. Auf is cognate to English up, while 'of' is from opod, which
means up. It is cognate to silindion opho.
As for sên, this is of course utterly non-german. An alternative would be to
create a personal pronoun from the root *me, which meant here. Then I could
approximate the German mich or mir.
Elliott
________________________________
From: James Kane <[email protected]>;
To: Elliott Lash <[email protected]>;
Subject: Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
Sent: Sat, Jan 26, 2013 5:33:00 AM
This is very cool! I have been trying to give some of my descendent languages
the feel of certain of natural languages but not to this extent.
I am not that familiar with German but I can tell that it isn't Standard German
- the definite article isn't inflected and there doesn't seem to be obvious
morphological gender distinctions and the words of and sên seem somewhat
foreign - but I could very easily believe it was some dialectal variety.
This is a very cool project. Have you tried any other languages? I would love
to see a French or Romance lookalike.
James
On 26/01/2013, at 3:03 PM, Elliott Lash <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Dear all,
>
> I have not been posting at all for a few years, but I have been trying to
> keep up with the
conversations. One of my interests has always been to use my database of roots
for proto-Silinestic to create new languages, specifically languages that
sounds like they are sort of like weird versions of real actual languages -
like German for example.
>
> I have finally found a way to make it work! I think.
>
> Here are some sentences:
>
> De See würe of den Esset ernören.
> "The dove was sitting on the nest."
> *ta sêwa busî opod tanô ess-sida essnorani
> (ta = that, sêwa = dove, bu-sî 'be-past', opod 'over', ta-nô 'that-dative',
> ess-sida 'on/in-sit', ess-nor-ani 'on/in-dwell-pres.participle' - the umlaut
> of the 'ernören is due to influence from the infinitive which is from
> *ess-nor-ye-llo > er-nör-ie-l > ernör-e-l/n)
>
> By the way this would be, in Silindion:
> mistinë i siva emë i essiravi.
> mist-i-në i sivaemëessira-bi
>
sit-them-impfthedoveonnest-loc
> (this has a totally different word for 'sit', but the word ernor- 'dwell'
> exists in Silindion and is related to ernör- in the above 'Germanic'
> language).
>
> You see here that the 'Germanic' language uses the dative ending -nô on the
> determiner, but Silindion uses the locative -bi (which was originally a post
> position). I am assuming the proto-language did not have any case endings (or
> perhaps just an nominative-accusative-genitive system). I think that it is
> not unrealistic for related languages to differ with regard to the placement
> of post/prepositions and hence the different position of the later case
> endings can be explained.
>
> Another example:
> De Erzel fürte sên de Wetze!
> "The prophet told me the truth!"
> *ta arhtilo bur- sêt-ni de westitû
> (ta = that, arh-til-o 'future-see-er', bur- 'tell', sêt-ni 'me-dat', westi-tû
'true-abstr.noun')
>
> The Silindion would be:
> Avuri sinti i astilo i vestimán!
> a-vur-i sinti i astilo i westima-n
> AUG-tell-PAST me.dat the prophet the truth-ACC
>
> Note that the 'Germanic' language differs from Silindion in having another
> abstract noun suffix -tû instead of -ma - this I think is fairly common
> amongst related languages.
>
> The one thing to note her is that the past tense of the 'Germanic' language
> is -te. This is not directly from German -te, although of course it is
> modeled after it. Instead, I found a pre-existing that could wind up as -te,
> depending on how I worked out the sound changes and the syntactic changes.
>
> So, there is a root *sthe^ (^ = glottal stop) in Silinestic. The -th- stands
> for a aspirated 't'. This mean 'stand' (it is modeled on the PIE root of a
> similar shape). In Silinestic, its past tense was (a)-sth^-i. I
decided that sth- would be simplified to 'th' in the 'Germanic' language. This
would then change to 'd-' (aspirated t to voiced stop seems like a fair change
to me). Then this would be devoiced (in the equivalent of the High German Sound
Shift).
>
> This would give:
> sth^i > th^i > thi > di > de > te
>
> Now, where to attach this? I went with the infinitive:
> *bur-ye-llo 'tell-CLASS1-INF' (-ye- is one of several infinitive class
> markers that existed in Silinestic). > pur-ie-l (with the equivalent of
> 'Grimms law', devoicing voiced stops) > pür-ie-l (umlaut) > pfürie-l (HG
> sound shift) > fürie-l (further change) > fürien (final -l to -n, just to get
> it closer to German), and then füren.
>
> So, this gives you: fürente, with syncope (a general process in the language)
> you get: fürnte, which could be simplified to fürte.
>
> So what do you
think?
>
> Elliott
Messages in this topic (1)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
6a. Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 10:33 am ((PST))
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:03:16 -0800, Elliott Lash <[email protected]> wrote:
> Note that the 'Germanic' language differs from Silindion in having another
> abstract noun suffix -tû instead of -ma - this I think is fairly common
> amongst related languages.
What's actually really common, I think, is for a language to have a whole bunch
of suffixes (/ other processes) that it uses to make abstract nouns with
different fossilised frequencies and patterns of behaviour; just one would be
kinda weird. Of course, it is a very common historical development for
different such suffixes to become more or less productive.
> This ['th'] would then change to 'd-' (aspirated t to voiced stop seems
> like a fair change to me).
I must differ. To me, that change in one step seems actually impòssible if
there is also a [t] in the language: [t_h] and [t] and [d] only differ in voice
onset time, decreasing in that order, and since sound change is gradual [t_h]
cannot jump over [t] to become [d]. Now, as it turns out, the *other*
direction [d] to [t_h] is a common enough multi-step change in natlangs, with
breathy voice as an intermediate, [d] > [d_h\] > [t_h]; but I've never seen
this run in reverse (unconditioned voicing changes are virtually always towards
the unmarked, and voiceless aspirated are less marked than voiced). The
shortest way to get [t_h] > [d] I can see is [t_h] > [T] which in Germanesque
style > [D] > [d].
All that said, there are enough steps in your development that I'm sure you can
find another way around it that does not need [t_h] > [d].
> So what do you think?
Not my own cup of tea (I don't want my artlangs to have anything to do with
German or Romance or other top-twenty natlangs, that's just so còmmon), but
seemingly done with great craft. Bravo.
Alex
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
6b. Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
Posted by: "Elliott Lash" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 10:53 am ((PST))
Thanks Alex for your comments
(1) Silinestic languages have multiple abstract known formations, as you
suggested. -tû and -ma are just two of them. There's also -rhai and -wa and -lo
for some more that I can think of off the top of my head. The idea here is that
although all would be attested in the daughter languages, only some are
productive. Perhaps the 'Germanic' language chose to make -tû productive and
extended it to roots which would have taken -ma in the proto-language.
(2) As for the change from [t_h] to [d] change, I never implied that it was one
step, I would assume it moved through [t], but after the voiceless sound had
become [T]. So I am not sure if that renders your point moot, as I am not a
phonologist. Otherwise, I could just use your alternative method of deriving
[d], via [T]. That's fair enough.
(3) Granted this sort of thing might be not everyone's cup of tea. But I would
like to distance this type of endeavor from the more common approach to this
kind of a postiori conlanging, which is to take a proto-language reconstructed
by academic methods on the basis of real natlangs and then create a sort of
alternative development to wind up with a new branch on the tree for the same
language family. My design goals here are completely different. It is to take
mostly a priori roots and apply sound changes that are similar, but possibly
not identical to the sound changes posited in the development of the target
language. In this way I can create an A PRIORI language that is superficially a
like the target natlang. Of course Silinestic does have some influences from my
study of Indo-European, so it's not completely free of a posteriori effects.
What I have often found in the past in trying to do this with the Silinestic
roots that I have is that the
roots and the morphology that I designed for that proto-language do not really
constitute a phonotactically suitable system for deriving fake Germanic (for
example) via the actual sound changes that are posited for Germanic. That means
that I really have to think a lot about how to get the same or similar result
with different changes.
Thanks again for your comments and I am glad you thought it was done 'great
craft'! It was really just a quick attempt which I am sure can be greatly
improved. For instance, I have noted that 'Esset' (*essida) and Wetze
(*westitu) actually have the wrong development for 'd' and 't', if I want to
wind up with something approximating the history of Germanic. -d- should become
-t- and then (OHG) -zz- and then (NHG) -ss-, while -t- should become -T- then
-D- and then -t-, and in fact that is what usually happens even in this fake
Silinestic Germanic. However, since I like these words, I'll have to think of
some new non-Germanic sound changes that have the effect of creating Germanic
sounding words.
Oh, and finally, this language is a practice language and really would never
have developed in Oreni (the world where Silindion and its proto-language
Silinestic are spoken)
Elliott
________________________________
From: Alex Fink <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2013 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: Using pre-existing conlang Roots to create a new language
On Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:03:16 -0800, Elliott Lash <[email protected]> wrote:
> Note that the 'Germanic' language differs from Silindion in having another
> abstract noun suffix -tû instead of -ma - this I think is fairly common
> amongst related languages.
What's actually really common, I think, is for a language to have a whole bunch
of suffixes (/ other processes) that it uses to make abstract nouns with
different fossilised frequencies and patterns of behaviour; just one would be
kinda weird. Of course, it is a very common historical development for
different such suffixes to become more or less productive.
> This ['th'] would then change to 'd-' (aspirated t to voiced stop seems
> like a fair change to me).
I must differ. To me, that change in one step seems actually impòssible if
there is also a [t] in the language: [t_h] and [t] and [d] only differ in voice
onset time, decreasing in that order, and since sound change is gradual [t_h]
cannot jump over [t] to become [d]. Now, as it turns out, the *other*
direction [d] to [t_h] is a common enough multi-step change in natlangs, with
breathy voice as an intermediate, [d] > [d_h\] > [t_h]; but I've never seen
this run in reverse (unconditioned voicing changes are virtually always towards
the unmarked, and voiceless aspirated are less marked than voiced). The
shortest way to get [t_h] > [d] I can see is [t_h] > [T] which in Germanesque
style > [D] > [d].
All that said, there are enough steps in your development that I'm sure you can
find another way around it that does not need [t_h] > [d].
> So what do you think?
Not my own cup of tea (I don't want my artlangs to have anything to do with
German or Romance or other top-twenty natlangs, that's just so còmmon), but
seemingly done with great craft. Bravo.
Alex
Messages in this topic (8)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
7a. Re: USAGE: Symmetric and asymmetric formal and informal pronouns.
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Sat Jan 26, 2013 11:25 am ((PST))
2013/1/25, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>:
> [...]
>
> The usage of "tu" and "vous" has changed a lot in the last 50 years and I
> think it is still changing. My grandfather (67 years old) was using "vous"
> to talk to his father, but not all is sibling did because they were in the
> period this was changing. Personally, I only have heard one time in my life
> someone using "vous" for their parents and they were very old (I'm not
> counting the times I've heard it on television since some movie take place
> before 1960). Personally I always used "tu" with my grandparents (I'm 22),
> and using "vous" would feel very distant for me. Most people I know of my
> age use "tu" for their grandparents.
In Brazil, "você" was once the formal pronoun and "tu" the informal
one (I think it remains like this in Portugal), but "você" has been
"banalized", maybe in a hystorical proccess similar to that of English
"you", and the new formal pronouns are "o senhor" and "a senhora",
literally "the Mister/Sir/Lord" and "the Lady/Madam".
For instance, people would formally ask "O senhor quer água?" meaning
"Do you want [some] water?"
The pronouns "tu" and "você" are both used as the informal pronoun
depending on the Brazilian region you are. Interestingly, as the Bible
Portuguese translations always uses "tu" instead of "você", some
people consider "tu" more ellegant and respectful. I think that
similar phenomenon happens in other languages. It seems that exist a
formal/informal cycle...
[...]
> My mother told me to ask people whether they prefer me using "tu" or "vous",
> but that also feels awkward for me, because I feel that a person will not
> necessarily admit s/he preferred being call "vous" but still might be
> somewhat offended.
My mother never wanted to be called "a senhora" because she said that
she felt as being too old being called this way.
> Personally, I would prefer there wasn't this constant dilemma in my mother
> tongue, but there is. But I would rationally like to try to avoid using
> "vous" as much as possible, but I still often do because it feels more
> "right" and also because in some cases the person I'm talking to might think
> I'm a better person because of this, which I think is silly.
I dislike the "T-V distinction" as well.
Messages in this topic (8)
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