There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Creating a Conlang with homophones
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
2a. Re: [Joke] Conscript
From: Padraic Brown
3.1. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: R A Brown
3.2. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: And Rosta
4a. Re: 12 types of language
From: Alex Fink
5a. Swedish /x/ (was: RE: Creating a Conlang with homophones)
From: Douglas Koller
Messages
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1a. Re: Creating a Conlang with homophones
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 26, 2013 7:13 am ((PDT))
Not sure why I thought it would be in Swedish. My screen reader did fine with
the list.
Thanks.
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of BPJ
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2013 3:17 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Creating a Conlang with homophones
On 2013-03-26 04:54, Douglas Koller wrote:
> Oh, come now. You can't just drop a little bon-bon
> like that and walk away. What *are* they? If there's
> a quick and dirty list of those somewhere, I'd be
> interested either here or offlist. I can probably
> come up with about half without breaking a sweat, but
> why have an aneurysm at 12 or 13 reinventing the
> wheel if there's an extant list? If there isn't such
> a list, it's okay -- I'll still get to sleep tonight.
OK here goes the official list, in alphabetical order.
The official list is even longer than mine because I
regarded some as instances of one of the others with a
silent _e_ or with doubled consonants, and I overlooked
some. All except those marked with * overlap with
other phonemes or sequences of phonemes. I don't know
what Nicole's screenreader will make of the list but I
tried to be mindful of marking it up sensibly!
1) ch -- chef.
2) che -- apache -- but I have /aˈpatɕe/ for this one!
3) g -- geni -- 'genius'.
4) ge -- bagage.
5) gi -- religiös.
6) ige -- beige.
7) j -- jour -- 'emergency duty'.
8) je -- damejeanne -- obsolete, unlike the name Jeanette.
9) sc -- crescendo -- I have /ʂ/ rather than /x/ in this word,
so I guess it's an unassimilated foreign
word for me; ditto for _fascist,
fascism_.
10) sch* -- schack -- 'chess'.
11) sh* -- shunt.
12) shi -- fashionabel.
13) si -- division -- only with the _-ion_ morpheme!
14) sj* -- sju -- '7'.
15) sk -- skön -- 'nice, comfortable'.
16) skj* -- skjorta -- 'shirt'.
17) ssi -- mission -- only with the _-ion_ morpheme!
18) ssj -- ryssja -- 'fyke (hoop) net'.
19) stg -- västgöte -- inhabitant of Västergötland/Västgötland
province, and only in these two words.
I guess the official spelling of the
name of the province makes yet another
spelling for /x/: _sterg_!
20) sti -- suggestion -- only with the _-ion_ morpheme!
21) stj* -- stjärna -- 'star'.
22) ti -- station -- only with the _-ion_ morpheme!
23) xi -- reflexion.
24) xj -- Växjö -- a place name /ˈvɛkxøː/ only;
Old Swedish _Wägh-siö_ 'Road Lake'.
/bpj
Messages in this topic (12)
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2a. Re: [Joke] Conscript
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 26, 2013 11:33 am ((PDT))
--- On Mon, 3/25/13, MorphemeAddict <[email protected]> wrote:
> Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> > Here's a nice joke about a "conscript" I saw on my Facebook ^^
> >
> > https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151366708121840&set=a.109041001839
> > .105995.21785951839&type=1&theater
>
> Since the letters are all distinct, that could actually work.
And therein lies the fatal flaw. Far too legible. Typically, a doctor's
writing is more characterised by random bits of straight lines (either
vertical or horizontal) interspersed with equally random jots and
squiggles:
http://www.adventuresoftubegirl.com/2009/09/doctors-handwriting.html
http://netajeekahin.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/why-doctors-write-illegible/
The old bromide being that doctors learn to write terribly while in
medical school, while nurses learn to interpret their terrible handwriting
while in nursing school.
> stevo
Padraic
Messages in this topic (3)
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3.1. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "R A Brown" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 26, 2013 12:07 pm ((PDT))
A longish answer as I sort out my thoughts :)
On 26/03/2013 00:35, And Rosta wrote:
> R A Brown, On 25/03/2013 14:03:
[snip]
>
>> But, of course, -(e)d ending is not only in preterite
>> contexts, but also in perfect participle contexts
>> (whereas _swam_ and _swum_ distinguish the two
>> contexts).
>
> In my analysis (which I have not presented in this
> discussion), perfect is a variety of preterite. (There's
> a contrast between preteriteness added to tense, which
> gives the 'past tense' inflected forms, and
> preteriteness in other syntactic environments (e.g. added
> to an auxiliary, to yield the perfect construction),
> which gives the default -en participial inflected form.
That's OK, I guess, for the 'perfect tenses' formed by
"have" (or, archaically, with verbs of motion, formed by
"be"). But with transitive verbs the so-called past
participle also does duty as a _passive_ participle. It
seems to me stretching things a bit to attribute
preteriteness to, say, "It will be seen by everyone."
> Only a mere 65 verbs distinguish past tense from
> participle form.
... and only two AFAIK that distinguish _may_ (i.e. not all
speakers observe this) show a difference between between
perfect and passive participles, cf.
I haven't proved it yet ~ It hasn't been proven.
Lisa has never showed a liking for red wine ~ The proof has
never been shown.
Oddly, those speaker that don't make the distinction use the
weak form 'proved', but the strong form 'shown' for both -
tho I suspect someone will quote speakers who do the
opposite ;)
But, interesting as an analysis of English verb usage may
be, this is a digression from the subject of morphemes
generally, especially in fusional languages.
[snip]
> rule to state the exceptional affix. I think it's
> simpler to have a rule saying "the worshape of preterite
> inflected {BUY} is not stem+d but rather _bought_",
>
>> I wondered if, at least, we might have morphonemic
>> //b.UY,OUGH// ??
>
> Seems reasonable.
Yes, on reflexion, it better to think of _bought_ as a
single word-form, rather than try to decompose it
phonologically into two separate morphemes. By doing so, I
realize now, one is merely encapsulating it diachronic
development - which happens to be known to us
I should have read on in Trask and not just have quoted his
definition of 'morpheme' simply to back up my thesis tat a
morpheme is not the same as a "unit of meaning." I should
have read on.
Not only would I have learnt that the term is older than I
had thought - its first attested use being by Baudoin de
Courtney in 1895 (_Versuch einer Theorie der phonetischen
Alternationen_, Strasbourg) - and that there was
considerable variation in the use of the word until "the
modern sense was established by Bloomfield (1933)" but I
would have got(ten) a better idea how Trask, at least,
understood 'morphemes.'
But before dealing with that, it seems to me that Trask is
in error in saying that modern usage is _established_ if
this thread is anything to go by! It seems to me that there
is still some variation in usage :)
Some may, indeed, continue to think Trask in error when I
expound below the way I'm coming to think about morphemes ;)
An important statement of Trask's is that a "morpheme is an
abstract unit which may or may not be realized by a fairly
consistent stretch of phonological material." There two
important things there IMO. One is that a morpheme (like,
indeed, a phoneme) is an _abstract_ unit.
When we start to confuse a physical realization of something
abstract with the abstraction itself, we can IMO confuse
both ourselves and others - hence the confusion every so
often on this list between phonemic & phonetic symbolism.
We have, it seems to me, been talking about the phonological
realization of morphemes rather than about morphemes
themselves, whether the morpheme concerned is suffixes (e.g.
loved) or infixed (e.g. swam). But Trask explicitly says
"which may or may not be realized by a ... stretch of
phonological material."
He goes to to say that "a noun plural in English usually
consists of two morphemes, a noun stem and the morpheme
{Plural}." But tho {Plural} is generally realized (in my
lect) as [ɪz], [z] or [s], there are others, e.g. sheep,
men, children, mice, radii, formulae, criteria, cherubim,
passers-by. Trask represents _feet_ as: {_foot_} plus {Plural}
>> The verb _see, saw, seen_ would seem to have at least
>> //s.EE,AW// (the comma is probably not the correct
>> symbol)
>
> (Make up the symbols as you see fit!) That also seems
> reasonable.
Thanks. But, following Trask, I will represent _saw_ as:
{_see_} plus {Preterite}.
As Trask treats _seen_ both as a perfect participle _and_ as
a passive participle, I'm not sure how he would describe
_seen_ morphemically.
>> I guess I'm trying to get a unified way of describing
>> what happens to English verbs in a preterite and in a
>> perfect participle context.
>
> Yes, that makes sense.
Thanks. I think I'm getting there, tho you may not go along
the way I'm dealing with things.
>> I was doing this with English verbs in order to get a
>> better idea how to describe the Latin verbal stems,
>> e.g. see: vidē ~ vīd ~ vīs break: frang ~ frēg ~ frāct
>> love: amā ~ amāv ~ amāt etc.
>>
>> The morphemic approach poses problems, and the
>> morphonemic approach doesn't appear any more helpful
>> ;)
>
> The amaa one looks relatively tractable.
At first glance one might suggest:
{amā} plus {Perfectum} realized as _amāv_
{amā) plus {Supinum} realized as _amāt_
BUT see below ...
I'll say no more about {Perfectum} other than the term is
used in L.R. Palmer in his "The Latin Language" (1954,
London), in contrast to Infectum ('present stem').
> Even the others could be handled like your suggestions
> for SEE and BUY, no?
Well, _frang_ has, as do some other verbs, an infixed -n-
so, maybe:
{frag} plus {Infectum} realized as _frang_
{frag} plus {Perfectum} realized as _frēg_
{frag) plus {Supinum} realized as _frāct_
The morpheme {frag} is justified by words such as:
_fragīlis_ "brittle, fragile; _fragmentum_ "piece broken
off, fragment"; _fragor_ "a breaking, crash"; _fragōsus_
"fragile, apt to be broken".
Indeed, the verb "to have" (regular in Latin!) with the
three stems - habē, habu, habit - clearly suggest that
{Infectum} is a morpheme, i.e.
{hab} plus {Infectum} realized as _habē_
{hab} plus {Perfectum} realized as _habu_
{hab) plus {Supinum} realized as _habit_
Also, remembering that besides the verb _amāre_, we have the
nouns _amor_ "love" and _amīcus_ "friend", clearly IMO we
should have:
{am} plus {Infectun} realized as _amā_
{am} plus {Perfectum} realized as _amāv_
{am) plus {Supinum} realized as _amāt_
Of course __amā_, __amāv_ and _amāt_ and the other triads
are all _stems_ or _bases_ onto which suffixes are appended.
I guess _habeō_ would be divided up thus //hab.e.ō//, the
them vowel -ē- being shortened before -ō.
But what are we make the final -ō. It's the personal ending
morpheme, I hear some say. True, but if we are dealing with
_abstract_ grammatical units, then we have, I guess:
{1st Person} plus {Singular} plus {Active} all realized as
the single vowel -ō.
Oh the joys of fusional languages ;)
> Roger Mills, On 25/03/2013 16:48:
[snip]
>
>> and how could it possibly account for be, am/are,
>> was/were, been?
>
> If a morphoneme is merely an alternation between chunks
> of phonological form, then you could have a morphoneme
> //be,am,are,was,were// (using Ray's notation).
As, following Trask, I've now adopted the notion that
morphemes are abstract and may be or may _not_ be realized
as chunks of alternating phonological forms, we now enter a
different world.
How, for example, can you satisfactorily split up Latin
_sum_ ("I am") in any meaningful morphonemic, or into
morphemes as credible phonological chunks?
I have seen it variously split as _su.m_, _s.um_ or _s.u.m_
- none seem entirely satisfactory to me.
I suppose, contrasting with _sumus_ "we are" and _sunt_
"they are" we could abstract su- as the 'stem'; but it falls
a bit flat when we consider _es_ "you [s.] are", _est_
"s/he, it is" and _estis_ "you (pl) are."
I suggest
_sum_ is the realization of {es} + {1st Person} plus
{Singular} plus {Active}
(Tho as the verb "to be" cannot be passive , maybe {Active}
is redundant; tho those who know Latin will know that if a
1st person singular form ends in -m it must be active -
passive has -r, or -or)
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
"language … began with half-musical unanalysed expressions
for individual beings and events."
[Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, 1895]
Messages in this topic (52)
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3.2. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "And Rosta" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 26, 2013 7:58 pm ((PDT))
R A Brown, On 26/03/2013 19:07:
> On 26/03/2013 00:35, And Rosta wrote:
>> In my analysis (which I have not presented in this
>> discussion), perfect is a variety of preterite.
>
> That's OK, I guess, for the 'perfect tenses' formed by
> "have" (or, archaically, with verbs of motion, formed by
> "be"). But with transitive verbs the so-called past
> participle also does duty as a _passive_ participle. It
> seems to me stretching things a bit to attribute
> preteriteness to, say, "It will be seen by everyone."
I agree it's stretching it. Nevertheless, I do stretch it. To put things
differently, there is something in the syntax that triggers the phonological
manifestation of 'pret' inflection, and has 'preterite' semantic interpretation
in some syntactic environments but not in others (e.g. not in passives or in
conditionals, e.g. "were she to").
>> Only a mere 65 verbs distinguish past tense from
>> participle form.
>
> ... and only two AFAIK that distinguish _may_ (i.e. not all
> speakers observe this) show a difference between between
> perfect and passive participles, cf.
> I haven't proved it yet ~ It hasn't been proven.
> Lisa has never showed a liking for red wine ~ The proof has
> never been shown.
I didn't know of that _showed/shown_ contrast. (But I've added it to my
notes.)
> I should have read on in Trask and not just have quoted his
> definition of 'morpheme' simply to back up my thesis tat a
> morpheme is not the same as a "unit of meaning." I should
> have read on.
>
> Not only would I have learnt that the term is older than I
> had thought - its first attested use being by Baudoin de
> Courtney in 1895 (_Versuch einer Theorie der phonetischen
> Alternationen_, Strasbourg) - and that there was
> considerable variation in the use of the word until "the
> modern sense was established by Bloomfield (1933)" but I
> would have got(ten) a better idea how Trask, at least,
> understood 'morphemes.'
>
> But before dealing with that, it seems to me that Trask is
> in error in saying that modern usage is _established_ if
> this thread is anything to go by! It seems to me that there
> is still some variation in usage :)
If I had more time I'd look at a range of textbooks to see how they treat
"morpheme".
> An important statement of Trask's is that a "morpheme is an
> abstract unit which may or may not be realized by a fairly
> consistent stretch of phonological material." There two
> important things there IMO. One is that a morpheme (like,
> indeed, a phoneme) is an _abstract_ unit.
>
> When we start to confuse a physical realization of something
> abstract with the abstraction itself, we can IMO confuse
> both ourselves and others - hence the confusion every so
> often on this list between phonemic & phonetic symbolism.
>
> We have, it seems to me, been talking about the phonological
> realization of morphemes rather than about morphemes
> themselves, whether the morpheme concerned is suffixes (e.g.
> loved) or infixed (e.g. swam). But Trask explicitly says
> "which may or may not be realized by a ... stretch of
> phonological material."
>
> He goes to to say that "a noun plural in English usually
> consists of two morphemes, a noun stem and the morpheme
> {Plural}." But tho {Plural} is generally realized (in my
> lect) as [ɪz], [z] or [s], there are others, e.g. sheep,
> men, children, mice, radii, formulae, criteria, cherubim,
> passers-by. Trask represents _feet_ as: {_foot_} plus {Plural}
That's almost how I do inflection, except that Plural (or Preterite, and so
forth) is a syntactic category. So on the one hand on the phonology side of the
sentence you've got your variant phonological shapes, //f . OO,EE . t//,
"stem+z", etc., and on the other hand on the syntactic side of the sentence
you've got the things, such as Plural, that trigger the phonological variants.
Lexeme Morpheme Base Morphology does this too, and calls "morphemes" the
syntactic things that correspond not to lexemes but to phonological
inflectional variants or to function words.
>>> The verb _see, saw, seen_ would seem to have at least
>>> //s.EE,AW// (the comma is probably not the correct
>>> symbol)
>>
>> (Make up the symbols as you see fit!) That also seems
>> reasonable.
>
> Thanks. But, following Trask, I will represent _saw_ as:
> {_see_} plus {Preterite}.
They're not mutually exclusive. {saw} is another name for //s.EE,AW//, the
latter giving info about the phonological shape.
--And.
Messages in this topic (52)
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4a. Re: 12 types of language
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 26, 2013 12:12 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, 26 Mar 2013 08:16:54 -0400, Jim Henry <[email protected]> wrote:
>On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 7:06 PM, MorphemeAddict <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Mathieu Roy <[email protected]>wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.dailywritingtips.com/12-types-of-language/
>>>
>>> I was expecting quite different kinds of types.
>
>Yes, this isn't any kind of coherent classification system, but just a
>vocabulary-building article with a few random bits of language-related
>terminology. Looking at the domain name in the URL explains why.
But perhaps useful to us therefore as a conlang vocab-building exercise. How
does your conlang express these, how does it divide the semantic space up in
this area? Seems like a good place to show off your speakers' sociolinguistic
attitudes, especially.
I haven't really got anything in my conlangs for kinds of language, or
non-neutral words for languages. The closest I can think of in one of my
conlangs is in Ājat he-Heloun, from the Akana project. In AhH the noun _kaj_,
besides its concrete sense 'tongue', means anything from 'language' through
'dialect' or 'register' to 'poetic form' or 'literary genre', but the ?proper
noun _Ājat_ appearing in its name means 'language descending from Adāta (the
grandparent language)'. I posited the latter word as part of an attempt to
grapple with the very unnatural fact that the names of nearly all the
descendants of Adāta have as their name the sound-change descendant of _Adāta_
(compare that most Romance languages are not called "Romanian" or "Ladino") --
at the least, that probably means the speakers of these languages are aware and
proud of their linguistic heritage or something, right?
There's also a derisive verb _pfǝ̄p_ 'speak with an accent containing [pf)]'
which only some non-standard dialects have; I think I had it perceived as
hickish or something.
Alex
Messages in this topic (4)
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5a. Swedish /x/ (was: RE: Creating a Conlang with homophones)
Posted by: "Douglas Koller" [email protected]
Date: Tue Mar 26, 2013 8:38 pm ((PDT))
> Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:42:49 +0100
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Creating a Conlang with homophones
> To: [email protected]
> On 2013-03-26 11:17, BPJ wrote:
> > OK here goes the official list, in alphabetical order.
Thank you. I did *not* see these coming:
> > 4) ge -- bagage.
> > 5) gi -- religiös.
> > 6) ige -- beige.
> > 7) j -- jour -- 'emergency duty'.
> > 8) je -- damejeanne -- obsolete, unlike the name Jeanette.
> > 9) sc -- crescendo -- I have /ʂ/ rather than /x/ in this word,
> > 18) ssj -- ryssja -- 'fyke (hoop) net'.
> > 19) stg -- västgöte -- inhabitant of Västergötland/Västgötland
> > province, and only in these two words.
And lo, he did pronounce and make the native speakers cringe.
Kou
Messages in this topic (12)
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