There are 10 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: Padraic Brown
1.2. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
From: Patrick Dunn
2a. Re: [x] in Swedish (was: Creating a Conlang with homophones)
From: Roger Mills
2b. Re: [x] in Swedish (was: Creating a Conlang with homophones)
From: Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
3.1. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: R A Brown
3.2. Re: Pesky morphemes
From: MorphemeAddict
4a. Creating A Prononominal System
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
4b. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
From: Robert Marshall Murphy
4c. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
From: yuri
4d. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
From: Daniel Burgener
Messages
________________________________________________________________________
1.1. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:46 am ((PDT))
--- On Sat, 3/23/13, Patrick Dunn <[email protected]> wrote:
> The English language (all natural languages, actually) doesn't have a
> birthdate. If you include any word, no matter how
> ancient, then you must
> stretch back to Middle English, Old English, Proto-Germanic,
> PIE, and back and back and back.
Actually, I did address precisely and exactly this point.
> And then there are non-words that nonetheless find their way
> into dictionaries, such as dord. Do we include them,
> because someone once
> thought that "D or d" was a word?
Well, having already been so kindly outed as a linguistical dick
comparator, YES, of course! What a silly question to ask.
> Also, the definition of "word" isn't simple. I will
> argue that
> "extra-large pepperoni pizza" is a single word, no matter
> how it's written,
> because it's morphologically impenetrable -- you can't say
> "extra-large
> delicious pepperoni pizza" without it sounding odd or
> wrong.
Argue what you will, then.
Padraic
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> > --- On Sat, 3/23/13, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> > > > I think it would be more useful to look at
> the words people actually
> > > > 1) recognize, and then 2) use. If a
> word is in the OED, but is never
> > > > found in the general culture - or anywhere
> outside of obscure literary
> > > > backwaters - there's not a lot of practical
> difference between that
> > > > word being part of the language and being
> truly foreign.
> > > >
> > > > Technical terms exist in every language that
> needs them - adopted if
> > > > necessary. So I don't think they should
> be counted. [...]
> > >
> > > The distinction is not clear-cut, though. For
> example, words like
> > > "oxygen" or "carbon monoxide" are clearly
> technical terms, yet in this
> > > day and age most people understand them even if
> they are non-chemists.
> > > And while most people *wouldn't* know what
> "monosodium glutamate" refers
> > > to, they *would* understand what its acronym "MSG"
> is.
> > >
> > > So where does one draw the line?
> >
> > Just popping in to say that me I'd draw the line broad
> and wide -- if the
> > word is now or has ever been an English word, no matter
> how ancient, no
> > matter how obscure, no matter how dialectical, no
> matter how foreign
> > seeming, then it gets counted. Just because a word is
> spelled with funny
> > little marks over some of the letters doesn't make it
> any less English.
> > MacKay said it best, of all our immigrant and newly
> coined words:
> > "[English] borrows, it steals, it assimilates what
> words it pleases from
> > all points of the compass, and asks no questions of
> them, but that they
> > shall express thoughts and describe circumstances more
> tersely and more
> > accurately than any of the old words beside which they
> are invited to take
> > their places."
> >
> > I see no problem at all with highly technical words or
> specialist words
> > and so also have no issue at all with older or more
> obscure terms. Like
> > with an honest census, if you're going to cut corners
> by arbitrarily
> > leaving out whole segments of the total lexicon, then
> any answer you
> > arrive at will be murchy cogging.
> >
> > We may never be able to say with absolute confidence
> "English has 849,423
> > words" -- we may never be able to say better than
> "English has something
> > like 850k words, give or take a few thousand". But it's
> better than lazily
> > saying "well, we didn't want to be bothered with all
> these horribly long
> > organic molocules; or foreign food; or any word that
> hasn't been used since
> > 1800; or any other word we just couldn't be bothered
> with -- so we just
> > ended up averaging the number of words per page in the
> AHD and hey presto!
> > English has 482,123 words!"
> >
> > The *only* line I'd draw a little bit narrow is obvious
> inflexional forms.
> > So, "car" and "cars" or "see" and "sees" don't count as
> two words -- both
> > have the same fundamental meaning. The only time a
> grammatical termination
> > should be counted as a word is if, for example, the
> plural of something
> > has a different meaning from the singular. For example,
> "men" where it has
> > the connotation of a team or a group of soldiers. I
> could be argued away
> > from this bit of line drawing, mind, if it proved to be
> to unuseful in the
> > context.
> >
> > Padraic
> >
> > > T
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Second Person, a chapbook of poetry by Patrick Dunn, is now
> available for
> order from Finishing Line
> Press<http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm>
> and
> Amazon<http://www.amazon.com/Second-Person-Patrick-Dunn/dp/1599249065/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1324342341&sr=8-2>.
>
Messages in this topic (47)
________________________________________________________________________
1.2. Re: "English has the most words of any language"
Posted by: "Patrick Dunn" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 6:06 am ((PDT))
>
>
>
> Argue what you will, then.
>
> Padraic
>
>
Thanks. Your permission means a lot to me.
--Patrick
--
Second Person, a chapbook of poetry by Patrick Dunn, is now available for
order from Finishing Line
Press<http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm>
and
Amazon<http://www.amazon.com/Second-Person-Patrick-Dunn/dp/1599249065/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1324342341&sr=8-2>.
Messages in this topic (47)
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: [x] in Swedish (was: Creating a Conlang with homophones)
Posted by: "Roger Mills" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 6:52 am ((PDT))
I've snipped the interesting list, but have an observation: It looks to me like
these (mostly) could originally have been [Z] or [S}, then merging > [S], then
> [x]-- which is also what happened in Spanish !!!! And a lot of them are loan
words.
I'm not entirely sure what happens in Dutch, but I do know that "baggage "
comes out as "bagasi" in Indonesian, so it looks like something similar has
happened to loans there too. And of course in Dutch *sk- > [sx- ~ sX-] and
Engl. [S] so maybe we could be on our way to [x[ too, though I doubt it........
Messages in this topic (14)
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2b. Re: [x] in Swedish (was: Creating a Conlang with homophones)
Posted by: "Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 7:12 am ((PDT))
On 27 March 2013 14:52, Roger Mills <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I'm not entirely sure what happens in Dutch, but I do know that "baggage "
> comes out as "bagasi" in Indonesian, so it looks like something similar has
> happened to loans there too. And of course in Dutch *sk- > [sx- ~ sX-] and
> Engl. [S] so maybe we could be on our way to [x[ too, though I doubt
> it........
>
In Dutch, "bagage" is [baËÏaÊÉ], or [baËÏaÊÉ] for those that lack [Ê]
(a
sound that is at best only marginally phonemic in Dutch, and only present
in loanwords). In any case, the second "g" is never velar or uvular.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/
Messages in this topic (14)
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3.1. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "R A Brown" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:32 am ((PDT))
On 27/03/2013 02:58, And Rosta wrote:
> 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
Maybe 'pret' should, then, be given a different name if it
does not have a preterite interpretation in some syntactic
environments.
> or in conditionals, e.g. "were she to").
But that is common in hypothetical conditionals in many
languages. The idea, surely, one of 'remoteness' rather
than literal past. It's a step further back from 'reality'.
[snip]
>>
>> 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".
Me too. But I was just referring to input to this thread or
to what started this thread. There does seem to be some
variation in what people understand.
[snip]
>>
>> 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.
Yes, but I am maintaining that a _morpheme_ is an _abstract_
unit, being the smallest grammatical unit in a language.
The phonological form is the actual instantiation of the
morpheme in a particular context. For {plural}, for
example, you do not only need plurality to trigger the
instantiation, you also need to know which particular
variant of the instantiation the stem morpheme triggers.
We need to know, for example that in _{car} plus {Plural}_
{Plural} is instantiated as /z/, whereas in {child} +
{Plural} the morpheme {Plural} is instantiated ax /rn=/ and
also triggers a vowel change in {child} /tÊajld/ --> /tÊɪld/.
> 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.
So it does! One lives and learns, even at my age ;)
I had not heard of LMBM before, but on doing a quick check
through various sources, it does seem very much in line with
the way my thinking has been going. It has seemed to me
that to use the same term (i.e. morpheme) form lexemes and
for affixes was not satisfactory. It would appear that LMBM
restricts _morpheme_ only to the latter, and distinguishes
between lexemes and morphemes thus:
1. lexemes belong to open classes; morphemes belong to
closed classes.
2. lexemes do not allow zero or empty forms; morphemes do.
3. lexemes have extra-grammatical referents; morphemes have
grammatical functions.
4. lexemes may undergo lexical derivation; morphemes may not.
5. lexemes are not paradigmatic; morphemes are.
Interesting.
[snip]
>>
>> 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.
Yes.
--
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 (54)
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3.2. Re: Pesky morphemes
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:48 am ((PDT))
On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Jeffrey Daniel Rollin-Jones <
[email protected]> wrote:
> That such a thing is possible is, of course, shown by the existence of the
> Afro-Asiatic family, the Semitic subgroup of which, in particular, has
> forms like Hebrew /yom/, "day", /yanim/, "days",
The plural of Hebrew /yom/ 'day', is /ya'mim/, not /yanim/. The dual is
/yomayim/.
stevo
> generalising even to loans in some cases (e.g. Arabic /bank/, as English,
> vs. /bunuk/, "banks". In the former case the lexeme could be said to be //y
> . OA . m//, in the latter //b UA . N . UØ . K//
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 24 Mar 2013, at 14:54, Patrick Dunn <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > You win me over with the idea that "sing" is /s_N/ where _ is /i/ ~ /@/ ~
> > /^/. You lose me with the assertion that you slipped in there that the
> {g}
> > is a morpheme separate from the {n}, when to my mind they're clearly just
> > an orthographic convention for representing /N/. Also, I don't imagine
> > what {s}, {n}, or {g} contributes to the word that /s_N/ doesn't.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 9:50 AM, And Rosta <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> David McCann, On 23/03/2013 16:34:
> >>
> >> On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:50:47 +0000
> >>> R A Brown<[email protected]**> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> How does one analyze _sing ~ sang ~ sung_ morphemically?
> >> First one would have to demonstrate the validity of analysing anything
> >> morphemically. The definition of a morpheme as the smallest meaningful
> unit
> >> of form rests on the presupposition that some units of form have
> meaning.
> >> For me, "morpheme" is the most perplexing term in the whole of
> linguistics,
> >> being neither obviously valid and useful nor obviously invalid and
> useless.
> >>
> >>
> >> The 1940s structuralists like Harris would say
> >>> sang = sing + PAST
> >>> where "sang" is an allomorph of "sing" and PAST has a zero allomorph.
> >>> The problem then was that they'd defined a morpheme as a set of
> >>> allomorphs in complementary distribution. So how do you study the
> >>> distribution of zero?
> >>>
> >>> A better approach would be to say that the word "sang" is exponent of
> >>> the lexeme "sing" in the context +PAST, while PAST has no exponent in
> >>> the context +sing.
> >>>
> >>> Generative linguistics would have yet another description. The
> >>> assumption (common to Harris and Chomsky) that any descriptive
> >>> technique is the only true method and applicable to all languages
> >>> is one that I find unconvincing.
> >>>
> >>> My favourite book on the subject is Morphilogy, by P. H. Matthews.
> >>
> >> In my current thinking, I take the stem of lexeme {SING} to consist of a
> >> sequence of morphonemes (as all stems do): //s . IAU . n . g//, where
> the
> >> morphoneme //IAU//, which also occurs in stems of {DRINK}, {SINK} etc.,
> is
> >> a set of syntactically-conditioned (rather than phonologically- or
> >> morphologically- conditioned) alternate phonemes /i, a, 3/, with /i/ the
> >> default and /a, 3/ the ones conditioned by certain syntactic factors.
> >>
> >> --And.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Second Person, a chapbook of poetry by Patrick Dunn, is now available for
> > order from Finishing Line
> > Press<
> http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm>
> > and
> > Amazon<
> http://www.amazon.com/Second-Person-Patrick-Dunn/dp/1599249065/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1324342341&sr=8-2
> >.
>
Messages in this topic (54)
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4a. Creating A Prononominal System
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:39 pm ((PDT))
Is his a limit on pronominal system creation? I know there's duals, and
four-person systems, so what else is possible? I'm not there yet, but
thought I'd ask the question now, while I'm working on the other sections of
the language and Yemoran vocal anatomy. Strangely, the pronoun section is in
with the verbs. I need at least six pronominal forms.
Messages in this topic (4)
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4b. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
Posted by: "Robert Marshall Murphy" [email protected]
Date: Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:54 pm ((PDT))
There's logophoricity: when different pronouns clarify things in subordinate
clauses (what English does with reflexive pronouns)
Certain European language have the so-called Zero Person.
The Obviative is called the Fourth Person.
Robert Murphy
On Mar 28, 2013, at 1:39 AM, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Is his a limit on pronominal system creation? I know there's duals, and
> four-person systems, so what else is possible? I'm not there yet, but
> thought I'd ask the question now, while I'm working on the other sections of
> the language and Yemoran vocal anatomy. Strangely, the pronoun section is in
> with the verbs. I need at least six pronominal forms.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Messages in this topic (4)
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4c. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
Posted by: "yuri" [email protected]
Date: Thu Mar 28, 2013 2:24 am ((PDT))
On 28 March 2013 19:39, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews wrote:
> Is his a limit on pronominal system creation? I know there's duals, and
> four-person systems, so what else is possible?
My conlang, KlaXa (or Klakha) has the basic I, you(s), [s]he, we,
you(pl), and they.
The first person plural (we) has two forms: inclusive (we including
you the hearer) and exclusive (us and not you).
The third person has three forms: this person here, that person there,
and some hypothetical person (similar to but not exactly like "one" in
English).
There is no distinction between gender. The third person pronoun can
be translated as "he" or "she". Any noun or pronoun can have the
suffix -wÄ«n or -tÄn to specify fem and masc respectively if such
distinction is required. (a virtual choc fish to anyone who can guess
the etymologies of -wÄ«n and -tÄn).
I don't know the grammatical/linguistic terms for all these things,
but that doesn't matter as I'm coining my own grammatical terms in
KlaXa.
Anyway, Nicole, there are many paths you can take. What would you like
your confolk to be able to express with pronouns? Make what works for
them.
Yuri
Messages in this topic (4)
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4d. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
Posted by: "Daniel Burgener" [email protected]
Date: Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:53 am ((PDT))
On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 2:39 AM, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Is his a limit on pronominal system creation? I know there's duals, and
> four-person systems, so what else is possible? I'm not there yet, but
> thought I'd ask the question now, while I'm working on the other sections
> of
> the language and Yemoran vocal anatomy. Strangely, the pronoun section is
> in
> with the verbs. I need at least six pronominal forms.
>
I asked a similar question on the list about pronouns a few months back and
got some very helpful answers which you might be interested in, regarding
some other options for pronouns. The first message is here:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=CONLANG;d1f9d3bd.1209A
I don't know how well your screenreader will handle the archives. Let me
know if you have problems and I'll copy the messages into a text file and
send it to you off-list so you can read it.
-Daniel
Messages in this topic (4)
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