There are 15 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
From: Padraic Brown
1.2. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
From: BPJ
1.3. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
From: Leonardo Castro
1.4. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
From: Leonardo Castro
2a. TED Talk
From: David Peterson
2b. Re: TED Talk
From: Gary Shannon
3.1. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
From: Logan Kearsley
4a. Not enough difference?
From: George Corley
4b. Re: Not enough difference?
From: Robert Marshall Murphy
4c. Re: Not enough difference?
From: H. S. Teoh
4d. Re: Not enough difference?
From: Alex Fink
5.1. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
From: Padraic Brown
5.2. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
From: George Corley
5.3. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
From: H. S. Teoh
5.4. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
From: George Corley
Messages
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1.1. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 4:29 am ((PDT))
--- On Fri, 3/29/13, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > > What about simply doing away with pronouns? People might address
> > > > their remarks indirectly by using the other person's title.
>
> > > Isn't that basically how Japanese works?
>
> > I think to a certain extent, yes. And Spanish, too, when you get down
> > to it and to a much more limited extent: usted < vuestra merced = your
> > mercy.
>
>
> Historically it did, but etymology is not meaning. I
> would doubt whether
> any native Spanish speakers still connect "usted" to the
> older meaning at all -- considering it has changed quite a bit.
The phrase has truly become worn. Though the Font of All Knowledge
article on Spanish Pronouns seems to indicate that "su merced" itself is
still to be heard, and it seems common enough knowledge what the origin
of Vd. is. I'm not sure I'd say that most Spanish speakers are ignorant
of the connection, though. I think it's understood to be terribly
archaic or terribly formal. Kind of like "thou" in English. Sure, there
are dialects here and there where thou is the normal 2s pronoun, but I
think it's true for most of the English speaking world that it's understood
to be formal and archaic and usually in a religious context.
> > We do it English too: your honor, your grace, your
> > excellency, etc.
>
>
> This is true.
And indeed Spanish is similarly replete with these pronouns: vuestra
señoría, vuestra excelencia, etc.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (33)
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1.2. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 5:57 am ((PDT))
On 2013-03-29 22:58, Roger Mills wrote:
> --- On Fri, 3/29/13, MorphemeAddict<[email protected]> wrote:
> Or simply use titles:
> Teacher to student: "Teacher would remind Student that the homework is due."
> Student to Teacher: "Student regrets to inform Teacher that the dog ate the
> homework."
>
> I understand that Thai does this sort of thing, even between mother and
> child.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> So does Indonesian, to a great extent. Some of the terms are short forms of
> real words-- pak instead of bapak 'father', bu for ibu 'mother', dik for adik
> 'yger.brother'. I was almost always addressed pak MIlls, then later in the
> conversation it would just be pak. I knew an Army general, who was ALWAYS pak
> jendral. ;-)
AFMOC Sohlob does this, including clipped forms -- of
titles in honorific language and of names in non-
honorific language. So there would be a whole scale of
forms of address for the philologist Fenderzoghd
depending on the speaker's and addressee's relative
status and relation to him.
- Hlagan Odrony : 'Professor' ("Master Teacher").
- Hlagan Fenderzoghd : 'Master Little-Elephant'.
- Hlag Fenderzoghd : 'Mr.* Little-Elephant' [^1]
- Odrony Fenderzoghd : 'Teacher Little-Elephant'.
- Hlagan : 'Master'.
- Odrony : 'Teacher'.
- Ojor Fenderzoghd : 'Prof Little-Elephant'.
- Ojor Fender : 'Prof Little'.
- Ojor : 'Prof'.
- Fenderzoghd : 'Little-Elephant'.
- Fender : 'Little'.
- Fend : 'Li'l'.
_Ojorfend_ 'Prof Li'l' would almost certainly be
offensive, BTW, and not just because of what _Fend_
happens to mean!
[^1]: "Mr." is hardly a correct translation here,
except etymologically. This is what another
person called Master would call him if they
were on somewhat familiar terms, and of the
same generation.
/bpj
Messages in this topic (33)
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1.3. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 7:01 am ((PDT))
2013/3/29 Gary Shannon <[email protected]>:
> What about simply doing away with pronouns? People might address their
> remarks indirectly by using the other person's title.
>
> For example, the teacher says to the student: "The teacher would remind the
> student that the homework is overdue."
I have an Amerindian pupil who speaks just like this! Her native
language is "Tupi Mondé".
Messages in this topic (33)
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1.4. Re: Creating a Prononominal System
Posted by: "Leonardo Castro" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 7:03 am ((PDT))
2013/3/29 George Corley <[email protected]>:
> On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
[...]
>
> Historically it did, but etymology is not meaning. I would doubt whether
> any native Spanish speakers still connect "usted" to the older meaning at
> all -- considering it has changed quite a bit.
>
>
>> We do it English too: your honor, your grace, your excellency, etc.
>>
>
> This is true.
BTW, do you know if the formal pronouns Sie (German) and Lei (Italian)
etymologically related to this kind of treatment. The word "honor",
"grace", "excellency" and "highness" are usually feminine (not sure
about German), ¿is that why those formal pronouns are feminine?
Messages in this topic (33)
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2a. TED Talk
Posted by: "David Peterson" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 9:18 am ((PDT))
Hey all,
I got the opportunity to give a TED University talk at TED last month, and they
put it online yesterday:
http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/29/meet-david-peterson-who-developed-dothraki-for-hbos-game-of-thrones/
It's very short (I was given 6 minutes; I took 7), and there's really nothing
here that isn't old hat for any conlanger, but I thought I'd share anyway.
David
Sent from my iPhone
Messages in this topic (2)
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2b. Re: TED Talk
Posted by: "Gary Shannon" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 9:35 am ((PDT))
Very cool! Now that your famous you'll have to hire people to answer your
fan mail. ;-)
--gary
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 9:18 AM, David Peterson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I got the opportunity to give a TED University talk at TED last month, and
> they put it online yesterday:
>
>
> http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/29/meet-david-peterson-who-developed-dothraki-for-hbos-game-of-thrones/
>
> It's very short (I was given 6 minutes; I took 7), and there's really
> nothing here that isn't old hat for any conlanger, but I thought I'd share
> anyway.
>
> David
>
> Sent from my iPhone
Messages in this topic (2)
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3.1. Re: Creating A Prononominal System
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 10:42 am ((PDT))
On 29 March 2013 05:07, Jyri Lehtinen <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been reading Foley's "The Papuan languages of New Guinea" and it lists
> some pretty strange ways for splitting the pronominal space. The most
> insane system are the singular pronouns of Ngala:
>
> 1.SG.M wɨn
> 1.SG.F nyɨn
> 2.SG.M mɨn
> 2.SG.F yɨn
> 3.SG.M kɨr
> 3.SG.F yɨn
>
> First of all the language extends the masculine/feminine split into not
> only the second person but all the way to the first person. On top of that
> it doesn't distinguish the feminine second and third person singular
> pronouns. I guess you have to have quite strict gender rules in your
> society in order to make this kind of a system stable.
Well, now I've got an ANADEW example for Mev Pailom's pronouns, which
also distinguish feminine and masculine first person.
Merging the 2nd and 3rd person feminine is certainly odd, but I don't
think it would require particularly strict societal rules to maintain
the first-person gender distinction. While I don't know of any other
language that distinguishes the *forms* of the pronouns specifically,
Russian assigns grammatical gender to first and second person pronouns
based on biological sex of the referent, and has different agreement
forms for predicate adjectives and past-tense verbs that depend on
gender, which creates morphological distinctions in the first-person
speech of men and women.
> Another strange feature of many Papuan languages is that there is
> apparently often a connection between the second person singular and first
> person non-singular pronouns. As an example Foley gives the personal
> pronouns of Suki:
>
> SG PL
> 1 ne e
> 2 e de
> 3 u i
>
> Many languages of the area also make only partial person distinction in
> their non-singular pronouns. So for example Awa contrasts in plural _ite_
> (1/2.PL) with _se_ (3.PL) and Iatmul in dual _an_ (1.DU) with _mpɨk_
> (2/3.DU).
>
> Some of these features are very strange and I would have considered them
> wildly unnaturalistic if I would have encountered them first in someone's
> conlang.
Now *that's* cool. It's sort of a mirror image of the 1st person
inclusive/exclusive distinction- English "we" is ambiguous between
including the addressee or not (but always includes the speaker),
while I'd guess Awa "ite" is ambiguous between including the speaker
or not (but always includes the addressee; if I'm wrong in that guess,
well, there's a cool conlang idea for you).
-l.
Messages in this topic (28)
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4a. Not enough difference?
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 10:56 am ((PDT))
Something that has been bugging me while working on Pahran -- I feel like a
lot of roots are coming through my sound changes untouched. Of 68 words I
have created so far (yes, I am slow with lexical development) 15 are
entirely unchanged, and many others have only developed in ways that are
clearly just allophonic variation.
Keep in mind that Pahran's sound changes are supposed to span 1000-2000
years. I haven't really been thinking about how syntax and morphology are
changing, either. Being a high-class, somewhat literary dialect, the
variant of Pahran I'm working on may well make sense to be a little
conservative, but it seems a bit TOO conservative at the moment.
Messages in this topic (4)
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4b. Re: Not enough difference?
Posted by: "Robert Marshall Murphy" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:27 am ((PDT))
I don't know about percentages, but as I study Ugaritic, there are so many
footnotes for words in Modern Arabic that are identical. Depending on the
original vowels, there are words in Modern Greek that are the same as Homer
would've said them. And again, both of these are literary languages.
Maybe if you create very specific rules that target the 15 words you've seen so
far, it will make the overall percentage come out very low.
-Robert Marshall Murphy-
On Mar 30, 2013, at 12:56 PM, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Something that has been bugging me while working on Pahran -- I feel like a
> lot of roots are coming through my sound changes untouched. Of 68 words I
> have created so far (yes, I am slow with lexical development) 15 are
> entirely unchanged, and many others have only developed in ways that are
> clearly just allophonic variation.
>
> Keep in mind that Pahran's sound changes are supposed to span 1000-2000
> years. I haven't really been thinking about how syntax and morphology are
> changing, either. Being a high-class, somewhat literary dialect, the
> variant of Pahran I'm working on may well make sense to be a little
> conservative, but it seems a bit TOO conservative at the moment.
Messages in this topic (4)
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4c. Re: Not enough difference?
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:29 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 12:56:17PM -0500, George Corley wrote:
> Something that has been bugging me while working on Pahran -- I feel
> like a lot of roots are coming through my sound changes untouched. Of
> 68 words I have created so far (yes, I am slow with lexical
> development)
Aren't we all? :)
> 15 are entirely unchanged, and many others have only developed in ways
> that are clearly just allophonic variation.
>
> Keep in mind that Pahran's sound changes are supposed to span
> 1000-2000 years.
Maybe you want to break that up into periods of, say, 250 years or so
each, and at each stage, apply yet another stage of sound changes?
> I haven't really been thinking about how syntax and morphology are
> changing, either. Being a high-class, somewhat literary dialect, the
> variant of Pahran I'm working on may well make sense to be a little
> conservative, but it seems a bit TOO conservative at the moment.
It seems that what happens with literary dialects much of the time is
that the vernacular has moved on in radical ways, but the literary
dialect (tries to) retain its original form. However, it's not truly
independent from the vernacular either; pronunciation for one thing will
change no matter what. What people try to do is to try to compensate for
it by developing a "literary pronunciation system" which is different
from the vernacular, but of course, that also tends to erode over time,
and sometimes people over-compensate, introducing supposedly
"conservative" forms that are actually not present in the original
literary language. The vernacular will influence this in both ways:
sometimes a colloquialism is imported into the literary language (though
this isn't too common), sometimes the literary language acquires new
anachronisms from over-compensation away from the vernacular.
As for syntax/morphology changes, if the language is actually being used
actively (as opposed to being, say, a liturgical language), then it will
definitely experience change. The most common phrases / segments will
tend to shorten, contract, merge, etc.: people don't like pronouncing
every last syllable if everyone already knows what the entire phrase is
going to be anyway. Once enough has been said that determines the rest,
you can pretty much bet on the rest just melting into a quick slur,
which over time will calcify into actual word endings, for example.
Sometimes the same word can split into a full form and a slurred form
due to context-dependent simplification: e.g., the -ÑÑ passive ending of
Russian verbs developed from ÑÐµÐ±Ñ (oneself) in the ancestral language,
but ÑÐµÐ±Ñ is still used in its original sense (and without contraction to
*ÑÑ) today. So you can see how the original construction of verb + ÑебÑ
came to be regarded as a unit, and over time contracted into verb + ÑÑ
(and even just -ÑÑ /s_j/ in some contexts), but outside of this context,
ÑÐµÐ±Ñ didn't erode at all.
Another Russian example: ÑпаÑибо ("thanks") is a contraction of
ÑпаÑи
Ðог ("God save"), yet both standalone words still exist unmodified
today. (Well, "unmodified" is not quite accurate, perhaps, the
pronunciation *has* shifted over time, but nowhere near as much as the
contracted form ÑпаÑибо did. IOW, the same word/phrase can undergo
different rates of "erosion", depending on the context! More generally,
different words may undergo different rates of change over time, such
that after a lengthy period of time, like your 1000+ years, some words
may be very close to the original but others have mutated beyond all
recognition. I'm sure you can think of all sorts of cases where this
could happen in your lang, creating new words or new morphemes from the
same original roots, and all sorts of fun stuff like that.)
(Marginally-related note: my favorite example of mutation beyond all
recognition is the fact that the Russian "ÑзÑк" /yazi\"k/ is cognate
with the English "language" /lE"NguIdZ/ (!). Now imagine if something
like this happened in the *same* language due to different changes being
applied in different contexts. Wouldn't that be cool?!?!)
T
--
What do you get if you drop a piano down a mineshaft? A flat minor.
Messages in this topic (4)
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4d. Re: Not enough difference?
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 1:10 pm ((PDT))
On Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:56:17 -0500, George Corley <[email protected]> wrote:
>Something that has been bugging me while working on Pahran -- I feel like a
>lot of roots are coming through my sound changes untouched. Of 68 words I
>have created so far (yes, I am slow with lexical development) 15 are
>entirely unchanged, and many others have only developed in ways that are
>clearly just allophonic variation.
>
>Keep in mind that Pahran's sound changes are supposed to span 1000-2000
>years. I haven't really been thinking about how syntax and morphology are
>changing, either. Being a high-class, somewhat literary dialect, the
>variant of Pahran I'm working on may well make sense to be a little
>conservative, but it seems a bit TOO conservative at the moment.
What sound changes have you got so far?
As a rule, sound change is subconscious enough that it is not the sort of thing
that can be noticed and retarded as it happens, even in a prestige dialect.
You can only attempt to undo it; and then only certain changes can naturally be
undone.
For instance, if I'm not wrong (Ray?), even when modern Greek was heavily
diglossic, the archaising Katharevousa was still spoken reading the vowels with
their Demotic-developed values, so e.g. single eta and iota and upsilon were
all still /i/, and there was never an inkling among users that it might have
been, much less conservatively Should have been, some other way. Effectively
the maximum extent to which written archaism can roll back sound change is to
undo those whose conditioning contexts are narrow enough that they look like an
_exception_, not just a non-one-to-one rule, of the spelling system. E.g.
Katharevousa read phi-theta as /fT/, since phi spells /f/ and theta spells /T/,
cancelling the effect of the Demotic sound change which took this cluster to
/ft/ (and similarly for other fricative-fricative and stop-stop clusters).
Arabic, by contrast, has retained the classical values of its phonemes in the
prestige tradition. The obvious explanation is that getting it right when
reciting the Qur'an mattered, but I'm tempted to attribute a good part of the
causality here as well to the fact that the modern Arabic varieties are so
diverse, and there's no pair of consonants which have merged across the board
in colloquial Arabic, so that awareness remains high that they're all really
distinct things. (And as for the vowels, well, those aren't written in normal
use but are written in these prestige contexts, so it's obvious what their
values Should be.)
And of course, if the writing system is non-phonetic, like Chinese, these
precise preservative forces don't apply. But the tendency is still to smooth
away exceptions, so instead you get things in Chinese like losses of secondary
pronunciations of characters which used to be different morphological forms, or
different words altogether.
So what type of writing system does Pahran have, and what's its history? What
other dialects are about?
Now, ordinarily, for someone complaining "my sound changes aren't enough! my
words aren't different enough!" my advice would be: sound changes aren't
everything in the world. If your lang's non-isolating, make some morphological
changes! Resegment some affixes, allow some stem extensions to accrete up,
forget the base of some derived forms and perform a new derivation to go the
other way, this sort of thing. Vastly underused, compared to sound changes.
And, of course, today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology, so change some of that
too.
But in your case, well, morphology and syntax are the sort of things which
prestige varieties are _good_ at being conservative with respect to, so perhaps
that advice doesn't apply here.
Alex
Messages in this topic (4)
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5.1. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:22 am ((PDT))
--- On Fri, 3/29/13, Krista D. Casada <[email protected]> wrote:
> Okay, this is just too funny:
> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tsk
Did I miss something? -- what's the joke?
Padraic
Messages in this topic (33)
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5.2. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:27 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> --- On Fri, 3/29/13, Krista D. Casada <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Okay, this is just too funny:
> > http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tsk
>
> Did I miss something? -- what's the joke?
>
> Padraic
>
Not sure. The audio, hilariously, only has the spelling pronunciation
/tIsk/.
Messages in this topic (33)
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5.3. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
Posted by: "H. S. Teoh" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:37 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 01:27:22PM -0500, George Corley wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> > --- On Fri, 3/29/13, Krista D. Casada <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > > Okay, this is just too funny:
> > > http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tsk
> >
> > Did I miss something? -- what's the joke?
> >
> > Padraic
> >
>
> Not sure. The audio, hilariously, only has the spelling pronunciation
> /tIsk/.
This is more real than you might think. My wife insists that "tsk" is
pronounced /tIsk/. She has never made the connection with a dental
click, and was genuinely incredulous when I explained it to her.
This is probably the result of the word (sound?) being transcribed into
text, with some readers having no idea what sound it was supposed to
represent. I wouldn't be surprised if, in another generation or two, the
original sound will either be lost (fully superseded by /tIsk/) or be
re-transcribed as a new, different word (and /tIsk/ will become an
independent word in its own right).
Such is the drama of language change.
T
--
Ðил-бÑл коÑÐ¾Ð»Ñ ÐºÐ¾Ð³Ð´Ð°-Ñо, пÑи нÑм блоÑ
а жила.
Messages in this topic (33)
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5.4. Re: More from the Popular Linguistics Front
Posted by: "George Corley" [email protected]
Date: Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:44 am ((PDT))
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 1:36 PM, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 01:27:22PM -0500, George Corley wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 1:22 PM, Padraic Brown <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > > --- On Fri, 3/29/13, Krista D. Casada <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Okay, this is just too funny:
> > > > http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tsk
> > >
> > > Did I miss something? -- what's the joke?
> > >
> > > Padraic
> > >
> >
> > Not sure. The audio, hilariously, only has the spelling pronunciation
> > /tIsk/.
>
> This is more real than you might think. My wife insists that "tsk" is
> pronounced /tIsk/. She has never made the connection with a dental
> click, and was genuinely incredulous when I explained it to her.
>
Oh, I didn't actually say it was wrong. For many years that was the way I
would say it, and I am a native speaker.
> This is probably the result of the word (sound?) being transcribed into
> text, with some readers having no idea what sound it was supposed to
> represent.
Hence "spelling pronunciation".
> I wouldn't be surprised if, in another generation or two, the
> original sound will either be lost (fully superseded by /tIsk/) or be
> re-transcribed as a new, different word (and /tIsk/ will become an
> independent word in its own right).
>
> Such is the drama of language change.
It will probably be replaced. Granted, I haven't done a study, but I
rarely hear the click much any more. It's very low frequency, anyway.
Messages in this topic (33)
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