There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
From: Padraic Brown
1b. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
From: Padraic Brown
1c. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
1d. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
From: Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews
1e. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
From: Alex Fink
2a. Re: Phoneme textual frequency
From: Roman Rausch
Messages
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1a. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Apr 27, 2013 7:57 pm ((PDT))
--- On Sat, 4/27/13, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
> > But you're probably not going to want to borrow your third person
> > plural pronoun from a *third* language just because English did: that
> > was weird.
>
> Really, English got its 3PL pronoun from a third language? Which one
> would that be?
It's from Old Norse þeir.
As I recall, we got quite a few words from our happy Viking neighbours!
But I think "they" is pretty close to unique, being the only "grammatical
word" we got.
Padraic
>
> One thing that has always struck me as very odd is the fact
> that IE
> pronouns seem to be all over the map. Are there any
> references that
> explain exactly where they came from and why?
>
> Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but when I see things
> like Russian
> _его_ (3SG acc.) vs. Greek _ἐγω_ (1SG nom.), or
> English _me_ (1SG acc.)
> vs. Russian _мы_ (1PL nom.), it makes me wonder if they're
> cognates, and
> if so, why such drastic differences in meaning? Or why in
> Greek various
> cognates of _αὐτο_ (reflexive pron., IIRC) came to be
> used as 3rd person
> pronouns (like _ἐαυτο_, etc.)? While, at the same
> time, other things
> like English _thee_ and Russian _ты_, or Russian
> _-(е/и)те_ vs. Greek
> _-ετε_ appear to have survived the ravages of time mostly
> untouched.
>
> Are these merely superficial coincidences, or signs of
> something really
> weird going on with IE pronominal systems?
>
>
> T
>
> --
> Perhaps the most widespread illusion is that if we were in
> power we
> would behave very differently from those who now hold
> it---when, in
> truth, in order to get power we would have to become very
> much like
> them. -- Unknown
>
Messages in this topic (15)
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1b. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" [email protected]
Date: Sat Apr 27, 2013 8:09 pm ((PDT))
--- On Sat, 4/27/13, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Also, can accent marks be used as letters, such the Star?
Sure, why not? They could possibly develop into letters. Much will
depend on the conlang in question and its writing system.
The 'rough breathing mark' becomes a letter (for the /h/ sound) in
Loucarian, for example.
People often use the apostrophe to represent the letter for the glottal
stop.
The only question becomes: why would you use the star or the dollar sign
or whatever for letters in one of your (presumably Yemoran?) conlangs?
You'd probably want to come up with a Yemoran system of writing, rather
than use the English one...
Padraic
Messages in this topic (15)
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1c. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:45 am ((PDT))
Thanks, guys. I know I French the grave accent is over the a and E has its
own accent. But I want the symbols to stand alone.
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Padraic Brown
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2013 7:51 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Conlangs and English Language History
--- On Sat, 4/27/13, Jim Henry <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>Also, it was common practice to add at the end of
> the alphabet the "&" sign as if it were the 27th letter,
> pronounced and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet
> would end in "X, Y, Z and per se and". This last phrase was
> routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into
> common English usage by around 1837.
> <<
>
> So yes, it used to be a traditional part of the alphabet,
> though an
> anomalous one (representing a whole word, not a single
> sound).
The trend continues, of course, where we use various synbols to
represent whole words or syllables. "4" has long been used to stand in
for the preposition. With the vast increase in text messenging and so
forth, we find "2" for "to", "8" for "ate", "u" for "you", "m" for "I am",
"r" for "are" and all sorts of other ligatures: ur, ru, cu; and of course
all those acronymy things that could be seen as something like ideograms
or even whole-sentence-o-grams.
We've used punctuatio marks to replace letters in comics for ages, though
I don't think the replacements were ever standardised. "A$$" is common
enough, and serves to defeat naughty word censors. This practice is
becoming standard online in order to defeat anti-spam software
> As far as I know it's always represented the word "and" in
> English.
Just as # represented the word "pound", and @ represented "at (the rate
of)"; though now both have expanded meanings in the digital media age.
> It originally was an abbreviation for "et" in medieval
> Latin
> orthography, and was adopted into English and French and
> perhaps other
> languages to represent native conjunctions with the same
> meaning.
>
> My gjâ-zym-byn has a number of morphograms and logograms in
> its
> orthography in addition to its letters. Whether you
> consider them
> part of the "alphabet" is a nitpicky bit of terminology;
Sure. I don't generally count them, but this doesn't mean the Natives
won't as well!
> they're part
> of the writing system, anyway, along with the punctuation
> marks and
> the diacritics. Perhaps in the strict sense the
> "alphabet" should
> refer to the subset of the writing system consisting only of
> signs
> roughly representing a phoneme, in contrast to whatever
> signs the
> writing system might have for syllables, whole words,
> stress, tone,
> intonation breaks, pauses, etc.
Yes.
Padraic
> Jim Henry
Messages in this topic (15)
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1d. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
Posted by: "Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews" [email protected]
Date: Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:53 am ((PDT))
I'd thought about creating another system, but not sure how I could
represent it on the computer or in Braille for that matter. They do use
leather scrolls called Prailea, which is similar to Braille in that it's
raised. However, everyone uses it, unless they're men, who can't read nor
write, and those with reading disabilities.
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Padraic Brown
Sent: Saturday, April 27, 2013 8:09 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Conlangs and English Language History
--- On Sat, 4/27/13, Nicole Valicia Thompson-Andrews <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Also, can accent marks be used as letters, such the Star?
Sure, why not? They could possibly develop into letters. Much will
depend on the conlang in question and its writing system.
The 'rough breathing mark' becomes a letter (for the /h/ sound) in
Loucarian, for example.
People often use the apostrophe to represent the letter for the glottal
stop.
The only question becomes: why would you use the star or the dollar sign
or whatever for letters in one of your (presumably Yemoran?) conlangs?
You'd probably want to come up with a Yemoran system of writing, rather
than use the English one...
Padraic
Messages in this topic (15)
________________________________________________________________________
1e. Re: Conlangs and English Language History
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Sun Apr 28, 2013 6:52 am ((PDT))
On Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:03:21 -0700, H. S. Teoh <[email protected]> wrote:
>One thing that has always struck me as very odd is the fact that IE
>pronouns seem to be all over the map. Are there any references that
>explain exactly where they came from and why?
The PIE system of first and second person pronouns has actually been relatively
stable, qua system -- certainly compared to what goes on in East Asia, for
instance. For instance, the suppletion in the first person singular with a
~vowel-initial form (< *(h1)eg'Hom) in the nominative and an /m/-initial one (<
*h1me/o-) in the oblique cases has survived remarkably.
There have been all sorts of structural changes, of course. This isn't
anything special to pronouns; structural changes in the morphology go on in IE
all the time. Most individual cases are hard to give any "why" for.
There are at least some broad trends. For instance, the dual pronouns were
usually lost early. The system of endings for oblique cases was also
undergoing restructuring during PIE: originally nouns and pronouns seem to have
had different endings, but the two paradigms were influencing each other,
making things a little messy; later on, case has been being degraded and lost
in various daughters.
And there are late phenomena which belong more to synchronic sprachbunds than
IE the clade, like the various restructurings in Western Europe following on
from the overloading of a politeness distinction onto the second person: thus
in English the old 2pl _you_ drove out the 2sg _thou_; in some other places
(e.g. Italian, German) third person forms have stepped in; many Spanishes have
in this way lost the second person as a category of the verb altogether, so the
person contrast is just first vs. nonfirst (and _usted_ < _vuestra merced_
isn't etymologically a pronoun).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_pronouns is a reasonable
overview of the protosystem.
>Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but when I see things like Russian
>_его_ (3SG acc.) vs. Greek _ἐγω_ (1SG nom.), or English _me_ (1SG acc.)
>vs. Russian _мы_ (1PL nom.), it makes me wonder if they're cognates, and
>if so, why such drastic differences in meaning?
These ones are coincidences. (I don't think the vowels match directly in
either case. Slavic /o/ is IE short *o (long *o: > Slavis /a/); Slavic /1/
comes from *u:, whereas I don't think there was any reason an old *u: could get
fronted in English in a historical monosyllable).
The Slavic case endings _-go_ (genitive/accusative; showing up in your Russian
_ego_) and _-mu_ (dative) are poorly understood, AFAIK. The latter seems to be
an irregular outcome of the PIE *-smoy; the former I don't know how to account
for at all.
Most of IE has a *w- form for the 1pl nominative, but Balto-Slavic and Armenian
have an *m- form. It's again unclear why. On the basis of the verbal subject
endings one might take a wild guess that the *w- stem was originally dual and
the *m- one plural?
>Or why in Greek various
>cognates of _αὐτο_ (reflexive pron., IIRC) came to be used as 3rd person
>pronouns (like _ἐαυτο_, etc.)?
I don't know much about this, but perhaps through a reduction of the old
contrast in object position -- reflexive for same as subject, basic third
person for different from subject -- in favour of the same-as-subject forms.
Or perhaps via their use as emphatics ("he _himself_").
>While, at the same time, other things
>like English _thee_ and Russian _ты_
_Thou_ is the exact analogue, actually, a perfect formal and morphological
match.
Alex
Messages in this topic (15)
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________________________________________________________________________
2a. Re: Phoneme textual frequency
Posted by: "Roman Rausch" [email protected]
Date: Sun Apr 28, 2013 5:36 am ((PDT))
>This is what one would expect. An approximate formula for the
>frequency of phonemes is the Gusein-Zade law:
>Fr = (log(n+1) - log(r)) / n
>where Frᵣ is the frequency of the sound ranked r and n is the total
>number of phonemes.
Testing the Talmit and Kymna frequencies (http://sindanoorie.net/glp/stat.html)
I get (first column is the actual frequency, second column according to the
formula):
Top 5 Talmit consonants (n=17):
n: 0.15 0.17
r: 0.11 0.13
l: 0.09 0.11
t: 0.09 0.09
k: 0.08 0.08
Top 3 Talmit vowels (n=6):
a: 0.34 0.32
e: 0.26 0.21
u: 0.16 0.14
Top 5 Kymna consonants (n=16):
m: 0.18 0.18
n: 0.12 0.13
r: 0.12 0.11
s: 0.09 0.09
t: 0.09 0.08
Top 3 Kymna vowels (n=7):
a: 0.29 0.30
u: 0.22 0.20
o: 0.14 0.14
Wow, this agrees remarkably well, all within 0.01-0.02, except that Talmit
seems to be a bit heavy on the /e/.
Messages in this topic (7)
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