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There are 17 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. The Czech Sound
From: bob thornton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: Unattested... but possible?
From: bob thornton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. Re: OT: continents
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: Sumerian Lexicon
From: Thomas Wier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: Adunaic case system
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: "hewed to"
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: The Czech Sound
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
8. Re: Unattested... but possible?
From: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: Adunaic case system
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: The Czech Sound
From: Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: list troubles
From: Tristan McLeay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: list troubles
From: Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: Sumerian Lexicon
From: Kevin Athey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: Adunaic case system
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: Adunaic case system
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: Adunaic case system
From: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
17. Re: Adunaic case system
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 19:34:12 -0800
From: bob thornton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: The Czech Sound
Does anyone have a recording or an attestation of the
infamous Czech sound? (/r_r/, the r-hachek in Czech)
And does anyone know from whence it comes, and what
conditions led it into existence? These things, they
interest me.
-The Sock
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 2
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 19:55:14 -0800
From: bob thornton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Unattested... but possible?
SOMEONE must mention Tatari Faran and Thenqol. Those
two are insane, and yet seem very plausable.
-The Sock
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 3
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 04:03:03 +0000
From: Rodlox R <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OT: continents
>From: damien perrotin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Re: OT: continents
>Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 00:52:58 +0100
>
>Skrivet gant # 1:
>
>>Do y'all know where I could find the etymology of the continents' names?
[snip]
>>But, particularily for Asia and Africa, where are the names from?
>>
>>Could someone help me?
>America comes from the name of an Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
>Africa was originally the name of a Roman province created on what had
>been carthage (present day Tunisia). The name itself meant "land of the
>Afri (singular afer). Nobody knows for sure what the Afri were
could the name be related to the Afar tribes of northeastern Africa?
*curious*
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Message: 4
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 00:34:34 -0600
From: Thomas Wier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Sumerian Lexicon
From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[In Sumerian]
> Many of the 'V-only' words actually have longer 'variants', which are
> probably their true forms. However, I find it unrealistic that a word of
> the form /a/ can have such diverse meanings as 'water', 'tears',
> and 'father' and that a word of the form /u/ can have such diverse
> meanings as 'sleep', 'cock', and 'plant'. Even if such meanings were
> distinguished by tone, I find it hard to believe that rather complex
> concepts were expressed monophonemically in Sumerian.
Why? Many languages don't lexically distinguish 'water' and 'tears',
and thus it is not surprising if they look segmentally the same.
And it's quite easy, if languages allow monophonemic free morphemes
at all, for there to be a number of homophonous forms. Just look
at English /o/, with a number of verb entries every bit as different
as 'water' and 'tears' (to be in debt, have a characteristic, to
be attributable to) and others completely unrelated, like the
archaic vocative particle, the exclamation, the name of a letter of
the alphabet, or any number of metaphors for roundness, such as
Shakespeare's "wooden O" [=the Globe Theater]. Why is any of this
surprising?
Above and beyond this, it's entirely unclear to me why these concepts
are complex, nor why there should be any relationship between simplex
words and complex concepts.
> As I understand it, by the time Sumerian was represented syllabically,
> it was no longer really a living tongue. Also, there are
> inconsistencies in its representation by various Akkadian scribes.
> Finally, since Sumerian and Akkadian (i.e. Semitic) were such
> different languages, it's definitely likely that some (if not many)
> things were 'lost in translation'.
These are all true, but nonetheless, I think a certain amount of
positivism is necessary with these texts, if not taken to extremes,
since that's all we have to go on. Tones? Yes, probably. Extra
segments which just get left off? Well, maybe, but to make this
more than whimsy you need to provide concrete evidence. There are
just too many languages where the phenomena you discuss here are
present.
> It is an interesting exercise to try to connect Sumerian with existing
> language groups. From what I understand, the Sumerians migrated to
> southern Mesopotamia from the north, either from the Caucasus region or
> from the Zagros Mountains south of the Caspian Sea. Based on this,
> Sumerian could have been related to the following language families:
>
> 1. North-West Caucasian
> 2. North-East Caucasian
> 3. North-Central Caucasian
> 4. Hattic
> 5. Hurro-Urartian
> 6. Elamo-Dravidian
> 7. Kartvelian
>
> Of course, it could very well have no living relatives.
There is no real evidence linking Sumerian to any of these languages.
Northwest Caucasian languages are ergative, yes, but that alone hardly
suffices. Starostin and Diakonoff have argued for a relationship between
H-U and NEC, but there's great controversy about this, and even
they don't suggest a link to Sumerian. "Northcentral Caucasian"
doesn't exist as such, except as a name for a subfamily of Northeast
Caucasian, the Nakh languages. According to one Elamitist here at the
UoC, there's no evidence suggesting a genetic link between Sumerian and
Elamo-Dravidian (and even the latter family is debatable). I can attest
that Kartvelian is so radically different, and AFAIK has so few ancient
cognates with Sumerian, that there is no link. I know too little about
Hattic, but I seem to recall that it's linked to Northwest Caucasian,
which is superficially plausible based on what I've read. (I own an
unpublished 1000-page grammar of the language, a printout of a PDF, but
it's in German and I've only read 75-100 pages or so of it, and
haven't had the time to wade through the rest. Really, the number
of people qualified to answer the question could fit around a small
table comfortably, and I wouldn't be among them.) The best answer right
now, with known data, is in all likelihood that it's not related to any
known language family.
==========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 07:04:19 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Adunaic case system
On Saturday, March 19, 2005, at 04:12 , Patrick Littell wrote:
>> I don't think I've run across anything quite like the subjective and
>> objective cases elsewhere. (They're not much like nominative and
>> accusative.) Are
>> there natural language precedents?
>
> It's very unusual, although not impossible, for the subject to be less
> marked than the object. (Presuming, of course, that when Tolkien says
> the "subject of a verb" he means both transitive and intransitive
> ones.) It violates Greenberg's universal #38:
But IME almost all Greenberg's 'Universals' are violated by some natlang
or other. My understanding is that at best they are "universal
_tendencies_". In any case, the Normal (i.e. unmarked) form of the noun is
used as the subject of verbs (both transitive & intransitive) in Adunaic
if the verb has pronominal prefixes.
[snip]
> -- Subjective is used for the subjects of both intransitive and
> transitive verbs. (I figure if they were treated differently, Tolkien
> would have mentioned it.)
except that Tolkien never completed his description of Adunaic - the
"Lowdham's Report" in the posthumously published 'Sauron Defeated' breaks
off before it reaches the verb. But there is certainly no evidence I know
of that the two types of verb would be treated differently.
> That's really all there is to Nominative.
yep - but Adunaic 'Subjective' has other uses not covered by the
Nominative.
> -- Normal being used for direct objects (that are not part of a
> compound expression.) I'd call this accusative with little
> hesitation.
Normal may also be used as subject - see above - and complement of "to be"
.
[snip]
> -- Genitive case being used for object incorporation. (I would treat
> (i) -- the object coming right before the verb, getting a different
> case than usual, and being treated as a compound expression -- as
> object incorporation.)
That's not how I understand Adunaic 'Objective' - it occurs _only_ in
compounds and reminds me far more of the 'construct state' of the Semitic
langs. I think equating with 'genitive' is incorrect; possession is shown
by the prefix _an-_ which is often reduced to _'n-_ (e.g. Bâr 'nAnadûnê
"Lord of Anadune"; Narîka 'nBâri 'nAdûn "The Eagles of the Lords of th
West").
(â = a circumflex; ê = e circumflex; î = i circumflex; û = u circumflex)
===============================================
On Saturday, March 19, 2005, at 04:20 , David J. Peterson wrote:
[snip]
> If I undertand these very vague descriptions correctly, then, yes,
> there are precedents. The "objective" simply sounds like the genitive,
I do not agree - see above.
> only Tolkien gave it a different name. Possibly to cover cases
> like the following:
>
> His stealing of the food.
> His killing by the murderer.
>
> Imagine the above were in a language that had a genitive case.
> "He" might just be in the genitive case, only in one instance it would
> be the object of the nominalized verb, and in other instance it
> would be the subject. Latin made this distinction by using a possessive
> pronoun for one, and a noun/pronoun in the genitive for the
> other (I always forget which was which).
Mainly because Latin did not make the distinction! It was potentially as
ambiguous as English, tho objctive genitives are more common than
subjective ones.
[snip]
> As for the subjective, it doesn't sound like a case, but a copula.
> Quoting the two examples:
>
> _Ar-Pharazon kathuphazganun_ = 'King Ar-Pharazon the Conqueror'.
> Contrast _
> Ar-Pharazonun kathuphazgan_ = 'King Ar-Pharazon is (was) a Conqueror'.
>
> One is a noun phrase (the top one), which would need to be
> used in a sentence with a non "fully inflected verb".
Yes, the Normal form _kathuphazgan_ is used for the complement - the
Subjective _kathuphazganun_ shows the noun is in apposition to
_Ar-Pharazon_, i.e. the first is not a sentence.
> The second
> is a sentence. So, then, it's not a case,
I agree.
[snuip]
> The "normal" is a case only in the sense that the nominative is
> a case for common nouns (not pronouns) in English. That is, if
> you want to say English is a case language, then all common
> nouns can be inflected for one case--the nominative--and they're
> always in the nominative, no matter what construction they're
> in.
Basically - I agree. The Normal is the unmarked form of the noun.
> In other words, this is no more than a misuse of the word "case",
> and possibly a misunderstanding of the concept of "case".
I doubt that Tolkien had really misunderstood 'case'. My information is
that "it [Adunaic noun] is inflected for three forms that may be called
cases" which suggests that they are not cases in the traditional use that
Tolkien was familiar with from Greek, Latin, Old english, Old Norse &
Finnish. But I do agree that calling these forms 'cases' is not helpful
and I suspect that had Tolkien got around to revising & completing his
description of Adunaic he may well have defined things differently.
It seems that Adunaic was meant to have a "faintly Semitic flavour"
(SD:240). It has, for example, triconsonantal word-bases, thus G-M-L (star)
producesactual words such as: gimli, gimlê, gimlu, igmil etc.
As I have said, Adunaic 'Objective' reminds me more of the 'construct
state' than anything else. Maybe one should be looking at Semitics langs
for the inspiration of Adunaic noun forms: Normal, Subjective, Objective.
Steg? Yitzik? Any ideas?
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
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Message: 6
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 07:07:17 +0000
From: Ray Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "hewed to"
On Friday, March 18, 2005, at 09:24 , David G. Durand wrote:
> Obviously, any usage can be thought of as wrong, but this one seems
> quite well established.
Which one? The carpenter's usage or the one in the quote from tom Purdum?
> The OED doesn't have this usage, but has
> several citations of hew in the sense of forming or shaping, as by
> masons or carpenters, including "hewing the arch of a perfect circle"
> (slight mangling possible as it's back on the shelf now.
But _no one_ has said that is wrong! The verb is normally transitive &
means 'to cut, to shape'. AFAIK this is normal usage - as far as the verb
is used at all now in most of the anglophone world.
>
>
> here's on etymology, courtesy of
>
> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hew
>
> hew
>
> O.E. heawan "to chop, hack, gash" (class VII strong verb; past tense
Yes, yes - I know the etymology.
[snip]
> forge;" L. cudere "to strike, beat;" M.Ir. cuad "beat, fight"). Weak
> pp. hewede appeared 14c.
Did it? As I said, both 'hewed' and 'hewn' are normally accepted by
presciptivists past participles, tho only 'hewed' is used as the preterite.
> Seemingly contradictory sense of "hold fast,
> stick to" (in phrase hew to) developed from hew to the line "stick to
> a course," lit. "cut evenly with an axe or saw," first recorded 1891.
I.e. a metaphor from woodworking.
>
>> Mr Purdum's usage seems to me to be on a par with a south Walian
>> councillor I once heard on the radio talking about a "resumé of work"
>> when
>> he meant a _resumption of work_ - trying to use a fancy phrase and
>> choosing the wrong word!
Yes, I have since learnt by private email that the term is used as Todd
Purdum used it, but it seems mainly (only?) in political contexts (as
indeed it was) & it also seems to be essentially an Americanism. But I
admit I was wrong about Todd Purdum.
What misled me was the notion that he meant 'clinging to' as _cleaving to_
would mean. I feel certain, as my informant suggested, that the term in
fact derives from the woodworking term as Elyse Grasso said and, indeed,
as you say above. It would seem that the metaphor in Todd Purdom's "Mr.
Wolfowitz's career has hewed to those same unshrinking precepts... " is
that of shaping one's life by cutting back on everything else to
concentrate on a particular objective.
But I confess I not come across this metaphorical use this side of the
Pond (maybe it's on its way over :)
Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason." [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 7
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 08:08:07 +0000
From: Chris Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: The Czech Sound
I suspect it came from the palatization common in all the slavic
languages, but that's just a guess.
>Does anyone have a recording or an attestation of the
>infamous Czech sound? (/r_r/, the r-hachek in Czech)
>And does anyone know from whence it comes, and what
>conditions led it into existence? These things, they
>interest me.
>
>-The Sock
>
>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
>Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
>
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
>http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
>
>
>
>
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Message: 8
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 09:06:26 +0000
From: Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Unattested... but possible?
bob thornton wrote:
>SOMEONE must mention Tatari Faran and Thenqol. Those
>two are insane, and yet seem very plausable.
>
>
>
Is Tatari Faran as good as Ebisedian?
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 9
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 01:50:36 -0800
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Adunaic case system
Replying out of order to several:
Ray wrote:
<<
Mainly because Latin did not make the distinction! It was potentially as
ambiguous as English, tho objctive genitives are more common than
subjective ones.
>>
Ah, I see. I saw it written in the grammar section of a Latin
dictionary. But, then again, how reliable is the grammar section
of a Latin dictionary that has Latin words for "computer" and
"telephone" in it going to be? It would be nice if it made the
distinction, though. It's an interesting distinction to make.
Now on to Adunaic. I think what may have been confusing me
was the description of the Normal. I think it might be easier to
think that the Normal is used wherever the Objective and
Subjective aren't, and that the description is an attempt to
capture this. So let me look over the whole thing again.
Quoting Doug's original:
<<
The Objective (O) form is used only in compound expressions, or actual
compounds.
>>
Problem 1: What's the difference between a compound expression and
an "actual" compound!?
Anyway, looking at the actual examples, you have (I'm rewriting
them here for ease):
/minul tarik/
heaven-OBJ. pillar-NOR.
"pillar of heaven"
This looks like the English possessive "heaven's pillar". This isn't
like
the construct state. Consider the following Arabic example:
sajaara al-waalid
/car DET.-father/
"Father's car."
Here, the determiner is only placed on the last noun of a compound
phrase (and *only* that noun), so you could get:
sajaara bint al-waalid
/car daughter DET.-father/
"The car of the daughter of the father."
Oh, I see... I just looked this up, and I guess the form of Arabic I
learned no longer has the construct state, because it no longer
really has case endings. Go here for more info:
http://www.answers.com/topic/arabic-grammar
Anyway, the other form is
/minal tarik/
heaven-NOR. pillar-NOR.
"heavly pillar"
And in this example, the first is just an adjective (I assume it's in
the normal...?). So based only on this example, it looks like the
genitive case in Turkish, or the 's possessive in English.
This would seemly contradict point (ii), quoted here:
Doug:
<<
(ii) Before another noun it is either (a) in apposition to it, or (b)
in and
adjectival or possessive gentive relation. . . .
>>
The second example above would obviously be point (b), but only
the "adjectival" part of it, not the "possessive genitive relation"
part.
It would be interesting to see an example of the latter compared to
the objective example. Oh, wait, now I see. Quoting the last sentence
in the objective example:
Doug:
<<
_minal-tarik_ would mean 'heavenly pillar', sc. A pillar in the
sky, or made of cloud.
>>
"A pillar made *of* cloud." Perhaps Tolkien thought of that as
a "possessive genitive relation", rather than a relation of composition.
If so, that would make the objective a genitive.
But Ray wrote:
<<
I think equating with 'genitive' is incorrect; possession is shown
by the prefix _an-_ which is often reduced to _'n-_ (e.g. Bâr 'nAnadûnê
"Lord of Anadune"; Narîka 'nBâri 'nAdûn "The Eagles of the Lords of th
West").
>>
So there's three different ways to mark possession in this language
(the Normal, the Objective, and this an- prefix), and no way to
distinguish any of them? That is, all three types of possession are
the same? Because while what you listed above is different from
the possession example listed in the Objective section, nowhere is
it stated that it *is* different. This is beginning to seem more and
more like an unfinished sketch. Perhaps if it had been finished
these kinks would've been ironed out. As it is, it seems a little
jumbled.
-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 10
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 12:21:20 +0200
From: Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: The Czech Sound
Chris Bates wrote:
> I suspect it came from the palatization common in all the slavic
> languages, but that's just a guess.
>
> >Does anyone have a recording or an attestation of the
> >infamous Czech sound? (/r_r/, the r-hachek in Czech)
> >And does anyone know from whence it comes, and what
> >conditions led it into existence?
That's true. |r^| /r_r/ is the result of palatalization of /r/. First
attested in a 1297 manuscript (written as |rs| and |rz|):
*/morjo/ 'sea' > /morje/ > /mor;e/ > /mor_re/.
In Polish the process mowed one step further, making it [z`]: |morze|
["moz`e].
-- Yitz
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Message: 11
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 22:13:55 +1100
From: Tristan McLeay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: list troubles
(Sorry for the cross-post.)
On 20 Mar 2005, at 5.41 am, Isaac Penzev wrote:
> On Friday, March 18, 2005 12:07 PM, Tristan McLeay wrote:
>
>
>> JC has pointed a couple things out to me and if I understand him
>> correctly, the problem appears to be at my end (apparently I don't
>> have
>> reverse DNS set up on thecartographers.net).
>
> Its all Barsoumian to me.
> Is the confirmation message bounced? What words does it have in its
> title?
> I've set the filter at the server box itself to prevent some spamming
> - it
> filters out some key words like CONGRATULATIONS etc. (20 words in
> total).
Basically---it's not your fault, it's mine. (Well, it's not *my* fault,
it's my setup's fault, but I can't change it easily.)
But you're right. If you can't read the list, it's not fair to have it
there. I've set up a Yahoo group. I hope people don't mind having to
resubscribe; we know it at least works.
The new group is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/concreole [subscription & account
management]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [subscription]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [posting]
You need a Yahoo! account to sign up using the web interface, but I
think you can still sign up with the
[EMAIL PROTECTED] email address without one.
I apologise to everyone for this trouble but I didn't anticipate it...
At least I know for next time.
PS: Is there someone who's a general moderator/owner of all/most of the
other conlang offshoots on yahoo groups? Do you want me to give you
moderatorship/ownership of this one too? If there isn't, this is a call
for volunteers, in case I fall off the face of the planet or something
--- at least two groups have had trouble because of that.
--
Tristan.
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Message: 12
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:41:27 +0200
From: Isaac Penzev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: list troubles
Tristan McLeay wrote:
> But you're right. If you can't read the list, it's not fair to have it
> there. I've set up a Yahoo group.
Now that's more that funny: I've just succeeded to subscribe at
thecartowhatever (from a different mailbox).
> PS: Is there someone who's a general moderator/owner of all/most of the
> other conlang offshoots on yahoo groups?
No. I own 3 of them: aboriconlangs, westasianconlangs and konlang_ru. I know
Jan van Steenbergen is a moderator of at least romconlang and
germaniconlang. I do not know who is in charge for the other groups.
> If there isn't, this is a call
> for volunteers, in case I fall off the face of the planet or something
> --- at least two groups have had trouble because of that.
Let me look how hard is the traffic and think. If it is low, it may be me.
Btw, ppl, what about a deutsch sprechende list (kinda German ideolengua)?
I'd love to see one - there are many German speakers here, and it could
stimulate my German studies :)
-- Yitzik
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Message: 13
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 12:06:46 -0600
From: Kevin Athey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Sumerian Lexicon
>From: Rob Haden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>Many of the 'V-only' words actually have longer 'variants', which are
>probably their true forms. However, I find it unrealistic that a word of
>the form /a/ can have such diverse meanings as 'water', 'tears',
>and 'father'; and that a word of the form /u/ can have such diverse
>meanings as 'sleep', 'cock', and 'plant'. Even if such meanings were
>distinguished by tone, I find it hard to believe that rather complex
>concepts were expressed monophonemically in Sumerian.
If there were another phonetic feature involved, I doubt they could be
called monophonemic. Nevertheless, the following are represented as "e" in
pinyin in Mandarin: hunger, evil, moth, palate, goose, and forehead.
That's with only two of the four tones. If you consider the initial glide
to be part of the same phoneme phonologically, "yi" is more impressive:
doctor, medicine, one, clothing, according to, maternal aunt, move, doubt,
rite, lose, by, chair, lean on, already, supress, easy, overflow, discuss,
justice, idea, art, one hundred million, translate, and foreign. All of
these words can stand alone, by the way. They aren't simply bound
characters. In Old Norse, long "a" was a preposition, a form of to have,
and the word for river, and the short vowel was an enclitic for not. Let's
also not forget I, eye, and aye, all of which are arguably monophonemic in
English. The Chinese is the most impressive, though.
Of course, it's generally easier for a language to bear homophones with very
different--and generally rarely contrasting--meanings. How often would
water and father be confused in speech? It is much more rare to have words
with parallel meanings, such as mother and father. (Of course, grandfather
and uncle differ only in vowel length in Japanese...)
In any case, I find the longer variants most likely to be earlier forms.
Sumerian, like Latin, is a language over a span--rather than at a point--of
time. I'm not a Sumerologist, though. I may well be wrong.
>As I understand it, by the time Sumerian was represented syllabically, it
>was no longer really a living tongue. Also, there are inconsistencies in
>its representation by various Akkadian scribes. Finally, since Sumerian
>and Akkadian (i.e. Semitic) were such different languages, it's definitely
>likely that some (if not many) things were 'lost in translation'.
I don't doubt.
Actually, it's more accurate, I believe, to say that "by the time Sumerian
was represented" _consistantly_ "syllabically, it was not longer really a
living tongue." As I understand it, the syllabary existed earlier. There
was a slow trend toward its use over the ideographs and radicals (which, I
believe, remained in heavy use, even in the Akkadian period).
I still don't think that Akkadian transcription was exclusively to blame for
ambiguity in Sumerian, however.
>It is an interesting exercise to try to connect Sumerian with existing
>language groups. From what I understand, the Sumerians migrated to
>southern Mesopotamia from the north, either from the Caucasus region or
>from the Zagros Mountains south of the Caspian Sea. Based on this,
>Sumerian could have been related to the following language families:
>
>1. North-West Caucasian
>2. North-East Caucasian
>3. North-Central Caucasian
>4. Hattic
>5. Hurro-Urartian
>6. Elamo-Dravidian
>7. Kartvelian
>
>Of course, it could very well have no living relatives.
It probably doesn't. I've also heard a loony proposal for a
Sumerian-Finno-Ugric link. Props for not going with the obvious, and the
time depth could work, but it's still very unlikely.
Athey
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Message: 14
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 13:56:45 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Adunaic case system
Some random comments prompted by my experience with Kash, so probably a
little OT...
David Peterson wrote:
> Ray wrote:
[subjective vs. objective genitive]
> Mainly because Latin did not make the distinction! It was potentially as
> ambiguous as English, tho objective genitives are more common than
> subjective ones.
>
Isn't _amor dei_ the common ex.? Actually English can disambiguate this with
different phrasings: "God's love"-- is subjective, implying God loves
[us/someone], whereas "love of God" is objective, [our/someone's] love
w.r.t. God. This problem hit me as I was merrily writing out the syntax of
Kash, and suddently realized that only the _subjective_ was possible in the
_Verb+ni Noun(nom.)_ construction:
sisa/ni çenji can only mean "Shenji's love" (of someone, which if present--
Sh.'s love of Mina-- would be expressed in a prep.phrase, as in Engl.)
I won't comment much on the Adunaic situation, except to say that as I read
the discussion, the three "cases" seem reasonable.
> The Objective (O) form is used only in compound expressions, or actual
> compounds.
> >>
>
> Problem 1: What's the difference between a compound expression and
> an "actual" compound!?
Well, in Engl., the stress pattern, I think. láwnmower (device) vs. láwn
mówer (person-- not the best ex., I know); Whíte House vs. whíte hóuse.
----------------------------------------
> /minul tarik/
> heaven-OBJ. pillar-NOR.
> "pillar of heaven"
>
> This looks like the English possessive "heaven's pillar".
Not to me-- surely it's figurative, and doesn't imply actual possession, nor
even "intrinsic part". In Kash it would definitely be _pillar-ni heaven_.
OTOH "pillar of the temple" could be _pillar temple-gen._
This isn't
> like
> the construct state. Consider the following Arabic example:
>
> sajaara al-waalid
> /car DET.-father/
> "Father's car."
Actual possession/ownership. I wonder what would be the Arab. translation
of "the seven pillars of wisdom"??? (There might actually be a phrase "the
five pillars of (the) faith" w.r.t. Islam??)
--------------------------------------
> But Ray wrote:
> <<
> I think equating with 'genitive' is incorrect; possession is shown
> by the prefix _an-_ which is often reduced to _'n-_ (e.g. Bâr 'nAnadûnê
> "Lord of Anadune"; Narîka 'nBâri 'nAdûn "The Eagles of the Lords of th
> West").
"Eagles of..." true possession; "of the West" not, IMO; at least not in
Kash, where it would be _eagles lord-gen west(nom)-- in the nom., karun ures
(lord west) would be a N + N(=adj) compd.
> >>
>
> So there's three different ways to mark possession in this language
> (the Normal, the Objective, and this an- prefix)...,
Well, there are 3 ways in Kash, too:
1. N-ni N for non-intrisic or figuative possession, usu. restricted to
inanimates;
2. N N-gen for intrinsic possession/ownership, usu. restricted to animates
3. N N where the 2nd noun is adjectival (and implies some possession I
think). Here we might distinguish a generic statement--
"ñera puna (wall(s) (of a) house) is(are) usually built of wood" vs.
"ñerani puna yu (wall-of.it house the [specific wall]) was poorly built"
and even more specific: "ñera kati punayi yu (wall face[façade] house-gen
the) is highly decorated" (where the façade is certainly an intrinsic part,
and so "possessible"). Note the generic version of this: ñera kati puna is
(usually) highly decorated= 'a house('s) façade is..."
>...and no way to distinguish any of them?
I feel JRRT's system distinguishes just as clearly as my Kash exs.
>This is beginning to seem more and
> more like an unfinished sketch. Perhaps if it had been finished
> these kinks would've been ironed out. As it is, it seems a little
> jumbled.
That's probably true.......:-)))
Hope I've made some sense. (This area was a problem for me, too)
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Message: 15
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:29:34 -0800
From: "David J. Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Adunaic case system
[Starting out with a technical issue. When I receive messages with
quoted material, they come out with different colored bars to the
left of the text. I was concerned that this wouldn't come through
on the list, so I try to quote manually. Can people see the part of
my text that was quoted by Roger fine below? It's the "Problem 1"
sentence. On my end, it comes out as blue with a blue vertical bar
to its left.]
Roger replied to my original statement:
<<
> Problem 1: What's the difference between a compound expression and
> an "actual" compound!?
Well, in Engl., the stress pattern, I think. láwnmower (device) vs. láwn
mówer (person-- not the best ex., I know); Whíte House vs. whíte hóuse.
>>
Aren't those two examples different? That is a "lawn mower" is a
"mower of lawns (human)", where as a "white house" is "a house
that is white".
Roger wrote:
<<
(There might actually be a phrase "the
five pillars of (the) faith" w.r.t. Islam??)
>>
I don't know the words (well, except for "five"), but it would
be "five pillars the faith". Ordinarily, "five" would have to
agree in definiteness as an adjective modifying a noun, but in
this case, it must not (ditto with "pillars").
Roger wrote:
<<
Well, there are 3 ways in Kash, too:
1. N-ni N for non-intrisic or figuative possession, usu. restricted to
inanimates;
2. N N-gen for intrinsic possession/ownership, usu. restricted to
animates
3. N N where the 2nd noun is adjectival (and implies some possession I
think).
>>
See, now *this* makes sense. In Kamakawi, there are five ways
to do possession, which are:
(1) Product: the book *of* the author
(2) Familial: the sister *of* Alama
(3) Location: a man *from* Hawai'i
(4) Something Owned: the pencil *of* Alama
(5) Part to Whole: wall *of* the house
This is because of how possession is marked (with prepositions).
So I don't think Kamakawi can make the contrast you give in the
example here:
Roger's example:
<<
"ñera puna (wall(s) (of a) house) is(are) usually built of wood" vs.
"ñerani puna yu (wall-of.it house the [specific wall]) was poorly built"
>>
-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."
-Jim Morrison
http://dedalvs.free.fr/
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Message: 16
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 15:00:23 -0500
From: Patrick Littell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Adunaic case system
> But IME almost all Greenberg's 'Universals' are violated by some natlang
> or other. My understanding is that at best they are "universal
> _tendencies_".
Yes, and I specifically mentioned that it was violable. Although, on
second thought, the only violations I could think of (Yuman languages
such as Mojave) are debatable. I think Dixon, for one, has claimed
that the Mojave "nominative" -ch is really some sort of ergative. But
then again, I suspect Dixon specifically uses zero markings as a main
critereon for determining what to call a given case.
> > That's really all there is to Nominative.
>
> yep - but Adunaic 'Subjective' has other uses not covered by the
> Nominative.
>
Well, having other uses other than intransitive subject and transitive
subject doesn't "un-nominate" a nominative. (Unless the other uses
include transitive object, in which I, at least, would use a term
other than Nominative. The Romanian "nominative", for example, is
used for direct objects as well, whereas the Oblique is used for
indirect objects and possessors... but this is an unusual use of the
term "nominative". I suppose if we were looking at Romanian purely
synchronically "direct" might be more appropriate.) The other use of
the subjective -- for the subject of a existential sentence -- isn't
an unusual task for the nominative, anyway.
That doesn't mean, however, that I'm opposed to David's explanation of
S itself as a copula. Seems like the most natural explanation to me,
actually. It explains away of the two most unusual facets of Adunaic:
subject marking but no object marking and optional subject marking
with fully-inflected verbs. The fact that the "copula" is sometimes
realized as ablaut instead of "-un" doesn't make this explanation any
less compelling to me, at least.
> > -- Normal being used for direct objects (that are not part of a
> > compound expression.) I'd call this accusative with little
> > hesitation.
>
> Normal may also be used as subject - see above - and complement of "to be"
> .
Perhaps this is further evidence for the copular explanation, for the
reason that a Normal subject can only *immediately* precede a verb
fully inflected with pronomial prefixes. We could imagine an earlier
Adunaic with the order unmarked-subject, clitic pronouns, verb. When
the subject remained in immediate preverbal position, the clitic
pronouns affixed to the following verb, but when the subject *moved* a
clitic moved with it., and eventually became reanalyzed as a copula
and/or Subjective case.
(Same clitic each time, though? Or maybe different clitics eventually
supplanted by a generic "un"? It would be interesting to see if there
is any semantic distinction between nouns that take -un and those that
lengthen the final vowel. For example, if animates got -un and
inanimates got ablaut, it could be from an animate/inanimate
distinction in the clitic pronouns.)
> That's not how I understand Adunaic 'Objective' - it occurs _only_ in
> compounds and reminds me far more of the 'construct state' of the Semitic
> langs. I think equating with 'genitive' is incorrect; possession is shown
> by the prefix _an-_ which is often reduced to _'n-_ (e.g. Bâr 'nAnadûnê
> "Lord of Anadune"; Narîka 'nBâri 'nAdûn "The Eagles of the Lords of th
> West").
>
The big difference between genitive case and construct state is that
construct state occurs on the head rather than on the adjunct. Some
languages have both; Classical Arabic did. Take the approximate
Classical equivalent of David's sentence:
"sayyaar-a-0 al-walad-i".
car-ACC-CONST DEF-boy-GEN
the car of the boy
(Like David, I only learnt colloquial, so this is only approximate.)
The zero suffix on "sayyaara" (car) indicates that it's in accusative
singular and construct state. The al- and the -i on "walad" (boy)
indicate that it's a definite noun in the genitive singular.
If we take "an" to be a suffix, instead, we could claim "an" it to be
a construct state marker. The orthography belies this, but we could
still argue it. Take, for example, "Narika 'nBari". We could argue
that it's the phonological properties of the head (Narika) rather than
the adjunct (Bari) that determines the form of the "an" affix. After
all, it's probably the final "a" of Narika that elides the initial "a"
of "an", and the "n" isn't homorganic to the "b".
Possessive and genitive phrases aren't always the same thing,
cross-linguistically, although they're ususally so. Off the top of my
head, Russian distinguishes between the possessive and the genitive in
pronouns -- the genitive series is only rarely used. Pronouns are
common offenders, actually; Arabic doesn't handle possession by
pronouns with the genitive, either.
> As I have said, Adunaic 'Objective' reminds me more of the 'construct
> state' than anything else. Maybe one should be looking at Semitics langs
> for the inspiration of Adunaic noun forms: Normal, Subjective, Objective.
Proto-Semitic probably had a somewhat richer case system than
Classical Arabic, but still fairly similar. Here's Arabic:
nominative singular = -u
accusative singular = -a
genitive singular = -i
nominative dual = -a:
oblique dual = -ay
nominative plural = -u:
oblique plural = -i:
The "oblique" is the syncretism between accusative and genitive in
non-singular numbers. I noted earlier a similar syncretism in
non-singular Adunaic nouns. (This assumes that plural Objective nouns
take the zero suffix of Normal nouns; it would be very strange indeed
for them to take Subjective marking.)
Among the Semitic languages, I have a faint suspicion that Berber
might mark the nominative and leave the accusative unmarked. I'll
have to look that up.
--
Patrick Littell
Voice Mail: ext 744
Spring 05 Office Hours: M 3:00-6:00
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Message: 17
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2005 16:02:14 EST
From: Doug Dee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Adunaic case system
In a message dated 3/20/2005 3:01:01 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>It would be interesting to see if there
>is any semantic distinction between nouns that take -un and those that
>lengthen the final vowel. For example, if animates got -un and
>inanimates got ablaut, it could be from an animate/inanimate
>distinction in the clitic pronouns.)
Tokien has this to say "The Subjective: in Neuter nouns this is expressed by
a-fortification of the last vowel of the stem, in the case of strong nouns: as
_zadan_ with the S form _zada:n_; in weak nouns the suffix -a is used. In
Masculine nouns, strong or weak, the suffix -un is used; in Feminines the
suffix -in; in Common nouns the suffix -an or -n. In plurals it has the
suffix -a
in neuters, and in all other nouns the suffix -im."
By "strong" nouns he means nouns for which "the cases and plural stems are
formed partly by alterations of the last vowel of the stem . . . partly by
suffixes; in the Weak nouns the inflexions are entirely suffixal."
The strong/weak distinction of declension seems to depend on form rather than
meaning. Tolkien says that the class of weak nouns consists of
"monosyllabic nouns; and disyllabic nouns with a long vowel or diphthong in the
final
syllable."
Doug
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